Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

9. Writing Hunger on the Body: Simone Weil’s Ethic of Hunger and Eucharistic Practice

159 9 WRITING HUNGER ON THE BODY Simone Weil’s Ethic of Hunger and Eucharistic Practice Elizabeth A. Webb Simone Weil is a figure who incites much passion. Dismissed by some circles as perversely self-annihilating, embraced by others as providing vast stores of insight into suffering and compassion, very deliberately ignored by others, Weil is not a figure about whom most readers remain neutral. This passion is well-deserved; Weil wrote such provocatively self-abdicating statements as, “If only I knew how to disappear there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear.”1 Weil sought to live the self-abdication of which she wrote in order to keep her focus ever on Christ and on the suffering of others . The intersection of Weil’s way of life and of her thought is vividly displayed in her writings on and practices of hunger. These writings and practices in particular reveal ways in which Weil’s notion of selfemptying has dangerous consequences. Despite having misgivings about aspects of Weil’s life and thought, I love her deeply. I love her for the beauty of her life and of her words. I love her for her profound love for God, her deep compassion for the suffering of others, her wide-eyed yet clear-eyed proscriptions for a more just society. And I love her for her pain—not that I love the pain in her, but I long to ease her pain, to wrap my arms around her frail body, to 160 / Women, Writing, Theology feed her with the compassion she could not feel for herself. Some deep, unspoken trauma seems to haunt Weil, seeping into her self-perception as it seeps into her writing. I long to protect her, and when I have written on Weil previously, I have done so.2 Above all, I long to protect her from the violence of her own thought, to downplay that violence or write it off as deliberate hyperbole, so that Weil herself is not written off. Her diagnoses of the human condition are so beautifully and painfully right, her understanding of trauma and affliction so profoundly true, her conception of compassion so deeply compassionate. Yet at every step she cannot cease doing violence to herself. Weil writes hunger on her body as if gouging the word into her flesh with her pen. My love for Weil and for the profundity of her vision calls me to plead with her to take that pen from her flesh. Still, what Weil has written on her body demands a reading. What I read there is not only a brilliant but ultimately self-destructive ethic of living hungrily, but also the inscription of hunger in her very words. In her writing of hunger, Weil longs to elicit hunger in her readers, she cries out for our hunger. Paul Celan wrote of the strange dialogical character of poetry, especially after the Holocaust: a poem “may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.”3 Like Celan’s poetry, Weil’s writing, with a desperate hope, seeks a reader, a hearer, a witness, who will respond with hunger, with attention to her pain. Weil’s writing, that is, calls us to hunger for her very restoration. It is deeply sad that Weil’s writing could not also enable her own hunger for herself. Simone Weil’s refusal to eat fed her writing on the moral dimensions of hunger. Weil drew parallels between physical hunger and spiritual self-emptying: as eating destroys that which we consume, our consumptive love of the other destroys that other. The proper disposition, Weil contended, is that of hunger, an emptiness that refuses to seek possession of the other, and that even issues in the giving of the self to the other as food. That self-giving is a sacramental act, enabled by our transformation from eaters to lookers in the Eucharist. Weil’s own practices of food refusal allowed her to write hunger as a remedy for the Writing Hunger on the Body / 161 disorder of consumption. As profound as this remedy is, however, the violence of it as Weil conceives it negates the very compassion for which she argues, by reifying violence in ways that issue...