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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. I refer to the first anthology of Levi scholarship published in English, Rea- son and Light: Essays on Primo Levi, ed. Susan Tarrow (Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1990). 2. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stu- art Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Se questo è un uomo, rev. ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1958); Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Ray- mond 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). 3. 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 Enlighten- ment 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). 4. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. H. J. Patton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). The categorical imperative states the follow- ing: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (30). 5. Vincent P. Pecora, “Habermas, Enlightenment, and Antisemitism,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Fried- lander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 155–70; especially 163. 6. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 186. He adds: “For once the Jews were formally excluded from the body politic—on the grounds that by their nature they did not qualify for the rights of citizenship—there were no limits in principle to what steps might be initiated against them, even if in point of fact it required five or six years before the most extreme of those steps, that of genocide, was taken” (188). 136 NOTES TO PAGES 3–5 7. 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 mur- der, 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). 8. 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. 9. 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 Poli- tics of Survival (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001); Massimo Giuliani, A Centaur in Auschwitz: Reflections on Primo Levi’s Thinking (Lan- ham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). In Italian, see Massimo Dini and Stefano Jesurum, Primo Levi: Le opere e i giorni (Milano: Rizzoli, 1992); Franco Bal- dasso, Il cerchio di gesso: Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon, 2007). 10. 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). 11. 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 writ- ing 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 NOTES TO PAGES 5–8 137 includes an entire essay on Levi and the Enlightenment; see Daniela Amsal- lem, “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). 12. Joseph Farrell, “Introduction,” in Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, ed. Joseph Farrell (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), 9. 13. Farrell, “Introduction,” 9, 15. 14. Some of its confusing variety is cataloged in Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pan- theon 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 sup- ported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism; and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists” (44). 15. Richard Norman, On Humanism (London: Routledge, 2004), 20, 23, 24. 16. Robert S. C. Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17. 17. Bryan Cheyette, “Appropriating Primo Levi,” in The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71. 18. 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. 19. The later works show that Levi was an avid student of the Holocaust and of the broader questions it raised. At one point in The Drowned and the Saved, for example, he shows his acceptance of criticisms directed at the Enlighten- ment—in this case, that it is naïve about the psychology of the perpetrators of genocide (26). Nothing similar to this can be found in the first three decades of Levi’s writing after the war. 20. Cheyette, “Appropriating Primo Levi,” 82. 21. 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. 22. 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: Ein- audi, 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). 138 NOTES TO PAGES 8–11 23. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 149. 24. See Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Post- modernism 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). 25. See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interroga- tions (New York: Guilford Press, 1991). 26. 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 ‘solu- tions’ to all perceived social and political ‘problems’).” Stuart Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman (Cambridge, UK: Icon Books, 2001), 78.
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