Abstract
“Suffering” deals with the issue of animal suffering and compassion, and explores the ambiguity of Levi’s reported attitude toward the suffering of non-human animals, underlining how Levi structures his fiction according to a double impossibility of identifying with these mute creatures that, paradoxically, triggers the ethical recognition of a shared vulnerability. This chapter begins such investigation by reconstructing for the first time the debate on animal vivisection that surrounded Levi’s article “Against Pain,” published in the Italian newspaper La Stampa in 1978.
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- 1.
First in Levi (1980), 3; then in AM but with the different title “Lo scoiattolo; finally in O II, 716.
- 2.
See, for instance, the otherwise interesting essay written by Massimo Bucciantini about Levi’s experience as a chemist; Bucciantini (2011), 35–42.
- 3.
For a general overview of present scholarship on animal suffering, see Aaltola (2012).
- 4.
See the introduction by F. Rosen to Bentham (1996), xxxii.
- 5.
See Bentham (1996), XVII.4. All the following quotations by Bentham are taken from this fundamental paragraph, unless differently stated.
- 6.
On this very subject another British philosopher, Mary Midgley, has recently written that the argument according to which animals are things and therefore it does not matter how we treat them, “simply reverses itself. Since it does matter how we treat animals—since cruelty it is vicious in its own right, and not just because it might lead to ill-treating people—the sharp division into object and fully rational subject cannot be right” (Midgley, 152).
- 7.
The 2009 edition, from which we are quoting, keeps almost the same structure of the original 1975 edition but is enriched by some additional examples, especially in the two chapters devoted to animal experimentation and animal farming.
- 8.
The idea that animals not only do not suffer but they cannot even feel pain belongs to a very strong tradition of thought that finds its most important representative, although controversially, in Descartes and its famous comment on animals being machines or automata (see for example R. Descartes, Discourse on Method, part V). Whoever dealt and deals with an animal in his or her life does not need Peter Singer’s rejection of this idea to know that animals not only do feel pain and suffer, but they have also sometimes a very special way to express it that overcomes human language. However, strangely enough, there are contemporary philosophers who still consider animals in general unable to suffer. See, for instance, Harrison (1991), in which the prominent Oxford professor of science and religion claims that there is not enough evidence to maintain that animals feel pain, therefore they cannot be considered moral agents. There are many articles, essays, and books that are claiming the opposite view, but this is not the place to quote them all. I would rather suggest reading Rollin (2007) for a general but very well-argued and informed overview of the issue.
- 9.
See, for instance, Regan (1983).
- 10.
Manifestations of Derrida’s “animal turn” can be also found in an interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco, in which Derrida deals with some of the same issues he discusses in the “Animal Therefore I Am” (Derrida and Roudinesco, 62–76), and in another interview entitled “Eating Well” in which he offers a controversial opinion about vegetarianism (Derrida 1991).
- 11.
All the quotations are taken from the 2005 online version: see Ruesch 1976 (translated afterwards in English first as The Slaughter of the Innocents in 1978 and eventually as The Naked Empress, or The Great Medical Fraud in 1982). On the general influence of Ruesch on the development of the animal rights movement in Italy, see Tonutti, 2007, 151–196.
- 12.
The name of Ruesch might have not escaped Levi’s attention, though. Levi claims in fact to have read Ruesch’s novel Il paese delle ombre lunghe [original title: Top of the World, 1950] during an unpublished lecture on the conservation of food. I must thank Marco Belpoliti for kindly alerting me about this reference.
- 13.
This is not the first time in which Ruesch is asked to express his ideas on medical science on “La Stampa.” In a short interview published on April 4 of the previous year, entitled “Ci ammaliamo di medicine,” Ruesch had anticipated some of the issues of Imperatrice nuda, without though mentioning explicitly the book or even vivisection. It is only after the publication of his major work that “La Stampa” gets really interested in him and in general in this topic.
- 14.
Few months later, the protest against animal vivisection gained even more popular attention, when the Italian Parliament was convinced to emit a bill against cruelty to animals. The whole issue was considered so important by La Stampa that it reached the first page, with an article entitled “Finiranno le torture in nome della scienza. Il disegno di legge contro la vivisezione,” published in the newspaper on Wednesday, October 12, 1977.
- 15.
I would like to immediately stress here the adjective “subumana” because it is a term we will find in Primo Levi’s article, utilized in a way that does not fit precisely within the whole system of his other narratives about animals. My guess, as we will see when we will discuss “Contro il dolore,” is that Levi actually borrows this specific term—as he sometimes does even in other essays—from his opponent and adjusts it into his own vocabulary.
- 16.
See, for instance, RS OII 933 and SeS, OII 1103.
- 17.
These terms are not obvious synonyms. A further investigation about the relations among these terms and what we might call a topology of subhumanity in Levi would be needed and most welcome. Yet, there is here both a general indication about Levi’s use of the specific term “subumani” and an overlap between a human reference and an animal one that the same Levi did not feel the need to (theoretically) justify. We might also stress that Levi has never been interested in building a coherent philosophical system.
- 18.
Cf. Belpoliti (1997), 159.
- 19.
To investigate further this complex issue of identification with the gaze of the persecutor, I suggest comparing Levi’s account of his “iniziazione” in Auschwitz with two very intriguing books. The first one is Sax (2000) in which the author not only gives us a survey of how animal symbolism worked in the Nazi regime, but also analyses the complex dynamics of this double identification. The second one is the already mentioned Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, in which the reversal identification between the colonizer and the colonized (and the animal) is investigated using Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
- 20.
See Agamben (2002).
- 21.
- 22.
It should not surprise that Rigoni Stern, who in the same period of “Contro il dolore” was publishing in La Stampa a series of articles collectively entitled “Storie di bestie,” was not convinced by Levi’s arguments. Moreover, Levi was always very impressed by Rigoni Stern’s familiarity with animals and with nature as a whole; a characteristic he probably could not find in himself, at least according to his friend’s account as reported in the quoted interview. We can see expressions of this feeling in Levi’s oeuvre too, for example in La chiave a stella, in which Levi enjoys Faussone’s “zoologia autogestita” [self-managed zoology] and “confidenza con le piante e con le bestie” (CS, OI 1011) [familiarity with plants and beasts], and, most importantly, in a short story entitled “Ammutinamento” (VF, OI 718–724) and indeed dedicated to Marion Rigoni Stern. In this story, the main character is a young girl able to understand and interact friendly with plants and animals.
- 23.
For a general survey of the relations between Judaism and the Animal Rights Movement, see Kalechofsky (1988).
- 24.
Sometimes Levi does not acknowledge any fundamental difference between pain and suffering. Cf., for example, Levi (1997a), 43: “E di che cosa ha paura? Del dolore fisico, mio e altrui;” and 72: “Ho paura della sofferenza, ma non della morte. Temo molto la sofferenza, sia la mia che quella altrui.”
- 25.
First as Levi (1977); then in L; finally in O II, 145–148.
- 26.
OII 114. In La Stampa the short story was originally entitled “Costumi.” The two mentioned pieces published in between are instead “Il nostro sigillo” (August 21) and “Lettera a Lattanzio: Dia le dimissioni” (September 8).
- 27.
G. Leopardi, Ultimo canto di Saffo, vv. 45–46.
- 28.
Levi (1976): then in AM and in OII 676. Although published earlier in the newspapers, this essay follows in L’altrui mestiere immediately after “Contro il dolore.”
- 29.
In both cases, emphasis added.
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Benvegnù, D. (2018). Suffering I. Shared Vulnerability . In: Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71258-1_2
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