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Simone Weil disorients. Her writings pull one into the world of a person whose search for truth and understanding was continually confounded by a fierce intellectual individuality, uncompromising sense of purity, refusal to subscribe to doctrine, and a sense of the paradoxes and contradictions of human existence.1 She evinces communitarian sympathies, but also a continual ambiguity toward community life.2 "The city," Weil notes, "gives one the feeling of being at home," but that feeling "must be rooted in the absence of a place" (GG 86).3 Weil's spiritual individualism does not mesh with liberal individualism either. Her notion of justice contrasts sharply with a Rawlsian negotiation of rights.4 She also analyzes the "empty hopes" of Marxian progress while admiring Marx's analysis of oppression (OL 1; also OL 148).5 She "tried to embrace Christianity" on "her own terms" while exemplifying, as one commentator notes, "the cosmopolitan reach of freethinking Jewish culture" that "she resented and rejected."6 She adopts a distinctive feminist stance while rejecting her own feminism. Because of her own disillusionment with an anarchist wing in the Spanish Civil War, she abandoned anarchism and later, with the rise of German power, pacifism. Furthermore, her turn from overtly political concerns toward spirituality is seen as leading to extremes of solitude, self-renunciation, and self-annihilation (see esp. GG 89). Perhaps her best-known work, The "Iliad," or the Poem of Force, is identified frequently as marking this spiritual turn, leading scholars to assess her interpretation of the Iliad as both anachronistic7 and apolitical.8
This essay seeks to bridge the metaphysical and spiritual world of Simone Weil with the Homeric world, suggesting that Weil provides us with a way of reading the Iliad that is grounded in the text and can be read in the context of her other writings. We develop this Weilian interpretation of the Iliad by way of one of the central paradoxes that organizes her work: the power of words. In a late essay, Weil writes, "By the power of words we always mean their power of illusion and error" (HP 76). Words emerge as instruments of oppression, used to justify or disguise cruelty, oppression, and exploitation (PW 234)....