During the First World War, a six-year-old Simone Weil learned that soldiers on the Western Front were not rationed sugar, so she refused to eat it until conditions improved. But whereas most leave such zealous empathy in childhood, Weil’s commitment to suffering with — or, at least, in the same way as — others became the hallmark of her work as a philosopher and political activist, as well as of her short, harrowing life. And though her ascetic self-denial tended toward self-erasure, a theme she would reflect endlessly upon in her writing, she couldn’t help standing out. At the École Normale Supérieure, the elite Paris institution of higher learning where she was among the first generation of women to be educated, she was known as “The Red Virgin,” a testament to her asceticism, her communism, and, as her peers saw it, her scorn for femininity. (An improvement, perhaps, on “The Martian,” the sobriquet given to her by her lycée teacher, the radical pacifist philosopher, Alain.) Once, when her classmate Simone de Beauvoir argued that the point of political progress was not to provide for people’s needs but to help them find “the reason for their existence,” Weil countered, “It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry.”
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