Abstract
No one has written about the Nazi concentration camps with more acuity, moral clarity, and understated eloquence than Primo Levi (1919–87), the Italian chemist and author who survived nearly a year in Auschwitz. Possessed of a rare intelligence and a resilient temperament, which made him well suited to deal with this grim subject matter, his task of interpreting and representing the Holocaust was nevertheless fraught with difficulty. To our occluded view of the black hole of Auschwitz, Levi has been said to bring “reason and light.”1 However, it has become apparent over time that the tools he had at his disposal, the scientific method, the accumulated wisdom of European culture, and Kantian ethics, were not wholly adequate to the exceptional challenge he faced, having been impaired and compromised by the events of the Holocaust or even before. It is sorely troubling that these bulwarks of Enlightenment humanism lacked the strength to stop the Nazi genocide before it started. Even more disconcerting is the distinct possibility that the Enlightenment itself created some of the conditions that enabled the Holocaust. As much as we may wish to live in a world governed by it, reason, with its dispassionate, automated rigidity, is not always accompanied by light.
The abstract, ahistorical self posited by the Enlightenment as an ideal of humanity entails in its converse appearance the implication that historical difference (and all the more, an historical definition of identity) will be suspect; the principle of universal reason or judgment implies that the grounds on which such distinctions are based may be—should be—challenged: not only can everyone be judged by one criterion, but the consequences of being included or excluded by it are, in terms of the principle of universalizability, without limits. The “difference” of the Jews was judged by the Nazis to be fundamental—and with this decision, there was nothing to inhibit the decision subsequently made about what followed from that judgment; there was no “reason” not to destroy the difference.
—Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (194–95)
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Notes
I refer to the first anthology of Levi scholarship published in English, Reason and Light: Essays on Primo Levi, ed. Susan Tarrow (Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1990).
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Se questo è un uomo, rev. ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1958);
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, 1989); I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 1986). On the importance of Levi in American intellectual life, see Michael Rothberg and Jonathan Druker, “A Secular Alternative: Primo Levi’s Place in American Holocaust Discourse,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28, no. 1 (forthcoming).
Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 195. In the chapter titled “Genocide and Kant’s Enlightenment,” Lang offers a careful, measured, and detailed assessment of the “affiliation” between Enlightenment ideas and the inner logic of Nazism (165–206). He takes possible objections to his thesis seriously, admitting that so many Nazi proclamations and policies claimed to be in sharp opposition to Enlightenment principles. However, he states, these objections “argue past rather than against the thesis posed here, which is based on the internal structure of ideas, not on what is said about them” (194).
See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. H. J. Patton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). The categorical imperative states the following: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (30).
Vincent P. Pecora, “Habermas, Enlightenment, and Antisemitism,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 155–70; especially 163.
Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 195. See also Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 143–56. Before the Enlightenment, intolerance of Jews in Europe led to ghettoization, forced conversion, expulsion, or even unsystematic murder, but not to carefully planned genocide. According to Bauman, modernity, with “its obsessive preoccupation with ordering,” marked a transition to an “Age of Gardening.” “When society is turned into a garden, then the idea of unwertes Leben [‘worthless life’] is bound to occupy in every blueprint of a better society as great a place as the need to fight weeds and parasites occupies in every good gardening handbook” (153).
As early as 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre noted the link between a deification of the human and fascism: “We have no right to believe that humanity is something to which we could set up a cult, after the manner of Auguste Comte. The cult of humanity ends in Comtian humanism, shut-in upon itself, and—this must be said—in Fascism. We do not want a humanism like that.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Meridien, 1956), 368.
In English, see Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995);
Mirna Cicioni, Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge (Oxford: Berg, 1995);
Fredric D. Homer, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001);
Massimo Giuliani, A Centaur in Auschwitz: Reflections on Primo Levi’s Thinking (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
In Italian, see Massimo Dini and Stefano Jesurum, Primo Levi: Le opere e i giorni (Milano: Rizzoli, 1992);
Franco Baldasso, Il cerchio di gesso: Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon, 2007).
Although not discussed in my study, many other Italian Holocaust writers had to navigate these same transitions. See Risa Sodi, Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing (1944–1994) (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
See Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980). In some of the earliest Levi criticism in America, Rosenfeld wrote that Survival in Auschwitz was “influenced by the traditions of Western humanistic learning” (56). See David Denby, “The Humanist and the Holocaust: The Poised Art of Primo Levi,” The New Republic, July 28, 1986, 27–33. Denby wrote that as a “humanist after Auschwitz,” Levi “not only violates our sense of what a survivor should be, he violates our sense of what a modern writer should be. He lacks fierceness, anguish, a taste for extremity” (28). See Michael André Bernstein, “A Yes or a No,” Review of Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist by Myriam Anissimov, The New Republic, September 27, 1999, 35–41. Bernstein wrote of Levi: “His writing embodies perhaps the last great testament to the Enlightenment’s trust in the adequacy of reason to comprehend the world and to shape a fitting place for us in it” (36). An Italian anthology on Levi organized by key topics includes an entire essay on Levi and the Enlightenment; see Daniela Amsallem, “Illuminista,” in Riga 13: Primo Levi, ed. Marco Belpoliti (Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1997), 361–71. See also François Rastier, Ulysse à Auschwitz: Primo Levi, le survivant (Paris: Cerf, 2005). Rastier wrote: “Héritier des ingénieurs de la Renaissance, Levi reste un écrivain des Lumières: son ami Calvino … le compare à des encyclopédistes due XVIIIe siècle … ” (188).
Joseph Farrell, “Introduction,” in Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, ed. Joseph Farrell (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), 9.
Some of its confusing variety is cataloged in Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50. “In the seventeenth century, there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general … In the nineteenth century, there was a suspicious humanism, hostile and critical toward science, and another that, to the contrary, placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism … there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism; and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists” (44).
Richard Norman, On Humanism (London: Routledge, 2004), 20, 23, 24.
Robert S. C. Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17.
Bryan Cheyette, “Appropriating Primo Levi,” in The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71.
The episode has often been discussed in Levi scholarship. See, for example, Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 228–30.
Gian-Paolo Biasin, “The Haunted Journey of Primo Levi,” in Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, ed. Roberta S. Kremer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 11.
Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf, with afterword, “The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions,” trans. by Ruth Feldman (New York: Macmillan, 1987); Primo Levi, La tregua (Turin: Einaudi, 1963);
Primo Levi, If Not Now, When? trans. William Weaver, intro. Irving Howe (New York: Summit Books, 1985);
Primo Levi, Se non ora, quando? (Turin: Einaudi, 1982);
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1984);
Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico (Turin: Einaudi, 1975);
Primo Levi, The Monkey’s Wrench, trans. William Weaver (New York: Summit Books, 1986);
Primo Levi, La chiave a stella (Turin: Einaudi, 1978).
See Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
and Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Postmodernism and the Holocaust (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).
The best broad overview is found in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds., The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991).
According to Stuart Sim, posthumanism is “the state many theorists claim we are now in, where humanist values are no longer taken to be the norm and are even openly contested. A post-humanist society regards humanist ideals with scepticism, and is prone to see their negative side only (for example, the Holocaust as a logical extension of the humanist desire to find rational ‘solutions’ to all perceived social and political ‘problems’).” Stuart Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman (Cambridge, UK: Icon Books, 2001), 78.
See Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Antihumanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordam University Press, 2005);
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986);
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989);
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 239–64.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 222.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 18.
See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
See Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
See Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand, trans. Séan Hand and Michael Temple (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 75–87.
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© 2009 Jonathan Druker
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Druker, J. (2009). Introduction. In: Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622180_1
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