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Hello everybody. This brief is called Antifascist Autistic Simone Weil Part one with Part two dropping on Monday on Patreon. For our subscribers, there will be more in this series as well. I'm Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality Podcast where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on Blue Sky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads and please support our Patreon. We really appreciate it. So this is the second of several two part series that I'll be doing on Anti Fascist Christianity and the first one rolled out over this past Labor Day weekend and it told the story of German theologian and would be assassin of Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who learned his Anti Fascism I argued in the Black Church of the Harlem Renaissance and on his road trips to the deep south in 1930. Now that all fits into this series I've been doing on Patreon called Anti Fascist Woodshed where I collect a bunch of useful stories and resources for this very shitty time. Okay, so I'm writing and recording this before the Global Sumud Flotilla is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Gaza on September 14th or 15th. This is the international flotilla of boats that is attempting to break Israel's blockade of Gaza by bringing aid. Things like, you know, baby formula and medical supplies and flourishes. Now I'm not sure what the situation will be when this is published, but I do know that the Security Minister and Israeli national fascist mascot Itamar Ben Gvir has proposed jailing Greta Thunberg and other flotilla members under terrorism laws for attempting to bring all of these just supplies and aid across the Mediterranean. Now, the last time I published on Thunbere was on the occasion of her first arrest by Israeli naval commandos back in June in an episode that was about the relationship between her anti fascism and her autistic experience of life. And at the heart of that is Thunbere's uncompromisingly honest nature and her inability to ignore contradictions in the world and to paper them over with social niceties. So I chronicled the hatred thrown at Thunbere and how many right wing ghouls call her the mentally ill puppet of green Marxists or a Hamas supporting anti Semite. But I also described how liberal media and institutions, just as they fail to defend everyone from fascists, have specifically thrown Thunbere under the bus as she relentlessly exposes the hypocrisies of powerful adults and as her message has evolved from climate alarm to a direct critique of capitalism, colonialism and systemic exploitation. They really don't like it when Thunbera asserts that climate justice cannot exist without social justice, or when she links environmental destruction to war and oppression. She has a structural analysis and she focuses on the profit motive and the failure of markets. And she challenges the foundational beliefs of liberal Western society. Most broadly, liberals don't like it when she insists that normal was already a crisis, but normal being a crisis is not something she would be able to turn away from. This is a basic observation in autistic culture. Thunbere initially called autism her superpower before learning a little bit more about disability rights and, you know, better language use. She's always learning, and this is something that I really admire about her. And she has also acknowledged that autism can be a really difficult condition to experience if your society cannot meet your support needs. And in fact, that particular struggle is central to her origin story as an activist, because from about the age of 13, the stress of masking or suppressing natural behaviors so that, you know, she can conform led to autistic burnout or a kind of collapse that caused her to withdraw from school and also, however, allowed her time to disconnect from the hamster wheel of capitalist expectations so she could reflect on the questions that we are generally not allowed to reflect on. And it's for this reason that I cited the work of autistic philosopher Robert Chapman, who suggests in their wonderful book called Empire of Normality that autism becomes a pathology as industrial and cognitive Capitalism create rigid and accelerated demands for sociality and flexibility and. And that this disproportionately disables those who cannot comply. So today I'll get into the story of someone we might see as the spiritual auntie of Greta Thunberg. This is the French anti fascist philosopher Simone weil, born in 1909 in Paris. And that means her autism has nothing to do with vaccines, Bobby. And she died in 1943 in Ashford Kent of tuberculosis and disordered eating. And that happens to be the challenge that Greta Thunberg was able to overcome in our own time with improved care, understanding and support. Now, just a language note before I start. I'm making the choice that I haven't seen any other commentator on ve make, which is to use the pronouns they them throughout to refer to they. Because they were clearly non binary, which is not uncommon among autistic people. They rejected gender expectations in every manner. Their parents, who were extremely supportive in many ways, especially for the time