Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Stefano Bellin
This essay explores the relationship between affect, implication, and ‘natality’, which, building... more This essay explores the relationship between affect, implication, and ‘natality’, which, building on a critical engagement with Arendt (1958), I conceptualise as the unchosen ground of our political responsibility. In what sense and to what extent are we responsible for the unchosen conditions we are born into, and for the socio-political position they ‘throw’ us into? The connection between natality and responsibility seems paradoxical, for the conditions and the position we are born into lay beyond our control. Yet this essay is not concerned with biological birth, but rather with the subject position we are ‘thrown into’ and how the latter shapes the context in which we live. Drawing on Heidegger’s concept of ‘throwness’ (1927), the essay analyses how socio-political structures frame and reproduce the givenness of our being, generating stark inequalities of power, freedom, and rights.
Taking Italy’s citizenship laws and Europe’s mobility policies as a study case, I ask: How does it feel to be part of a country or a political community whose citizenship and migration policies are profoundly discriminatory and perpetuate global injustice? How are feelings of belonging related to feelings of implication (Rothberg 2023)? In which ways and to what extent does the subject-position we are born into implicate us in the coloniality of national formations (Mellino 2012) and in the violence produced by border regimes? And how should we ‘take responsibility for’ (Young 2011; Vázquez-Arroyo 2016) the structures of power we are born into to contest the racialised production of borders and citizenship? Exploring how the randomness of birth places us in different predicaments of power, this essay investigates how diverse affective dynamics might facilitate one’s implication in the violence of the global border regime or catalyse the resistance to it.
This Special Issue gathers a range of contributions on the topic of “Literature and Global Respon... more This Special Issue gathers a range of contributions on the topic of “Literature and Global Responsibility.” By creating mutually illuminating dialogues between literary texts and theoretical frameworks, the articles included here offer substantive critical insights on the ethical and political role of literature in an age characterised by both global connections and deep disparities. The goal of the Special Issue is to analyse how literature might help us to think critically about the world and take responsibility for our compromised positions, creating the premises for meaningful interventions.
Literature Compass, 2023
This introductory essay offers a theoretical framework for discussing the relationship between co... more This introductory essay offers a theoretical framework for discussing the relationship between contemporary literature and global responsibility. After surveying recent conceptualisations of collective responsibility, the article presents the definition of global responsibility that frames the Special Issue. ‘Global’ is understood here in the double sense of worldwide and comprehensive: it draws attention to our global relations of interdependence and to the complex networks of actions and inactions that create the conditions of possibility for structural violence and injustice. Literature is a powerful tool for thinking about the challenges and questions that characterise our interconnected world, as well as for developing a sense of responsibility that transcends national and cultural boundaries. Having reflected on the ethico-political role and potential of literature, this introduction summarises the articles that constitute this Special Issue. While the five essays that follow cannot possibly address all the problems that affect our globalised world, they offer a set of concepts, narrative explorations, and hermeneutical readings that help us to reassess critically our
compromised positions, thus creating the pre-conditions for transformative interventions.
Disorienting empathy: Reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, 2022
This article explores how literature can sensitise us to our potential implication in the injusti... more This article explores how literature can sensitise us to our potential implication in the injustice and violence of the global border regime. The violence of borders today sustains a large economic and political system that produces precarity and disposability, exposes migrants and refugees to harm and exploitation, and reinforces global inequalities. While it manifests itself in direct events, policies, and actions, the violence produced by the global border regime is structural, widespread, and racially charged. Citizens of the global North are not precisely perpetrators of border violence, yet they bear a certain kind of political responsibility for the experiences of trauma, death, impoverishment, and discrimination that borders generate and institutionalise. Reading Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), I investigate how we can recognise ourselves in the position of the ‘implicated subject’ (Michael Rothberg) through a process of what I call ‘disorienting empathy’. This form of expanded and self-aware perspective-taking elicits our concern for others, but simultaneously de-centres our self, leading us to reflect critically on our subject position and on our potential indirect involvement in systemic violence. By examining Exit West's literary strategies, I argue that empathy, non-appropriative identification, and disorientation can generate a self-reflexivity about our responsibility in relation to the global border regime. Drawing on affect theory, literary theory, migration studies, and critical race theory, the article highlights contemporary fiction's capacity to represent diasporic experiences and reimagine the freedom of movement in the twenty-first century.
