Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections

Nemla Italian Studies, Journal of Italian Studies, Italian Section, Northeast Modern Language Association Special Issue: The Jewish Experience in Contemporary Italy, Balma Philip, Simona Wright, eds. Pp. 196 - 199, 2015

In The New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo D’Azeglio to Primo Levi , 2018

Although brutal, the definitive 1958 edition of Primo Levi's canonical Holocaust memoir, Se questo è un uomo, is less uniformly bleak than the story told in the first edition, published in 1947. This article argues that the later version's most significant additions introduce notes of optimism which affect how this essential book has been interpreted. Furthermore, the 1958 edition registers a shift in Levi's previous focus, from a nearly exclusive interest in documenting Nazi crimes against humanity, to a bifurcated approach that incorporates more autobiographical elements and commemorations of individual victims. The added passages, amounting to thousands of words, include several humane encounters and instances of altruistic friendship that stand in marked contrast to the Darwinian aspects of Auschwitz strongly emphasized in the 1947 edition. These positive elements, each resulting from empathy and successful acts of communication, constitute important exceptions to the rules governing human behavior in the camps, which Levi himself described.

Primo Levi asks his readers to consider whether those who live comfortable lives have some meaningful connection to those who suffered in Auschwitz. He suggests that discovering such a connection is, paradoxically, both improbable and imperative. Alternatively, Hannah Arendt argues that the thoughtlessness of the perpetrators and the suffering of the victims in the camps amount to meaningless banalities. For her, totalitarianism is an attack on humanness as such and the best response to it is to practice a different, more human type of politics. However, Levi’s paradox shows us that thoughtlessness is an insufficient diagnosis of the Nazi bureaucrat and that our relationship to those who suffer cannot be separated from politics or the question of what it means to be human. Instead, the essential political question after Auschwitz is whether or not those who suffer are part of the human community.

Italica, 1992

REVIEWs 263 sionale. Tema che si ricollega allo scopo del volume: aiutare l'insegnante a rinnovarsi continuamente per migliorare.

Italica, 2006

This article reads Levi’s testimony from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that Western philosophy, as continued in modern humanism, privileges the “Greek” narrative of being—which violently absorbs difference into ontological self-identification—over the “Hebrew” narrative, which embraces ethical responsibility for the other. The dilemma at the heart of Levi’s testimony resides in the simultaneous entwinement of, and opposition between, the “Greek” and “Hebrew” modes that course through the text. The ontological position is repeatedly interrupted by the sight of the Muselmanner, the dehumanized victims of Auschwitz whose alterity is beyond assimilation. My reading accounts for Levi’s subtextual ambivalence toward universality as a basis for ethics.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2015

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 1994

‘Which Holocaust? Primo Levi and the Field of Holocaust Memory in Post-war Italy’, Italian Studies, 61, 1, Spring 2006, 85-113

Contemporary Political Theory, 2021

Political philosophy in the last decades has turned away from universal narratives of progress, on grounds that these narratives produce exclusion and justify domination. However, the universal values that underlie emancipatory political projects seem to presuppose universal history, which explains its persistence in some contemporary political philosophers committed to such projects. In order to find a response to the paradox according to which universal history is inherently exclusionary and yet necessary to uphold universal values, I examine the contrast between Adorno's and Lyotard's perspectives on the problem of writing history 'after Auschwitz'. For both philosophers, Auschwitz interrupts our fundamental normative and cognitive values, because any attempt to identify the meaning of the camps by means of these values misunderstands the suffering that took place in them. Yet this interruption produces a feeling that calls for the institution of new universal normative values. For Adorno, this value is a purely negative command to act in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself. For Lyotard, by contrast, it is the demand to invent new idioms that make it possible to find meaning in Auschwitz.