The Sexual Overtones of Waiting

“(…) every time I think of the crucifixion of Christ I commit the sin of envy.”

In one of her essays in Waiting for God[1], Simone Weil defines attention as the act of “suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object”. In attention, she writes, thought is “waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it”[2].

Such a corporeal, almost visceral description of attention seems to evoke something of a reciprocity between attention (or the direction of consciousness) on the one hand, and the objects of the world on the other—a reciprocity that melts the two poles into one another, and that is only really attained in this moment of suspension where the soul renounces its contents, and waits.

1. To be in waiting

Notice, if you’re familiar with French, the shared root in attention and attente. This makes clearer the relationship Weil wants to draw between attention and waiting: to pay attention is to be in waiting, to be in a state of radical openness to the object of attention, without however going towards it.

To pay attention is to wait for the object to come to me, to open myself to it, to allow myself to be influenced by its chronology through a renouncing of my own.

Notice also that in order to be penetrated by its object, attention must as well be made object to an extent. Attention can only make itself vulnerable to its object once it has accepted the grounds which it shares with it: its own objectivity on the one hand, and the object’s own selfhood on the other.

In objects, there is something that has become objective—the object is not immediately so, but is made object by a subjectivity which grasps it; it’s not given as object, but is objectified by what handles it, so to speak. It is our attention, to use Weil’s terms, that determines and defines the world of objects. It is our attention that gives meaning to this mass of externality, this material, the stuff of life, with which we collide daily.

But it’s also only by virtue of this mass of externality that we, in turn, gain our place in the world and are able to encounter and engage other selves as objects. Here, to be an object means simply to be determined, to be limited; by space and time, by biology, by physics, by extension—by whatever is necessarily transcended by the Divine.

For Weil, the world of objects submits to a “blind necessity” which will eventually disclose itself as what actually is an obedience not dissimilar to the obedience of a creature towards its Creator. Elsewhere in Waiting for God:

If we examine human society and souls closely and with real attention, we see that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and as exact as the laws of gravitation. […] The mechanism of necessity can be transposed to any level while still remaining true to itself. […] If […] we transport our hearts beyond ourselves, beyond the universe, beyond space and time to where our Father dwells, and if from there we behold this mechanism, it appears quite different. What seemed to be necessity becomes obedience. Matter is entirely passive and in consequence entirely obedient to God’s will. It is a perfect model for us.[3]

Matter submits to divine will. Weil gets to this idea through this motion of “transposing”, a conceptual shifting of one’s lens. What appeared, in nature, to be the product of a blind, blunt, purposeless necessity, transforms into the ideal manifestation of faith—complete obedience to divine will, to the point of going as far as desiring, and not merely accepting, whatever God wills irrespective of effect or consequence. What changes between the first and the second appearance is the way in which our thought is directed.

The distance between brute meaningless necessity and Divine order is, then, a question of redirecting one’s gaze. If our gaze is turned in the way of what is supremely Good[4], we can discern the necessity of God’s will itself without knowing its “details”, without knowing its terms or its rationale. We can recognize the ontological necessity of divine will in spite of, or perhaps by virtue of, our status as that which receives the divine, that which waits for it, that which constitutes its difference. This means we can know Divine order because we acknowledge the infinitesimal space separating God from his creation, and by extension the infinite space between God and God himself.

Everyone who knows God knows this to be true. By acknowledging the presence-and-absence of God, his infinite expansion coexisting with his absolute ubiquity, we acknowledge our knowing cannot answer to divine logic—except by renouncing its pretentions. And, so, we arrive at attention: the soul renounces its pretention to know, it drops its mask; it empties itself of its artifice, and opens itself to be visited by God[5]. In this, the soul is in waiting—en attente.

For Weil, this conception of attention is the very essence of prayer.

Perhaps it’s by virtue of its essential embodiment that thought leaves itself open to the possibilities of materiality whenever it positions itself where it is apt to do so, and so leaves itself open to the same kind of necessity to which nature itself succumbs.

1. Attention as a self-emptying/the sexual encounter

I’m personally enamored with this idea of leaving one’s attention open to be penetrated by its object. Seeing as Weil’s conception of attention is primarily placed in an ethical theoretical context, where attention’s direction is first God and then my other, in their struggle and affliction (malheur, a term for which there is no real equivalent in the English language—perhaps something like شَقاء in Arabic), I hope it’s not a perversion of Weil to extract the sexual overtones of this formulation. It’s difficult not to notice that “penetrated” has in itself a very material, very bodily or at least corporeal significance.