KEYWORDS: borders, disorientation, empathy, implication, refugees, responsibility, solidarity.
Close Encounters in War Journal, Dec 28, 2020
This article explores the connection between close encounters, PTSD, and Freud's concept of the "... more This article explores the connection between close encounters, PTSD, and Freud's concept of the "uncanny" by analysing the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980-2000) and offering a novel reading of Santiago Roncagliolo's Red April (Abril rojo, 2006). Focusing on how the novel establishes cross-referential relationships between traumatic encounters and repressed parts of our selves, my reading shows how Red April calls into question the identity position from which we tend to look at war. By eliciting what I call a "positional identification" with the narrative of war and an "ironic identification" with its main character, I argue that Red April foregrounds our implication with the structural forms of oppression that feed conflicts like that which struck Peru in the 1980s. In doing so, it reveals our compromised positions and unheimlich proximity to the violence of war.
Journal website: https://closeencountersinwar.org/issue-n-3-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-as-aftermath-of-close-encounters-in-war/
Paragraph 42.1 (2019): 54–75, 2019
This article analyses the concept of the human in Primo Levi's works, as well as his use of the a... more This article analyses the concept of the human in Primo Levi's works, as well as his use of the animal as way of characterizing the nonhuman element inside the human. To disclose the implicit assumptions and far-reaching implications of Levi's thought, the article reads his writings through the lens of Roberto Esposito's work on the category of the person and the philosophy of the impersonal. The article is divided into three parts: the first gives an overview of Esposito work on the notion of the person; the second shows how Levi's Holocaust texts deploy the dispositif of the person; and the third looks at the ‘impersonal’ aspects of Levi's writings. The conclusion discusses the tensions that arise from these counter-narratives, arguing that, far from being accidental, they suggest that being human is primarily a political and ethical issue rather than a cognitive one.
Rethinking the Human–Animal Relation: New Perspectives in Literature and Theory, 2019
Paragraph - Edinburgh University Press
Volume 42, Issue 1, March, 2019
Primo Levi and Franz Kafka. An Unheimlich Encounter, 2016
In 1983 Giulio Einaudi asked Primo Levi to translate Kafka’s Trial for the new series «Scrittori ... more In 1983 Giulio Einaudi asked Primo Levi to translate Kafka’s Trial for the new series «Scrittori tradotti da scrittori». The proposal sounded original and provocative, and Levi accepted eagerly. The translation, however, had a negative effect on him. While working on The Trial, Levi relived his Auschwitz season, revived his deepest fears, and fell back into depression: he felt as if he was himself on trial. This was partially due to a clash of literary styles as well as to two contrasting – and yet at times kindred – conceptions of language and communication. The present study addresses the following questions: were Levi and Kafka’s literary styles as opposed as Levi implies? How is Levi’s “obscure part” connected to Kafka? Why did Levi associate The Trial with his Holocaust experience and identify himself with Josef K.? What does Levi’s encounter with Kafka tell us about the shame of being human and our capacity to give an account of ourselves? By investigating Levi’s uncanny encounter with Kafka, my essay will discuss Levi’s theory of language, showing how the Levi-Kafka intersection opens up new ways of interpreting Levi’s concerns about communication, the work of the witness, moral responsibility, and shame, which coalesced into the reflections of The Drowned and the Saved.
The Wound and the Hope: Primo Levi's Troubled Relationship with Israel, 2015
How did Primo Levi come to terms with what the historian Enzo Traverso has called ‘the end of the... more How did Primo Levi come to terms with what the historian Enzo Traverso has called ‘the end of the Jewish modernity’? How did he react to the fading out of that tradition which, between the Enlightenment and the Second World War, saw the European Jews playing a central role in the critical consciousness of the Western world? What was his relationship with Zionism? Did he ever acknowledge the Nakba? To address these questions, my article analyses the different positions that Levi took on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the awkward coincidence of the publishing of Se non ora, quando? and the 1982 Lebanon War, and what his tormented and passionate relationships with Israel reveals about the Italophone Jewish experience.
