02-04-2025 

As Gwylène and I cross France back and forth in different directions, she for the Evanescence project, I for my little sister’s unfortunate death, America has been thrown into total chaos … Question: will I really want to go back to a country I chose to live in for reasons now erased? Of course, I have to go back. Can’t abandon family, friends and partners in such a predicament. That is where Simone Weil is exemplary: she goes to Spain to experience the civil war; she works in factories to better understand the impact of exploitative work on people’s existence. We have to go back to America to taste what it means to live under a wannabe authoritarian regime and do something about it.

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Last night, Mediapart had a long session about the state of the United States. Lots on the negative impact of Trump and his actions since inauguration. After one hour of, can I say, a bad news review, one of the panelists brings up the existence of resisting forces, (ONGs, civic organizations, unions, opposed politicians, local networks …). But time is up! There will be no conversations around the possibilities of salvation from fascism, coming from alternative sources, from the people, although Mediapart constantly praises it (the people) as the life blood of democracy.

I wonder. Is this a blindspot of Mediapart? Or a mistaken editorial choice, not to push for hope over fear or panic? Even further …. is it a general weakness of the French left  to not celebrate enough and support enough the positive forces in place, ready to push against doom? In which case hope is not in the picture any longer. Are future elections lost before ballots are cast?… For sure, this would explain the high % of electoral abstenteism. It would also explain a compensatory expansion of all sorts of extremisms, and a full loss of faith in collective intelligence, at a time when, filling the void, artificial intelligence accelerates the dumbing down of societies.

I could even elaborate further that if, among the essential counter-powers at work against a far-right takeover, the Green parties are most challenged right now, it is precisely because they are the first victims of a demoralized, demobilized, soft-bellied left, ill equipped to resist disinformation, unable to take advantage of their universal centrality whereas big oil is very clear about it! Even brilliant Naomi Klein or Bill McKibben seem to be absent these days. .Swamped by extractivists’ moneys.

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When Trump was asked, at a press conference, to reflect on the Washington plane-helicopter collision, he squarely blamed DEI for it! DEI, the journalist insisted? Trump’s answer was crystal clear: yes, it is common sense!

Common sense is the favorite extreme-right answer to collective intelligence.

It took me a long night of poor sleep to remember that Common Sense, the pamphlet, was very inspirational in the writing of the American constitution … and to come up with the name of the author … Thomas Paine … Here I was, realizing again how diabolical it is for Mr. Trump to appropriate key symbols of American history, twist their content beyond recognition and spit them out to trick and confuse people.

02-11-2025

Another long week of speed-train traveling across France and spending all my spare time reading Simone Weil’s biography with more delight every day. I may be repeating myself here. Simone Weil is unique as a philosopher in that she backs all her assertions with personal experiences. She is a twenty five year old experimental philosopher! If she chooses to do factory work at the lowest echelon – that of a front line worker – it is to understand fully what it does to someone’s integrity to be conditioned by machines which demand that you leave your intelligence at the door, deny your soul’s aspirations and risk physical as well as moral injuries, to adjust to the pace of industrial production and its machinery. If she goes to fight for the Republic, in Spain, against Franco’s fascist forces, it is to share in the dangers, possibly the death of Spaniards and mold her living and her thinking into the daily realities of war. If she conducts her school teaching of philosophy much as she would a small group conversation in a park, with friends she trusts and loves, it is because of her belief – very much like bell hooks’ – that there is no passing on of knowledge in teaching without the experience of deep reciprocal empathy, which blends philosophy with life … and no safe way to de-blend them!

There should be a parallel writing of mine to relate how Simone Weil’s reflexions on politics and political institutions enlighten and actualize my own, give them credence …

Actually, for the last few days, an other reason why I am not having so many entry in the diary is that all I would have to say would be: just go read Simone Weil ‘in the text’. For one thing, to see if her writing does or does not separate her from her thinking. And, if it does not, to study the tone of her writing. How can she manage to be as close to her readers as she is to her co-workers at the factory (or their bosses, when she decides to force her way into conversations with them, until they admit they are extracting blood from their employees!), with her union partners (real friends for some), her students, her companions in war.

So, in order to enter Simone Weil’s writings, to tiptoe into them more like, I just bought the smallest book I could find on the impressively full shelf dedicated to her, at a bookstore nearby: “Notes on the general suppression of political parties“. Thanks to the Simone Pétrement biography, I can very well situate these Notes within her life. In fact, this is exactly my purpose, when I insist on reading biographies: to situate the writer and the writing in their historical context; to avoid separating the work from the workplace. In a masterly way, Pétrement’s book is full of extended quotes of Simone Weil’s which reenforce my sense of knowing Weil’s fairly well, past the brush I had with her when I was in catholic school, where, obviously, she was seen as a very controversial figure! When I will buy and read the “Reflexions on the causes of freedom and social oppression”, I may consider that my entrance into Simone Weil’s thinking is whole! I may be blown away by what she has to say about the CAUSES of freedom.

Today, I am still in an extremely stimulate state of speculation about that! I have been searching for my own understanding of what the causes of freedom might be, in a time and place where freedom is considered to be something between an ideal to fight for/towards or a gift to protect. In fact, to ask what the causes of freedom are, is a metaphysical question. Here is the present state of my answer. If there are causes to freedom, it is because freedom is not a given ontological attribute of being. It originates in the reality that one is not a being ALONE. One is a being together with other beings. Freedom is a product of proximity, of social mixing. Or is it a function of proximity, or of social mixing? I am not clear about the difference. There maybe none. In any case, I speculate that it is historically the case that one way to take away their freedom from foes, the powers-that-be separate them from society and throw them in jail. It is also a fact that solitary confinement dehumanizes victims, meaning, to me, that there is no humanity without social mixing.

To be free is, therefore, a co-existential corollary of being human.

To deny freedom is to de-humanize.

Proximity can mean all sorts of encountering, embracing, rubbing, loving … Denial thereof means obliteration of ‘the other’.

Proximity forces one to take a stand about others. It is a catalyst for socialization. It is an enabler of freedom.

Artificial Intelligence is, at the moment, the least human, the most non-human product spreading around the world. It wants to substitute human abilities to decide on small as well as global questions – industrial, social and political – under the pretense that with all the datas, it has all the knowledge.

Yet, we also knows that AI, as a gatherer of data, will further atomize society and annihilate this rubbing, this loving which is, not so much the expression of an urge to socialize than of the indispensability of freedom.