Lecture, travail and Croix according to Simone Weil

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the concept of labor in the thought of Simone Weil from a perspective that places the labor of the human being within Weil’s metaphysical scheme. The perspective also takes into account the possibility for human beings to accomplish an authentic presence in the cosmos through the waiting for the divine grace. Labor activity can be interpreted as lecture, i.e., the human capability to understand and modify nature by navigating the hermeneutic dimension of meaning. Alienated and alienating labor, ruled by the cadence of the machine and marked by the orders of superiors, tends to remove meaning from its intermediate position, which connects the human being with the natural environment. This kind of deracinating labor entails a situation of malheur, a moment in which the divine grace is revealed in a pure manner within the cosmos. Hence, alienating labor is an image of the Cross. The human being striving to hold an authentic position within the divine grace has to accept the subtraction of meaning entailed by machine labor, realizing the shift that separates lecture from non-lecture. In the thought of Simone Weil, accomplished labor is that activity which places the human being in the condition of malheur, at the point when such activity is accepted as a manifestation of the divine grace in the same way as the metaphysical event of the Cross.