The Subversive Simone Weil with Robert Zaretsky

A virtual Evenings with an Author hosted by Alice McCrum, Programs Manager at the American Library in Paris, featuring Robert Zaretsky to discuss his new book, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. (Filmed on Zoom with a live audience on 25/01/2022.)
Simone Weil was in a particularly suited position to make this retort, having renounced her bourgeois background in order to, among other pursuits, work in a car factory and volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. A Marxist and an anarchist, as well as, later, a Catholic mystic, Weil and her life present many enigmas. The supreme achievement of researcher and writer Robert Zaretsky’s new book, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, is its reading of the complexities of Weil’s work as complementary contradictions of her life.
Robert Zaretsky is a professor of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston, specializing in European political and intellectual history. He is the author of many works, including A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest of Meaning (2013), Boswell’s Enlightenment (2015), and the forthcoming Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague (2022). Zaretsky is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe, and is the former history editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Evenings with an Author is sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.

[@billmayo1094]

Thank you.

[@ericroberts8518]

This is a book very relevant to our times

[@JohnCahillChapel]

It would not have been harder for Simone Weil to be Simone Weil now than in 1909-1943. After all, being who she was killed her! She would have “exhausted” her resources in any era given who and what she was.

[@Antreus]

Simone Weil was many things, but became a Disciple of Christ. She is a witness to any atheist.