period, called Simone our son number two. And their brother Andre referred to them as la trollesse, which understand translates as androgynous imp. And they would often sign letters to their parents with the words your son. And they often referred to themselves as Simon, leaving off the final feminizing e. Okay, in this first part, remember. The second part drops on Monday. I'm going to look at vey in three segments. First of all, their anti fascist street cred. Secondly, the philosophical and theological ideas they're most famous for. And by the third section, I'll be turning to the fact that as an autistic person in the world, I believe their experiences have been largely absorbed into a defanged discourse of manners and abstractions. And that began with the way in which their countless disorganized notebooks were collected, data mined and edited, and then shuffled into an order and subject headings and titles and published in books in a way that never would have occurred to Simone, that she never would have chosen or perhaps even cared about. The Simone Weil that comes to us in books is, is, I believe, the neatened up construction of a neurotypical world. They've been curated to quibble with instead of engage. I believe they were editorially absorbed into the kinds of liberal institutions and discourses that their antifascism rebelled against. So for a series about anti fascism, Weill's street cred is solid. Throughout their life, they threw themselves headlong, usually without preparation or a lot of support, into one activist boot camp after another, driven by a persistent need to investigate and feel the injustices of the world that they saw so clearly and that no amount of veneer could cover over. That drive was there right from childhood. In 1914, they're five years old. They refused to wear cotton socks, finding the fabric too luxurious and warm compared to the less fortunate whose feet were bare. And then, after listening to the news reports from the Western Front, Simon gave up sugar in solidarity with the soldiers. Now this would become a lifelong theme, that they found it impossible to abide suffering in others, especially related to food or bodily comfortable, and they had to somehow partake in that. They had to take it on themselves. In their early teens, they started attending labor meetings during a family holiday in Charlesau. They talked with hotel staff about their working conditions, and they were scandalized by what they learned and urged the workers to form a trade Union. In their 20s, while studying philosophy and education, they gathered signatures for a petition against compulsory military instruction for male students. And they also hung out with revolutionary syndicalists. When they were a schoolteacher in Le Puy, they became allies with the unemployed and even led a demonstration before the city council, which led a conservative newspaper to turn on their slur generator and pump out the accusation that Vey was a, quote, rapid red Virgin of the tribe of Levi, bearer of Muscovite gospels, and true to the tag. We sought out hard farm labor in Normandy and also spent a year on the assembly line at a Renault auto plant in Paris. But these experiences were physically grueling because Vey wasn't cut out for manual labor. Really, their short life, which ended at the age of 34 years, is the story of physical challenges, but more so the story of a world that couldn't accommodate their support needs. Now, in the follow up episode on Monday, I'll go deeper into the reports and self reports of their physical experience. The awkwardness, clumsiness, fatigue through low calorie intake, the boundaries around physical touch. Because all of these details point in a very obvious direction that most commentators on their life and work are shy to approach, seemingly out of the polite belief that being honest about autism would somehow pathologize or devalue their work. But. But that's upside down. It's actually an ableist instinct to not investigate, to not accept and celebrate the real differences that contributed to their penetrating insights. I have a friend named Jude Mills who's now a theology grad student, and we were talking about this on WhatsApp, and she said, as an autistic academic, the weird avoidance of this topic by others is palpable. They get really squirmy when I talk about it, when she discloses her own autism diagnosis, even the ones who are clearly undiagnosed neurodivergent themselves because academia is full of them. As you might imagine, this is the legacy of ableism. I've lost count of the people who've tried to convince me that giving myself a label is misguided. I. Or people who will say massively ableist things like, you're clearly high functioning or I wouldn't have known. And her retort to that is, yes, because I'm masking like fuck for your benefit. Autism is not a disease. It's a difference that becomes a disability defined by capitalist demands to conform in social and economic terms. And for people like Thunbere and Vay and countless other people now given a voice by Instagram and TikTok these days, it's also a perceptual skill set. Okay, back to ve. All of that labor obsession in childhood and as a teen was only prelude to traveling to Berlin in 1932 at the age