Abstract
This chapter borrows Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of Western thought, and also the posthumanist ethics he proposes as a remedy for its deficiencies, to reread Survival in Auschwitz. A critical approach of this type is needed to insert Levi’s canonical text into a larger discussion about whether the Holocaust, along with the other genocides that have stained the last century, constitute a watershed in the history of Western culture that marks the end of modernity, the end of blind faith in instrumental rationality, and the end of humanist ethics. In the context of this discussion, ethics are defined as the continuously negotiated relations between the self (or the subject) and the other (that is, the one who is irreducibly not the same as the self), which, at the negative and positive extremes, encompass either inequality and exploitation or mutuality and obligation.
How was I able to survive Auschwitz? My principle is: I come first, second and third. Then nothing, then again I; and then all the others.
—Ella Lingens-Reiner1
It is not the concept of “man” which is at the basis of this humanism, it is the other man.
—Emmanuel Levinas2
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Notes
Cited in Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, 1989), 79.
Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98.
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).
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 346.
Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), xii.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 46.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 108.
Emmanuel Levinas, Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 24; emphasis in original.
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.
Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis) use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 76–77.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the- Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 99.
Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Editions de le Cité universelle, 1947; reissued by Gallimard in 1957). Robert Antelme, The Human Race, preceded by an homage to Robert Antelme by Edgar Morin; trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1992); hereafter cited in the text as Human or simply with parenthetical page numbers when the source is clear.
In a later essay, Antelme V affirms his Kantianism: “Against every form of tyranny the best defense lies not in the proliferation of military institutions but in a truly free society in which each man exists as a man for every other man, exists as an end in himself.” Robert Antelme, “Man as the Basis of Right,” in On Robert Antelme’s the Human Race: Essays and Commentary, ed. Daniel Dobbels, trans. Jeffrey Haight (Evanston, Illinois: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 2003), 29.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 387.
Colin Davis, “Antelme, Renoir, Levinas and the Shock of the Other,” French Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003), 49–50.
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999); hereafter cited in the text as Remnants or simply with parenthetical page numbers when the source is clear. The question of dignity is particularly important in Agamben’s critique of two earlier theorists of concentration camp survival, Bruno Bettelheim and Terrence Des Pres, both of whom argue that the heroic victim is he who retains his human dignity to the end (Remnants 92–94).
Agamben, Remnants, 13, 33–34, 39, 54, 82. While not the central concern of my discussion, I tend to agree with many of Agamben’s critics who think that he reads too literally Levi’s remark about who can testify authoritatively to the Holocaust. Levi “did not seek to invalidate the witness accounts of those who survived,” states Geoffrey Hartman in “Testimony and Authenticity,” Yale Review 90, no. 4 (October 2000), 8.
Dominick LaCapra, in History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), writes, “For Levi as survivor to say that not he but the Muselmann is the true witness is, I think, an acceptable hyperbole. For Agamben to identify with Levi and hence speak for (or in the stead of) Levi and hence for the Muselmann (as he believes Levi does) may be hyperbolic in an objectionable sense” (185).
J. M. Bernstein, in “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘after Auschwitz,’” New German Critique 33, no. 1 (Winter 2006), 31–52, thinks that Levi speaks as he does out of guilt; only this explains “the exorbitant epistemic-ethical worth ascribed to the drowned” (34).
Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the- Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 97F.
Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 10.
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–153.
See also Robert S. C. Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 39–54. Gordon sketches out a convincing Levinasian reading of parts of Survival in Auschwitz. My contribution to this approach has been to move beyond the ethics and imagery of the face, which is Gordon’s focus, to how the ethics of narrative modes and the nexus between Western philosophy and the Holocaust function in Levi’s memoir.
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© 2009 Jonathan Druker
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Druker, J. (2009). Ethics and Ontology in Auschwitz and After. In: Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622180_5
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