Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Antifascist (Autistic) Christianity

Sept. 22, 2025 - Conspirituality

05:08

Bonus Sample: Antifascist (Autistic) Christianity — Simon(e) Weil (Part 2)

The second installment in a two-part exploration of Simon(e) Weil for the ongoing Antifascist Christianity series and the Antifascist Woodshed project. At the heart of the episode is Weil’s terse, luminous definition of love—“belief in the existence of other human beings as such”—and Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s unpacking of how that love rejects projections and demands the generosity of attention, shared joys and miseries, and a deprivatized ethic of care. Matthew contrasts this with caricatures of Weil as an ascetic or body-denier, arguing instead for a portrait of a neurodivergent activist whose stressed nervous system made hypocrisy intolerable and whose spirituality emerged from embodied encounters. Weil presented a lot of scrambling data—gender nonconformity, ambivalent sexuality, eating and touch aversions, migraines and hypergraphia. Theological and philosophical commentators often pathologize or misread Weil, while sidestepping their autism. As for Weil’s Christianity: it wasn’t about churchly allegiance but an experiential, anti-hypocrisy faith that found Jesus in direct action and in taking liturgical symbols seriously enough to live them. For Weil, “this is my body” became a present-tense statement of antifascist solidarity: the breaking and sharing of bread and body as an F-you to the imperials, and a call to communal repair. Show Notes:Coles, Robert. Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2001. Fitzgerald, Michael. The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006. Gilman-Opalsky, Richard. The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020. Lawson, Kathryn. Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil. New York: Routledge, 2024. doi:10.4324/9781003449621. McCullough, Lissa. The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2014. Plant, Stephen. Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction. Revised and expanded edition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008. Song, Youming, Tingting Nie, Wendian Shi, Xudong Zhao, and Yongyong Yang. "Empathy Impairment in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Conditions From a Multidimensional Perspective: A Meta-Analysis." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (October 9, 2019): 01902. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01902. Wallace, Cynthia R. The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. With a preface by T. S. Eliot. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Weil, Simone. Modern Classics Simone Weil: An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hey everybody, this is a bonus episode called Antifascist Autistic Christianity, Simon Vey.
	It's part two.
	Part one dropped on Saturday on the main feed.
	I'm Matthew Remsky.
	This is Conspirituality.
	On this podcast, we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
	You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on Blue Sky.
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	So this is the second of a two-part series I'm doing on Simon Vey.
	And along with the episodes on Dietrich Bonhoffer, uh, it all fits into the antifascist woodshed series where I collect a bunch of useful stories and resources for this very shitty time.
	Okay, brief recap.
	In part one, I suggested that Simon Vey was a spiritual auntie to Greta Thunbere, as I framed their life and work through the lens of autism, antifascism, and resistance to capitalist norms.
	Now, Thunbere doesn't echo Vey's overt obsession with religion, although Thunberg is openly enraptured by the more than human world, just as Vey was.
	Both show uncompromising honesty and intolerance to contradiction.
	These are traits that are often linked with autistic perception.
	Tunbere's journey from burnout and masking to climate justice advocacy mirrors Vey's lifelong refusal to paper over suffering, whether it's by refusing sugar and solidarity with soldiers at the age of five, finding solidarity with workers on farms or with workers on the Renault assembly line, or fighting with anarchists against Spanish fascists.
	Vei's life was marked by physical challenges, relentless activism, and a disgust for hypocrisy, whether it was shown by fascists, by communists who couldn't admit their own inner fascistic tendencies, or their own countrymen.
	In France, Vey joined the resistance, proposed radical solidarity plans, and embodied anti-fascism through constant personal sacrifice.
	Now, their writings, posthumously published, were not a professional project.
	I went into that in great detail in part one.
	These were hypergraphic notebooks that she left behind, through which she processed the overstimulation of life as she simply survived.
	Now, central to their thought is attention as a form of generosity, the priority of obligations over rights, and the term that she coined decreation, which is a kind of stripping down of ego to make space for the other.
	They emphasized rootedness as a human need, but carefully distinguished it from fascist nationalism.
	And they warned that capitalism's uprooting drives despair and authoritarianism.
	Right from the jump here, I want to reiterate and elaborate a little bit on what I believe is Vay's strongest contribution to anti-fascism, at least in terms of their writing.
	This is their deceptively simple definition of love, which I only really understood after reading this great book called The Communism of Love, an Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value by Richard Gilman Opalski.
	So that book is in the notes.
	Here's the definition quote belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.
	Gilman Opalski unpacks this to say that love is not merely recognizing other human beings, but that it demands belief in them as they really are.
	And this means rejecting the imaginary beings produced by projection or longing.
	In fact, Vey says that loving an imaginary being in the place of an actual being is more terrible than death.
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