Simone Weil was born in Paris just over a century ago, on February 3, 1909, and though she always remained fiercely loyal to France—and was French to her fingertips—the case could be made that her true homeland lay elsewhere, deep in the hazier and far more fractious republic of Contradiction. There she was, however perilously, chez elle. Weil displayed alarming aplomb on the horns of dilemmas; often she teetered on several simultaneously. She went after the paradoxical, the contradictory, the oppositional, with the rapt single-mindedness of a collector and the grim fervor of a truffle-hound. She exulted in polarities. Though many of Weil’s statements have an aphoristic cast or masquerade as bons mots, they are anything but witty in the usual bantering sense. Weil is an irritating thinker; her words impart an acrid aftertaste; they leave scratchy nettles behind. She meant to provoke, to jostle, to unsettle—she was an activist as well as a contemplative—and the play of opposition served this purpose.

But Weil also saw the summoning of opposites as a way of knowing. It was an ancient way, much favored by her beloved Greeks: the Stoic Chrysippus taught that we discern good and evil only by their opposition; in one of Heraclitus’s fragments, he is reported as saying, “God: day, night; winter, summer; war, peace; satiety, hunger.” The dark saying could have been Weil’s own. For her, truth was to be found, if at all, in the tension