We Have Never Been Disenchanted

If matter is not exactly “animate,” the material world of society and history could be a conduit for divinity. Because we have “forgotten the existence of a divine order of the universe,” we fail to see that “labor, art, and science are only different ways of entering into contact with it.”17Weil, 157, 159.

“All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned,” as Marx and Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto. Far from being bastions of piety, the bourgeois masters of capitalism have “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor … in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” What if those waters of pecuniary reason const

As the metaphysical common sense of market society, money defines and even bestows all manner of qualities. “I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid?” Money can even buy you love: “I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugl

Shortly before her untimely death in 1943, Weil—by then what could be described as a fellow-traveler of Christianity, someone lingering in the vestibule but never entering the sanctuary—speculated that just as “yeast only makes the dough rise if it is mixed with it,” so in the same way “there exist certain material conditions for the supernatural o

“The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force,” Marx mused. “If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, but confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to a man other than the worker.” The domination of labor by capital took the form of a modern animism, a capit