of 21. They wanted to hang out with Marxists and figure out what was going on. And they saw enough to eventually predict the success of the Nazis. And they also used that time to make the revolutionary connections that would eventually compel them to abandon their pacifism and fight with the anarchists in Spain in the civil war against Franco and his fascists. In that war, they survived reconnaissance expeditions under fire, but their comrades didn't want her handling a rifle, given their clumsiness and her very thick glasses. They'd seen Vay try to dance, and it wasn't pretty. So Vay's service was actually ended by a severe foot injury. Not from shrapnel, not a landmine. They actually stepped in a pot of boiling oil in a field kitchen. Now, a crucial thing to know about Vay's political formation is that they didn't abide bullshit from anyone. In 1932, they published an article entitled towards the Proletarian Revolution, which was a scathing attack on Orthodox Russian Communism. They mocked it as a dictatorship of a bureaucratic class, and the article found its way to Leon Trotsky himself, who was then living incognito in Paris, and he was butthurt. Vay's parents actually knew him and hosted him for a while. And when they did, he and Vay quarreled with Vay, grilling him on the tyranny of the Soviet state over the Russian people. And it's actually pretty hilarious to me that he argued with Simon at All given that at the time he was in exile, thrown out of the Soviet Union by Stalin, who eventually, of course, ordered his assassination in Mexico City in 1940 to preempt any attempt he might make at a comeback. Trotsky was living a contradiction, and they sniffed it out. They were warning him they could see what was coming, as sure as they could see fascism on the rise in Germany. And exasperated, all Trotsky could do was to shout at Weill, asking if they belonged to the Salvation Army. This is an insult about their alleged conservative individualism and sentimental pacifism, which of course he got all wrong. Trotsky dubbed their views as revolutionary melancholia and said that their philosophy was concocted to defend their personality, which is. Come on, I mean, what philosophy doesn't defend the philosopher's personality? But according to one biography at least, Trotsky felt impressed and perhaps even humbled by Weill's uncompromising morality. Years later, during the Nazi occupation of France, Weill joined the Resistance in the south and then in Marseille, acting as a courier and distributing anti fascist journals and also offering their rations to immigrant laborers from Indonesia and other colonial populations interned by the Vichy collaborationists. They also ambitiously proposed a Supreme Council of the Rebellion to coordinate internal French resistance, and this contributed to the establishment of the National Council of the Resistance by the Free French. They advocated for a plan to form a mobile unit of frontline nurses because they believed that such a unit, just seen to provide care in the heart of battle, would provide a powerful moral statement against the inhumanity of war. And they also asked to be parachuted into occupied France as a secret agent. And Charles de Gaulle himself thought that Simone Weill was insane for this suggestion, which in my world is a top badge rnr. So that's a journey through vay's anti fascist courage, which was nonstop and embodied. She was always doing something. So that lets me turn to a summary of the ideas they had that most commentators down through time have picked out as uniquely helpful from those piles of notebooks that stand in parallel to their life in the flesh. And on Monday, I'll get to the question of how their anti fascism might have intersected with their autistic traits. So where to start? Apropos to our age? I'd start with vay's idea of attention, which they considered to be at the very heart of their philosophy. They called attention the rarest and purest form of generosity, and it became fundamentally linked for VAY to both prayer and care for others. For vay, compassion involved paying attention to an afflicted man and identifying oneself with him in thought. Now, relatedly, they actually argued against the ideological basis of the French Revolution. For vey it wasn't revolutionary enough, they claimed that it should never have been built on the notion of human rights, that it should have been built on the recognition of human obligations. Because on an ultimate level, they argued that obligations come before rights. And the reasoning here is that an obligation retains its full kind of nature, its full force of existence, even if it's unrecognized by anyone. Whereas a right isn't worth very much if nobody recognizes it. And that's because obligations are derived from what they described as. As the earthly needs of the body and the human soul, which they considered sacred. Each human need entails a corresponding obligation from others. So needs and obligations, we said, cannot be subordinated to reasons of state or money or nationality or race or any other consideration. Obligations are characterized by the imperative to give something. They are motivated by. By a desire to do what justice demands. And they arise from a real feeling for