Much has been written on Levi’s Jewish identity, but his complex attitude toward the question of Palestine/Israel is relatively underexplored. Starting from Levi’s writings and interviews on the subject, my essay will therefore investigate the impact that this thorny question had on the Italian Jewry. I will structure my essay as follows: first, I will give a brief account of how the changing historical circumstances, like the foundation of Israel, the Eichmann trial, and the Six-Day War, have shifted the geopolitical position of the Jewish intelligentsia (both inside and outside Italy); second, I will analyse Levi’s struggle to find a position within this shifting scenario; finally, I will study how Levi’s public interventions fed back into Italian Jewish community.
in Traza (Academic Journal of the University of La Salle, Bogota, Colombia), 2011
Ho do visually impaired people produce a map? What does spatial invisibility mean? Can blindness ... more Ho do visually impaired people produce a map? What does spatial invisibility mean? Can blindness suggest a new way to ‘look’ and map the invisible? Starting from an original concept of ‘mapping’, intended as a creative investigation and a practice of space, this article (originally written for an MA course) addresses the question of vision and (in)visibility in a political and artistic milieu. The first part is a philosophical discussion of the results of some interviews conducted at the Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. By researching this particular approach to the human habitat, I try to depict the ‘uncanny’ resources that constitute a ‘vision beyond sight’. The second part discusses an example of the social effects of our metaphorical ‘blindness’. Through the study of the indigenous uprising in the Indian Red Corridor, the article demonstrates the human and environmental costs of the ‘production of disappearance’. The production of space, indeed, entails a struggle around geopolitical, economical, racial and sexual thresholds of vision. In the conclusion of this short essay I bring together these field analyses to propose a new kind of vision: a ‘critical eye’ able to overcome the ‘production of blindness’.
Book Chapters by Stefano Bellin
Israele, 2023
This chapter addresses Primo Levi's troubled relationship with Israel. It was published in the fo... more This chapter addresses Primo Levi's troubled relationship with Israel. It was published in the following volume:
Primo Levi, ed. by Alberto Cavaglion (Carocci, 2023)
The collection contains 23 chapters on different aspects and questions related to Primo Levi’s work. You can find more information and the Table of Contents on the publisher’s website: https://www.carocci.it/prodotto/primo-levi
Letteratura e Potere/Poteri Atti del XXIV Congresso dell’ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti), 2023
In
Letteratura e Potere/Poteri
Atti del XXIV Congresso dell’ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti)
... more In
Letteratura e Potere/Poteri
Atti del XXIV Congresso dell’ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti)
Catania, 23-25 settembre 2021
a cura di Andrea Manganaro, Giuseppe Traina, Carmelo Tramontana
Roma, Adi editore 2023
Primo Levi (1919-2019): memoria y escritura, 2022
in Primo Levi (1919-2019): memoria y escritura, ed. by Elisa Martínez Garrido et al. (Madrid: Gui... more in Primo Levi (1919-2019): memoria y escritura, ed. by Elisa Martínez Garrido et al. (Madrid: Guillermo Escolar, 2022), pp. 17-32.
Innesti: Primo Levi e i libri altrui, a cura di Gianluca Cinelli e Robert S. C. Gordon (Peter Lang), 2020
Il capitolo consiste in un'analisi della funzione svolta da Kafka nello sviluppo dell'identità le... more Il capitolo consiste in un'analisi della funzione svolta da Kafka nello sviluppo dell'identità leviana e sul possibile ruolo del "Processo" nell'esame interiore che struttura e attraversa "I sommersi e i salvati".
