Simone Weil's Final Notebooks Published in Critical Edition

The third volume of the sixth tome of Simone Weil's complete works has been published by Gallimard, containing her last notebooks, known as the "Cahiers de Marseille," written between February and June 1942. These notebooks, numbered VIII to XII, were composed just before Weil left Marseille for New York, where she arrived on July 6, 1942, and then London, where she died of cardiac arrest on August 24, 1943. The edition, titled "La porte du transcendant," is edited by Alyette Degrâces, Marie-Annette Fourneyron, Florence de Lussy, and Michel Narcy. The notebooks reveal Weil's synthesis of mathematics, Christian theology, Greek philosophy, and Eastern thought, centered on the concept of "holding together incompatibles" (ta adunata sunaptein) from Aristotle's Poetics. Weil explores non-duality, the union of opposites, and the notion of "decreation"—the dissolution of the self to allow divine grace. The publication marks a major event in Weil scholarship, as the complete works project, initiated in 1988 under André A. Devaux and Florence de Lussy, will eventually comprise seventeen volumes. The notebooks were first revealed by Gustave Thibon in 1947 with the publication of "La Pesanteur et la Grâce" (Plon).