Abstract
Primo Levi stresses and even exaggerates the importance of hybridity in his works and in his authorial persona.1 He tells his readers more than once that he was both an Italian and a Jew, both a chemist and a man of letters who was formed intellectually by scientific texts and humanistic ones, too. Examples of both kinds of writing share the pages of The Search for Roots, his personal anthology of favorite passages by favorite authors.2 Thinly veiled as the narrator of The Monkey’s Wrench, Levi describes himself as a sort of Tiresias, the male seer who, according to Greek mythology, also lived many years as a female. Like Tiresias, Levi had experienced the world from opposite sides, in his case, as both a chemist and a writer.3 However, he thought the split between them was only provisional and not essential. Indeed, in an effort that strikes me as more nostalgic than forward-thinking, Levi frequently hoped to reconnect the so-called two cultures, the sciences and the arts, to enable a return to a time when knowledge formed a homogenous whole, when words corresponded completely with the things that they named, and, implicitly, to a time before the Holocaust shattered our world.4
My chemical trade in its primordial form, the Scheidekunst, [is] precisely the art of separating metal from gangue.
—Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (137)
What in fact is [state] racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out groups that exist within a population.
—Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” (254–55)
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Notes
Of Levi’s short story published in the early 1960s, “Quaestio de Centauris” (Opere I 505–16), Ian Thomson writes: “This equine whimsy marks the beginning of an enduring, even obsessive attempt on Levi’s part to present himself as two halves or twin poles. Levi was not the only Italian literary figure engaged in two careers, but he alone tried to create a grand personal mythology out of this cloven state.” Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 298.
Primo Levi, The Search for Roots, trans. Peter Forbes (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002).
“I really did feel a bit like Tiresias … being a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling, on the contrary, a writer’s blood in my veins, I felt as if I had two souls in my body, and that is too many.” Primo Levi, The Monkey’s Wrench, trans. William Weaver (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 52.
Primo Levi, Other People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1989), 10.
As an example of scholarship claiming that hybridity is a key aspect of Levi’s oeuvre, see Jonathan Wilson, “Primo Levi’s Hybrid Texts,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 48 (Winter 1999): 67–72,
and also Natasha V. Chang, “Chemical Contaminations: Allegory and Alterity in Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico,” Italica 83, no. 3–4 (Fall and Winter 2006): 543–62.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1984).
See, for example, the 1938 “Manifesto of the Racial Scientists,” a document produced by a group of young scientists serving as the government’s mouthpiece. “The Jews represent the only population that has never assimilated in Italy because they are constituted from non-European social elements, absolutely different from the elements from which Italians originated.” Cited in Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 28.
Without employing the theoretical framework I adopt here, other scholarship has discussed how Levi’s texts navigate, often unwittingly, the gap between the ideals of science and its actual history as a tool for oppression. See, for example, Nancy Harrowitz, “From Mt. Sinai to the Holocaust: Primo Levi and the Crisis of Science in The Periodic Table,” in Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections, ed. Alan Rosen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 19–39.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 26.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), 42. Best and Kellner admirably clarify the three principle binaries that fracture Man, as discussed in chapter 9 of The Order of Things, and how humanism tries to paper them over. “Foucault describes how modern philosophy constructs ‘Man’—both object and subject of knowledge—within a series of unstable ‘doublets’: the cogito/unthought doublet whereby Man is determined by external forces yet aware of this determination and able to free himself from it; the retreat-and-return-of-theorigin doublet whereby history precedes Man but is the phenomenological source from which history unfolds; and the transcendental/empirical doublet whereby Man constitutes and is constituted by the external world, finding secure foundations for knowledge through a priori categories (Kant) … In each of these doublets, humanist thought attempts to recuperate the primacy and autonomy of the thinking subject and master all that is other to it” (42).
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 181.
Michele Sarfatti, La Shoah in Italia: La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 134.
For Foucault, “the entry of medicine, psychiatry, and some social sciences into legal deliberations in the nineteenth century led … [to] an increasing appeal to statistical measures and judgments about what is normal and what is not in a given population rather than adherence to absolute measures of right and wrong [i.e., the Law].” Paul Rabinow, “Introduction,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Pantheon: New York, 1984), 21.
Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di un antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005).
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), 256.
Primo Levi, Dialogo, ed. Tullio Regge, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), xv.
See also Elizabeth Scheiber, “The Failure of Memory and Literature in Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico,” MLN: Modern Language Notes 121 (2006): 225–39. Scheiber takes Levi’s remark in “Vanadium” about the instability of varnish to refer by analogy to the instability of memory, especially Levi’s traumatic memories of Holocaust (230).
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Random House, 1977), 217.
J. M. Bernstein, “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘after Auschwitz,’” New German Critique 97, Vol. 33, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 40.
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© 2009 Jonathan Druker
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Druker, J. (2009). The Art of Separation from Chemistry to Racial Science. In: Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622180_7
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