others. So fulfilling an obligation is always and everywhere good, unlike rights, which can be used for good or bad purposes. Now, we believed that ethical actions based on the impersonal desire for the good lead to a higher good, which is impersonal. But by contrast, a right isn't really anything on its own, but it comes into being in relation to the obligation to which it responds. So the effective exercise of a right originates not from the individual claiming it, but from others who feel an obligation towards that individual. They also said that rights have this kind of, like, commercial flavor to them, and evoking legal claims and arguments that they're always asserted in a tone of contention and that their assertion relies on force in the background, or else it will be laughed at. So we saw rights as transactional and tied to egos and power dynamics. But obligations, on the other hand, were foundational, unconditional, and a kind of impersonal call to care for others and manifest love in the world. And I just find this to be an incredible distinction to contemplate as liberalism crumbles. And while it crumbles as it tries to hold on to the notion of individual rights as being salutary. And as we've come through decades of framing obligations as entitlements, I think it's even more relevant. Okay, so next thing that I'll focus on is that they coined a term, and it's a little bit strange. They coined the term de creation. And that one rubs some Marxists and feminists the wrong way as it seems to point to a kind of esotericism or a withdrawing from material presence and dignity and dialectics. But. But I don't think that that's what VAY was getting at. Also, because VAY basically died from not eating. Decreation has often been mistaken as a call for self annihilation, but I think we understood it as a kind of release of the self that expands the personality and makes space for difference. It's a kind of spiritual stripping down that enables a perception of some sort of larger, less distorted truth. And they described it as a creative act that participates in all creation. They felt that de creation signified the death of the ego driven self so that the other could be allowed to exist on their own terms. And I'll come to this later because that's fundamental to Ve's concept of love. There's a lot more, but I'll end with this idea that they put forward in a book called the need for Roots, which is the idea of en racinement or rootedness. This is the idea that human beings have fundamental, often unrecognized needs of being or the soul beyond material well being. They need rootedness in a community, in history and culture. Uprootedness, we argues, is a catastrophe. Now your eyebrows might rise at this, especially if it seems to be coming from an anti fascist, because how does Vey distinguish this idea of the need for Roots from, you know, appeals to nationalism that romanticize the blood and soil? Well, they've got that covered because they're actually responding exactly to that, presenting fascist forms of nationalism as a dangerous perversion or consequence of uprootedness that result from the excess of inequality. Now we doesn't directly name capitalism here, but they might as well have because they say money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate by turning desire for gain and into the sole motive. So we describes the wage earning class, particularly those under peace work, as experiencing uprootedness, most acutely due to the absolute and continuous dependence on money. Ve says that this dependence morally uproots people, turning them into industrial brawn and leading to a sense of not being at home in their workplaces, dwellings, or even their own social and intellectual activities, or even themselves. So she really sort of goes off on Marx's alienation there. Uprooted people, Ve says, have two spiritual lethargy that resembles death, or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often through violent methods. And those who are not yet uprooted or only partly so will bear the brunt of that violence. She directly connected Hitler's Germany to this phenomenon, where humiliation and economic crisis led to an aggressive form of uprootedness and irresponsibility. And instead of the anxious and hollow patriotism that they reached for to fix that problem, they proposed compassion for one's country, a poignantly tender feeling for some beautiful, precious, fragile and perishable object, akin, they suggested, to the love one feels for children, aged parents, or a beloved wife. This love quote keeps its eyes open on injustices, cruelties, mistakes, falsehoods, crimes and scandals contained in the country's past, in its present, and its ambitions in general, quite openly and fearlessly. This is totally different from a romanticized, uncritical adoration of a nation's history or supposed destiny. The fascist has been deracinated from cultures of care. Of course, he has to invent a past and a country to imagine it in. So I started in the opposite way to what most commentators on Vade do. I led with what they did with their body, their lived experience, and how at every turn, they were putting skin in the game. And I think that's the best choice, even though the reason they are remembered