If paying attention to a task is equivalent to leaving one’s thought open and empty, directing it in such a way that it becomes apt, in this privileged state that is waiting, to receive and be entered by that which presents itself to it, then it may be worth examining what the specificity of attention becomes in the particular context of the sexual encounter[6]—especially in view of Weil’s comments elsewhere[7] around desire and obedience.

In the sexual encounter, the body gives up something—it renounces part of itself, it opens to what is fundamentally other to it and what necessarily objectifies it, what limits it, as the body necessarily objectifies this otherness in return.

The sexual encounter reveals in both parties a willingness to renounce one’s self for the sake of something that exceeds both selves and thus also exceeds their respective othering. Each self becomes more the other than its own: in that moment, I am more you than I am myself; it’s no longer as easy to differentiate between the one and the other. The boundaries dissolve, the space contracts, each side renounces its selfhood for the sake of whatever is born out of its overlapping with the other’s, each becomes less other as they become less self. In the sexual encounter, we find also the element of pleasure—and the more this gesture of renouncing is pronounced fully, the more likely it is for pleasure to take place.

Here we can point to the importance of the “negative” characterization Weil gives to the undertaking that is attention. Attention, she writes, is “an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort”[8]. Attention is not supposed to be physically taxing, it’s not supposed to drain—because it doesn’t exactly require that we go towards anything. Rather, it’s a gesture of restraining and letting something come to us instead, by allowing it to enter us, as it were, and perhaps modify or modulate us. Here’s where it gets interesting.

The meaningfulness of whatever we are doing in the moment lies in this very “negative effort” of attention; in its receptive power, in the openness to be marked by my Other. To be changed by my Other. To be modulated through that which is not me, to come out the other side something different, something transformed—all the while, presumably, maintaining some sense of selfhood. This formal sense of selfhood is the receptacle; an empty structure waiting to be filled, to be graced with the content toward which it turns its eye.

The sexual encounter “fills” in much the same way consciousness may be filled with the stuff of whatever it turns towards—whatever it empties itself for. The sexual self empties its corporeity and receives the stuff of its Other. In the throes of the sexual encounter, all there really is, is a waiting, punctuated by a melting of the two bodily poles. It’s not a rushed waiting; rather, if approached correctly, one that suspends time and expands it according to its desire. It is a waiting that stunts the linear trajectory of time and interferes in its passing.

This waiting cannot be impatient, since the question of patience is itself irrelevant to it, because it is not a waiting for something else—but rather a prolonged occupying of a suspended space without any plans, without any tasks, without force or rather without control. Perhaps more precisely, it’s a perpetual waiting for my other, in which I am always towards-them and never at-them, in which my very selfhood is claimed by that of my other, its form molded in their hands, its contents surrendered to their whim. As I occupy this waiting for my other, I submit to the potentiality of my own othering, and ensure the possibility of reclaiming myself as such as a result.

So, what do we do when we wait?

When I am waiting, I’m submitting to the necessity which is imposed on me by virtue of my position in the world of objects. God doesn’t wait. There can be no notion of submission in God—in fact, God is precisely that which is waited on, hence the title of Weil’s text. We do the waiting; and it’s only in waiting where the necessity of the passage of time can coexist simultaneously with a sort of suspension of time. It is only in waiting that we understand the necessity of renouncing our illusory grasp on time; that we practice denying part of ourselves in order to receive something that transcends both time and space, as well as physical limitation.

The sexual encounter is one such worldly case where time and space and physical limitation are temporarily suspended and transcended. Prayer is another.

In both acts, there seems to reside the “negative effort” of waiting in its fullest manifestation: an emptying of the self, creating a sort of radical, unconditioned receptivity to that which is fundamentally not me. Whenever I give my attention to something, I am purposely turning away from the contents of my own inner life to make way for such radical receptivity. This purposeful turning away, this self-negation, is precisely what makes of attention a creative force.

1. Desire, creation, and self-negation

God, Weil says, denies himself when he completes the creative act.

On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepted this diminution. He emptied a part of his being from himself. […] God permitted the existence of things distinct from himself and worth infinitely less than himself. By this creative act he denied himself […]. God denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response, this echo, which it is in our power to refuse, is the only possible justification for the folly of love of the creative act.[9]

God necessarily diminishes himself as he creates. He renounces himself—his eternity, his endlessness—whenever he brings something determined into existence. As God creates determination, he creates limit and difference, operating a sort of supreme giving up (of his very nature) which is at the heart and origin of Creation[10].