«Scolpitele nel vostro cuore». Primo Levi a cento anni dalla sua nascita, a cura di Maria Antonietta Garullo, Paolo Rigo e Laura Toppan, Roma, Ensemble, 2020
In una intervista rilasciata nel maggio del 1983, Primo Levi affermò che «benché parli di cose te... more In una intervista rilasciata nel maggio del 1983, Primo Levi affermò che «benché parli di cose terribili, [Se questo è un uomo] è un libro ottimista e sereno, in cui si respira un cammino verso l’alto, nell’ultimo capitolo soprattutto. Sembrava assurdo pensare che dal fondo, dalla fossa, dal Lager non dovesse nascere un mondo migliore. Io penso tutt’altro oggi. Penso che dal Lager non possa nascere che il Lager, che non possa nascere che male da quell’esperienza» (Opere, III: 395). Questa dichiarazione è sintomatica di una tendenza pessimistica dell’ultimo Levi, che si accentua a partire dagli anni Ottanta. Possiamo trovare indizi di tale tendenza in articoli come Il brutto potere (Opere, II: 1552-1555), in alcune interviste e racconti brevi, e nei Sommersi e salvati. Il “pensiero tragico” di Levi è come un fiume carsico che affiora per poi ritornare sottoterra, all’ombra del lucido razionalismo che caratterizza lo scrittore torinese. Ma quali sono le radici di tale visione tragica dell’esistenza? Quali idee la definiscono? Che rapporto c’è tra il Levi “tragico” e il Levi razionalista? È giusto ridurre il pensiero tragico a un semplice pessimismo? E come possiamo interpretare la visione “tragica” dell’esistenza che emerge da alcuni passaggi dell’ultimo Levi?
Questo capitolo si propone di analizzare la corrente tragica nell’opera di Levi e di offrirne un’interpretazione filosofica. La via proposta è quella di studiare il rapporto tra Levi e Giobbe e tra Levi e Leopardi seguendo il tema della massima “meglio non essere mai nati”. Per interpretare il significato di tale massima si farà ricorso al lavoro del filosofo Umberto Curi, Meglio non essere nati. La condizione umana tra Eschilo e Nietzsche (Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). Incrociare l’opera di Levi con questo lavoro ci permette di fare luce su alcuni aspetti meno conosciuti del pensiero di Levi e di approfondire la sua concezione dell’esistenza.
(book chapter) in Attraversamenti culturali, ed. by Simona Wright and Fulvio Santo Orsitto (Florence: Cesati, 2017)., 2017
In 1983 Giulio Einaudi asked Primo Levi to translate Kafka’s Trial for the new series ‘Writers Tr... more In 1983 Giulio Einaudi asked Primo Levi to translate Kafka’s Trial for the new series ‘Writers Translated by Writers.’ The proposal sounded original and provocative, and Levi accepted eagerly. The translation, however, had a negative effect on him. While working on The Trial, Levi relieved his Auschwitz season, revived his deepest fears, and fell back into depression: he felt as if he was himself on trial. As he wrote in the Translator’s Note, ‘Reading The Trial, a book filled with misery and poetry, leaves us changed – sadder and more aware. So this is it, this is the destiny of mankind: we can be persecuted and punished for an unknown crime that we did not commit, that “the court” will never disclose to us. Yet we can be ashamed of that crime until death and perhaps even beyond. Now, translating is more than reading, and I emerged from this translation as if from an illness.’
Why did Levi associate The Trial with his Holocaust experience? Why did he identify himself with Josef K.? Why did he ‘feel assaulted’ by Kafka? What does Levi’s encounter with Kafka tell us about the shame of being human and about our capacity to ‘give an account of ourselves’? How did this encounter feed into the reflections of The Drowned and the Saved? By addressing these questions, my essay aims to fill a partial gap in the existing scholarship on Levi, namely how Levi’s (re)encounter with Kafka, which started with a commissioned translation, progressively acquired more significance, becoming an important factor in Levi’s late ruminations on the Holocaust, and a vantage point for interpreting and elaborating his thoughts on the shame of being human. The studies published so far by Marco Belpoliti, Lisa Insana, Antonio Castore, Arianna Marelli, and others already move in this direction. Still, there is space for more theoretical and far-reaching explorations of the Levi-Kafka pairing. In light of this, my essay will draw from the insights of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Salvatore Satta, Giorgio Agamben, and Massimo Cacciari to reinterpret Leviʼs the issue of the “trial” in the broader context of Leviʼs work. As I shall argue, reading Levi’s translation as a trial that reenacts the trauma of his own arrest helps us to understand why he saw K.’s case as a metaphor of the human condition, within and beyond Auschwitz.
(book chapter) in Attraversamenti culturali, ed. by Simona Wright and Fulvio Santo Orsitto (Florence: Cesati, 2016), 2016
My paper focuses on the question of the ‘shame or being a human’ in Primo Levi’s Holocaust texts.... more My paper focuses on the question of the ‘shame or being a human’ in Primo Levi’s Holocaust texts.