is for their writing. Now, as I've already suggested, their writing is unquestionably brilliant and penetrative, but I believe it's also secondary and parallel to the work of their body moving in space. And so I'll spend time on this relationship between actions and writing because I think we're at a point historically where the alienation of media from action is increasing day by day. Last year I was enthralled by Naomi Klein's articulation of the mirror world idea in her incredible book Doppelganger. This is the distorted reality where the same issues are discussed, but through radically different interpretations, coming to radically different conclusions depending upon the political orientation. So Klein's mirror world is an alternate universe populated by far right conspiracy theories and a rhetoric that twists progressive causes and social issues into fear, hatred, and misinformation. All of that checks out. It's all 100% true. But I've also been feeling that there's a primal or structural mirror world looming larger over my shoulder. The world of books and live streams and social feeds and commentariat bears a strange and inscrutable relationship to the realities it is trying to observe and address. All of the news in the world about genocide has not stopped genocide from happening. And part of that, I think, is because news and discourse is alienated by commodification. We all know that it is its own product, and those of us who produce it are often so locked into that production cycle, we're not doing anything else. I often feel like a parasite. And not to mention the fact that we have a long intellectual history that explicitly divorces thought from action. As WB Yeats said, you can perfect your life or your art, but not both. And that's the kind of wisdom that works really well for the artist who doesn't want to not be an asshole. Simone Weil was not like that at all. I'm also currently immersed in a book ironically called Don't Talk About Politics. It's by the philosopher and social scientist Sarah Stein Lubrano. Lubrano basically says that the political discourse we're swimming in often fails to change political attitudes or realities because it relies on these flawed ideas. So one is the marketplace of ideas and the debate as war. These two models that just don't work. And she gives all of the evidence for that. And she argues that human psychology, because it's marked by confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, makes us highly resistant to being swayed by words alone. It's really actions, relationships, lived experiences, and robust democratic infrastructure that are the true drivers of political change. Now, that's a huge alarm bell for anyone paid for their words, including me. No matter where their political commitments lie, they fascinates me because they were never interested in the professional career of words and writing, or being a pundit or a philosopher. We do know that they were obsessed with living their life and improving material conditions for the suffering. And this both burned them out and also never allowed them to consider their thoughts in capitalist terms. And that's a profound model for those of us who are interested in anti fascism, because, yes, we all have to eat and get the money to buy the food, but there's something about the capitalism of discourse that. That can interrupt or betray our ability to engage with the world as it is. Now, from what I've read of Vay's thoughts on egolessness, they probably would have been content to leave their thoughts for posterity as aphoristic graffiti on the walls of the many towns and cities they tramped through. So here's a few phrases that you can imagine scribbled on the toilet wall in Paris or the crumbling walls of Aragon destroyed by fascist shelling. Attention alone, that attention, which is so full that the I disappears is required of me. Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy. For in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying, I quote, religion insofar as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith. Man can only gain control over nature by obeying it. Just put all that shit on T shirts, that's all I have to say. They wasn't a book writer. They did not write within the confines of capitalist knowledge production. It wasn't just shyness or disorganization that meant that they never sent a manuscript to a publisher. They journaled to record their experience and refine their thoughts. And they wrote letters to learn from comrades and share their heart. They published articles and essays, but didn't publish a single book while alive. So how did it come to pass that there are now 17 distinct book titles out there in their name? It happened posthumously as their journals and papers were collected by family and friends who turned them over to editors and a post war philosophy industry eager for explanatory content in the wake of the catastrophe. Now Weill's complete works have been put out in 16 volumes by Gallimard, and I haven't done a total page count on that collection. But if that average is 500 pages per book, at 250 words per page, that's 2 million published words. And very few of them were published before their death at 34. So let's just do some math