At least as I understand it, this giving up is merely gestural. It’s as if God gives up something—it’s almost symbolic. It serves to contain and define the way we view the act of creation. It is not that God can become something less, but rather that we are apt to be enriched, to some extent and in some way, with God’s eternity and endlessness[11]. If we understand the renunciation that is at the heart of Creation, then we can understand the renunciation required of us whenever we partake in otherness, so to speak—whenever we purposely come into contact with our difference and open ourselves to the suspended, unconditioned negation of our selfhood.

To be penetrated by the object of my attention means to let the object traverse me and in so doing become part of my very definition. When I desire my Other, all I want is to submit to them willingly—to exercise my freedom in renouncing my agency, to offer it up at the altar of recognition. This is, perhaps, the true distance between a mere glance and the sexual encounter. The difference lies in the degree of self-negation: in the extent to which each is prepared to give their Self up at the altar of the other’s recognition.

In the sexual encounter, each Self waits for this recognition by undertaking a self-negation; renouncing its grip on time and placing it in the power of the other. In the sexual encounter, I meticulously, consciously turn away from what is mine to let something of the other inhabit me, go through me, as it is, in its fundamental difference. As a result, both selves come to occupy the liminal space between the one and the other, in a sublime defiance of the necessity of nature, submitting radically to that which transcends both their limits.

Whenever I desire my Other, what I really desire, then, is freedom from my own agency. It is to be able to freely exercise obedience, to consensually inhabit a moment of necessity; to participate, in a sense, in the realization of Divine order. Whenever I freely succumb to this necessity, I partake in making truth, in establishing it as such. Through this apparently counter-intuitive gesture of making of necessity a sort of “organizing principle” of freedom and desire, Weil makes it clear that the only way to freely experience the possibilities of life is to practice, duly and consistently, inhabiting this space of attente—beyond merely living the undifferentiated sludge of acceptance.

Notes

[1] Weil, Simone. 1951. Waiting for God. New York: Putnam.

[2] “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”, WFG p. 111.

[3] “The Love of God and Affliction”, WFG p.128. Emphasis added.

[4] Weil’s metaphysics, while decidedly Christian, was also significantly characterized by an element of Platonism. The Good, the Just, the Beautiful, as those existing, complete Ideal counterparts of their incomplete, flawed, earthly manifestations, can never be fully realized except by the Divine but must always, nonetheless, be sought by us. In this sense, our moral imperative is to be and act in the way of the Good and the Beautiful. What gives credence to this position is its conviction that such Ideas as “the Good” are real objects that exist, and not merely products of our capacity to conceptualize. Much more can be said about this philosophy but I’ll stop here for the purposes of this attempt.

[5] God, for Weil, longs to go to those who wait for him, those who call to him arduously and patiently; not those who desperately, frantically search.

[6] For the sake of clarity and conciseness, I will limit myself to exploring the iteration of the sexual encounter which involves two individuals. This doesn’t mean that the observations I make cannot apply to other iterations. The reader is free to interpret and reflect.

[7] In “The Love of God and Affliction”, Weil poignantly describes the beauty of necessity-as-divine order and the importance of seeing the value in desiring, and not merely accepting, to occupy this space of perfect obedience. “Men can never escape from obedience to God”, she writes. “A creature cannot but obey. The only choice given to men, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not desire it” (p. 129). The obedience of things, when recognized as such, functions to uncover or reflect to us the nature of God and the necessity of his will. “(…) this obedience of things in relation to God is what the transparency of a window pane is in relation to light. As soon as we feel this obedience with our whole being, we see God” (p. 130). In attention, we desire the renunciation of our inner life—we desire, without knowing, whatever may be brought forth by Divine will.

[8] “School Studies”, WFG p. 111.

[9] “Forms of the Implicit Love of God”, WFG p. 145.

[10] It may be justified, then, to wonder whether this great act of renunciation is always at the source of the earthly, worldly creative act. Does creating ultimately mean denying some facet of the self in favor of answering to what is effectively divine interpellation? Would that be where the revelatory aspect of art resides?

[11] Of course, it almost goes without saying that the image of God renouncing something of himself “for our sakes”, as Weil claims, is effectively the image of the crucifixion—the moment of Christ’s sacrifice. Weil writes quite thoroughly on the theme of crucifixion throughout the essays and letters gathered in Waiting for God, explaining it as the unique moment of a Divine “tearing apart”, an “agony beyond all others” wherein God establishes himself through his own self-division and self-negation—exemplifying perfecly the tripartite, Christian conception of God as a multiplicity which comes to coexist harmoniously and necessarily within the concept of a presiding unity: the Creator.

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