A Jewish philosopher and mystic understood Trump’s Achilles’ heel
For those struggling to make sense of a flurry of executive orders, Simone Weil and ‘The Iliad’ offer useful guidance
President Donald Trump takes a question from a reporter after signing a series of executive orders. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky February 13, 2025
Amid the firehose of executive orders since Donald Trump reentered the White House, ranging from the return of plastic straws (“paper ones don’t work”) to the return of Mount McKinley (the president “who made our country very rich through tariffs”), it is tempting to recall these lines from Woody Allen’s Bananas. They are spoken by Esposito, leader of the guerrilla movement which has just overthrown the dictator of San Marcos.
“From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish!” Esposito declares. “In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.”
“Power has gone to his head!” one of Allen’s fellow rebels blurts out.
And, of course, the viewer explodes in laughter. How can we not, given the nature of Esposito’s executive orders? It is their absurd incongruity that makes them comic. But while we might guffaw over plastic straws, the laughter fades in the face of many of Trump’s other executive orders, whose inhumanity makes them toxic. The presidential order that there are now just two sexes, male and female, threatens the lives of trans people.
Similarly, the salvo of orders responding to the “invasion” at the southern border not only threatens thousands of undocumented immigrants with internment at the concentration camp on Guantanamo, but they also threaten to strip American citizenship from other categories of immigrants deemed illegitimate by the government.
Power seems to have gone to yet other heads. To fully grasp the effects of power, though, Allen’s now-ancient comedy is insufficient; we need to go back to ancient Greek tragedy — namely, Homer’s Iliad.
This is the same text that the French Jewish thinker (and, yes, Christian mystic) Simone Weil went back to in 1940. Part of the massive exodus of French civilians fleeing south ahead of the German invasion — in this instance, the proper use of the word — Weil began to draft an essay on her experience, one that she saw through the prism of the Homeric epic. The essay — “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” — was published the following year in France’s unoccupied zone, but under a pseudonym since Vichy forbade the publication of works by Jewish authors.
Ask someone who has read the poem to name its hero, and the reply will probably be Achilles and, if not, his friend Patroclus or his enemy Hector. But Weil replies that the true hero is none of the above. Instead, it is force or power. It is this that “enslaves man,” it is this “before which man’s flesh shrinks away,” and it is this that “alters the human spirit.” For her contemporaries caught up in the events of 1940, Weil has a warning: If you thought that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, think again. As for those who are paying attention to events, they understand that force “today as yesterday is at the very center of human history and that the Iliad is the purest of mirrors.”
Force, for Weil, is the phenomenon — as universal as gravity — that “turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” A thing, at the limit, was a corpse, the making of which Homer repeatedly describes in austere detail. But more fascinating, Weil suggests, is when force transforms us into a living corpse. In other words, into someone servile and subservient to those who exercise that force. She cites several passages from the poem, which she was translating into French while drafting the essay, to illustrate this point. The best-known instance is when Priam, the king of Troy, enters Achilles’ tent to ask for the return of the son and kisses the hands of the man who killed him. Utterly abject and fully compliant, Priam — or the husk of flesh and bone that Priam has become — hunches “abased at the feet of Achilles,” prey to the force wielded by the Greek.
Here, Weil’s seemingly Hobbesian perspective takes an even more interesting turn. She writes that Homer reveals what remains hidden to Achilles and his fellow Greek warriors: “The consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them — they too will bow their necks in their turn.” This is hardly a matter of human justice, but instead a matter as impersonal as, say, the laws of thermodynamics: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is that nobody really possesses force.” It weighs as heavily, in short, on those who rule as on those who obey.
The Greek playwrights — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — followed Homer’s lead, placing this fundamental truth about human affairs at the heart of their tragedies. (For that matter, so too did the “father” of history, Thucydides.) But whether they were working with mythical or historical events, they understood the inevitable hubris of those who think they control those events and the inevitable fall that always follows. These works, including Weil’s, do not offer a guide on how to avoid these events, nor do they offer much in the way of hope. But what they do offer, apart from their bracing lucidity and beauty, is a lesson in humility. Sooner or later, this lesson will be all Greek to those who now govern us.
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