 Attention can be seen as love, for just as attention consents to the existence of another, love requires the recognition of a reality outside of the self, and thus de-centers the self and its particularity. Contra the colloquial sense of love, it is because we do not love personally, but “it is God in us who loves them [les malheureux]” (WFG 93–94), that our love for others is “quite impersonal” and thereby universal (WFG 130). Weil allows, however, “one legitimate exception to the duty of loving universally”, namely, friendship (“Last Thoughts”, WFG 51). Friendship is “a personal and human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and a reflection of divine love” (WFG 131), a “supernatural harmony, a union of opposites” (WFG 126). The opposites that form the miraculous harmony are necessity/subordination (i.e., drawing from Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, she sees it as an impossibility for one to want to preserve autonomy in both oneself and another; in the world the stronger exerts force through will) and liberty/equality (which is maintained through the desire of each friend to preserve the consent of oneself and of the other, a consent to be “two and not one” [WFG 135]). In other words, in friendship a particular, self-founded reading of the other is not forced. Distance is maintained, and in this way Weil’s concept of friendship advances her previous critiques of the ethos of capitalism, bureaucracy, and colonialism—i.e., free consent of all parties is the essential ingredient of all human relations that are not degraded or abusive. Hence friendship is a model for ethics more generally—even, contra her claim, universally.