here. Let's say that these journals begin at 20, and so the 2 million words get written over 14 years. That's 140,000 words per year, or about 400 words per day. However, in reality it's a ton more than that, because all of their editors, low key, complained about what they saw as the disorganized and fragmentary state of their journals. And why not their journals? One editor described the journals as fragments, notes and sketches behind the floating terminology and an irresistible leaning towards the extreme and the contradictory. Thomas Merton, a later commentator on Weil and himself a hypergraphic whirlwind, described some of Weil's collected papers as disorganized material. And then many sources described the final publications as abridgments or extracts. So the question is, how many words were left on the cutting room floor? Twice as many as the 2 million. Does that make 800 per day? 3 times 1200 per day? But even figuring out a per day rate is dodgy, because we also know how physically busy they was, how much travel they did, how many activities they were engaged in. They do refer to going through feverish writing benders that balance out the physical demands of their experiential research. So I guess what I see are the hallmarks of intermittent hypergraphia, where on some days she's marching with farm workers or ducking bullets in Spain, and on other days they're scribbling up to 10,000 words in some endless fugue state. And I recognize this because I am someone for whom hypergraphia has also ebbed and flowed throughout my life, stemming from a period of seizures that I suffered in my 20s. Hypergraphia is one symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, or Geschwin syndrome, which also bestows an obsessive fascination with religious themes and content, but not necessarily devotional or commitment oriented content, but also an obsession with sexuality, or an obsession with completely avoiding sexuality. More on this in a bit Other folks who present with hypergraphia might have bipolar symptoms during which the writing surges during manic spells or schizophrenic experiences in which they feel they are involuntarily taking dictation. Now they doesn't self report seizures or internal voices, but by the year 1930 they are suffering from a pretty common experience among temporal lobe epilepsy folks, regular crushing migraines. For me, this is a crucial context for understanding vay's writing in relation to the work and travels of their body. What I see is that for vay, writing is a coping, stimming and even survival strategy deployed to process the overstimulation of moral and political action. I'm not seeing a person who is sitting around thinking big thoughts and hoping to craft them into coherent books. They were openly suspicious, actually, of any systematization of their work, because for them, I think, writing was a temporal and illusory mirror. They did say that their solution to living amidst tumult was, quote to fill up notebook after notebook with thoughts hastily set down in no order or sequence quote and they couldn't stop doing it, and they only ever wrote by hand, and that was a trial even from childhood. The sources record that their hands were disproportionately small for their body frequently swollen and painful, and so combined with challenged motor control, writing took tremendous focus and time, and it was not comfortable. This is not someone who is writing by choice, and so they leave behind these notebooks. And I mentioned this part of the story to my autistic academic friend Jude Mills, and her take was that the philosophy and theology industries basically colonized we's work for raw materials. So I ask again, why are there so many books when they themselves did not conceive of their writing in bookish terms? Here's more or less how it happened. For their most famous posthumous book Gravity and Grace. This is the book that brought them or their estate or their editors, because they were dead by that point, global fame. In 1941, Weill worked throughout the grape harvest season for Gustave Thibault. This was a vine farmer and self taught philosopher in the medieval town of Saint Marcel Dardes in southern France. The sources say that in the evenings they read Plato with him and taught him Greek, which they'd been fluent in since childhood. Weill was 32 and Thibault was 38. Sources say that Thibault was married with children, but I haven't been able to locate a timeline for that. And all biographers of vey emphasize their androgyny and asexuality and alleged fear of touch. And on Monday, as I said, I'll say more about all of those assumptions and how commentators on vey pretty much all strike out on the gender and neurodiversity and sexuality angles. Thiebon describes their relationship as uncomfortable at first because he was a devout Catholic and vey was a Jewish radical, but admits that a strong bond grew between them. So it sounds like they were close. Although Thiebaunt had to get over some physical feelings he had. He remembered Weill as, quote, prematurely bent and old looking due to asceticism and illness, and that, quote, their magnificent eyes alone triumphed in this shipwreck of beauty. And as I'll get to, there's a predictable cloud of sexism surrounding any consideration of Weill's work. But for their part, Weill was able to confide in Thibault things that dear friends confide. In one letter to him, they wrote, human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling, unquote. They were close enough that maybe they had the feeling, and I believe this was rare for them, that he understood and respected them. So at the end of their stay on the farm, they entrusted 11 of their notebooks to him, expressing some willingness for him to transmute the thoughts and publish them in a form that would reflect his own likeness. So there's even a hint that they believed he might digest their thoughts and use them to enrich his own, zeroing out the imprint of their personality. It sounds like they were giving him a gift. So what did he do with those journals? I think he used them to substantiate his own views. As Steven Plant writes in his short biography of Veil, Thibaunt's editorial selections were explicitly intent upon presenting Weil to the world as a Catholic saint in the making and to construct them as a religious philosopher of the void. Now, is that what Vey wanted? I doubt it. I also doubt that Vey would have appreciated the begrudgingly admiring but also condescending forward by none other than T.S. eliot to the 1952 English publication of the need for Roots, in which the depressive Catholic titan praised their genius. But for one who had never met, Vey spotlighted their difficult, violent and complex personality. As he put it, he wrote that Vey could be unfair and intemperate and prone to astonishing aberrations and exaggerations, and he attributed these to an excess of temperament rather than a flaw in intellect. He noted Weill's paradoxical nature as a patriot who criticized France, a Christian who refused baptism and criticized the Church, and as someone intensely Jewish who castigated the colonial project of Israel. What Eliot doesn't mention is that the whole damn book was edited from notebooks by Albert Camus. But he does mention that Thiebon was an expert on Weil's personality. Meanwhile, we allegedly hated that any focus should be placed on their personality. But I think this has a double edge through the lens of neurodiversity, the knowledge that one is never accepted as such, but also this drive towards moral purity that inevitably questions the relevance of the ego. And so here I find a paradox. In Lyssa McCullough's 2014 book, Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil, there's this claim. Weill felt that their perspective on the world was embodied most essentially in their writings, not in their actions and certainly not in their personal biography. In life, they would tolerate no attention to their person for the personality, the natural self, that which says I has a strictly negative value as something to be decreated and rendered transparent in their view, the better to refract the love of God in the world without egoistic distortion. Now, this claim isn't footnoted with direct quotes or passages from Weil's writings, so I don't know if Vey makes concrete enough statements about this in the thousands of pages that we have. But something seems off, because their biography is an extraordinary tale of constant personal sacrifice, inextricable, in my opinion, from their embodied autistic experience and in other parts of their writing. They're really specific about the necessity of conjoining theory and practice. So part of me wonders whether they would have felt differently about foregrounding personality if their physical existence hadn't been constantly stigmatized in gendered and ableist terms. Because this is the sentence that stands out from McCullough quote in Life, they would tolerate no attention to their person. But what autistic person, aware or semi aware of their difference and the extent to which their society can accommodate them, can tolerate the stress of masking the stress of the cultural demands and male gaze that wants them to conform? What kind of attention did they not tolerate? And if they're writing aloud for a deflection of that attention, what is that reader missing? To be honest, having one of their most famous quotes ringing around in my head makes me wonder how much of their life and yearning had to do with the absence of acceptance. Because how else would you get to as they did this statement, which is we's definition of love? Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love. That as such is doing a lot of work. I think it means understanding that the other is absolutely, unchangeably other, that they exist and should exist as other, a belief that that otherness is real and okay as it is. And this begs the question for me of how on earth would fascism rise in a people who felt that in their bones? Okay, that's it for today. I'll say more about that definition of love and how the Marxist philosopher Richard Gilmanopowski understands it in his excellent book Communism of Love on Monday. And I'll also run down, as promised, all of the slam dunk data on vay's neurodiversity and how I see it as inseparable from their anti fascism. And as per the title of this two part series, I'll look at how vay's spiritual life either came out of their fascism or the other way around. I'll see you then. Doug.