The shame of being human arises from the survivor’s feeling of having been diminished as a human being, from the awareness of having lived for months and years at a level that is ‘inhuman’ or ‘non-human’. This feeling is ‘comparative’, for it measures two different conditions of the subject against one another. The shame of being human involves indeed an ideal standard, a notion of what is ‘properly human’, and, at the same time, something that calls into question this ‘proper’. Borrowing Derrida’s terminology, we could say that the person who feels this type of shame bears within herself the ‘trace’ of her previous status and beliefs, which she compares to her new degraded condition. Shame hinges indeed on the structure of ‘iterability’, on the repetition-as-difference that constitutes the subject as a ‘text’. This means that the person feeling shame is never fully present in herself. She is always ‘out of joint’, divided within herself, and haunted by the spectre of what she takes to be her ideal self. Thus, by ‘intersecting’ Levi with Derrida, Curi and other philosophers, my paper aims to show how his account of shame operates a deconstruction of any essentialist conception of the human subject. My argument is indeed that in Levi’s testimony there are significant elements – most importantly the ‘If’ of If This is a Man – that overturn the simplistic binary opposition between the human and the inhuman.
(book chapter) in Oltre Cartesio. Percorsi di cultura francese moderna, ed. by Luca M. Possati and Ivan Pozzoni (Gaeta: DeComporre, 2014), pp. 143-154. , 2014
(book chapter) in Schegge di filosofia moderna XIV, ed. by Ivan Pozzoni (Gaeta: DeComporre, 2014), pp. 87-94., 2014
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Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Stefano Bellin
Taking Italy’s citizenship laws and Europe’s mobility policies as a study case, I ask: How does it feel to be part of a country or a political community whose citizenship and migration policies are profoundly discriminatory and perpetuate global injustice? How are feelings of belonging related to feelings of implication (Rothberg 2023)? In which ways and to what extent does the subject-position we are born into implicate us in the coloniality of national formations (Mellino 2012) and in the violence produced by border regimes? And how should we ‘take responsibility for’ (Young 2011; Vázquez-Arroyo 2016) the structures of power we are born into to contest the racialised production of borders and citizenship? Exploring how the randomness of birth places us in different predicaments of power, this essay investigates how diverse affective dynamics might facilitate one’s implication in the violence of the global border regime or catalyse the resistance to it.
compromised positions, thus creating the pre-conditions for transformative interventions.
KEYWORDS: borders, disorientation, empathy, implication, refugees, responsibility, solidarity.
Journal website: https://closeencountersinwar.org/issue-n-3-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-as-aftermath-of-close-encounters-in-war/
Much has been written on Levi’s Jewish identity, but his complex attitude toward the question of Palestine/Israel is relatively underexplored. Starting from Levi’s writings and interviews on the subject, my essay will therefore investigate the impact that this thorny question had on the Italian Jewry. I will structure my essay as follows: first, I will give a brief account of how the changing historical circumstances, like the foundation of Israel, the Eichmann trial, and the Six-Day War, have shifted the geopolitical position of the Jewish intelligentsia (both inside and outside Italy); second, I will analyse Levi’s struggle to find a position within this shifting scenario; finally, I will study how Levi’s public interventions fed back into Italian Jewish community.
Book Chapters by Stefano Bellin
Primo Levi, ed. by Alberto Cavaglion (Carocci, 2023)
The collection contains 23 chapters on different aspects and questions related to Primo Levi’s work. You can find more information and the Table of Contents on the publisher’s website: https://www.carocci.it/prodotto/primo-levi
Letteratura e Potere/Poteri
Atti del XXIV Congresso dell’ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti)
Catania, 23-25 settembre 2021
a cura di Andrea Manganaro, Giuseppe Traina, Carmelo Tramontana
Roma, Adi editore 2023
Questo capitolo si propone di analizzare la corrente tragica nell’opera di Levi e di offrirne un’interpretazione filosofica. La via proposta è quella di studiare il rapporto tra Levi e Giobbe e tra Levi e Leopardi seguendo il tema della massima “meglio non essere mai nati”. Per interpretare il significato di tale massima si farà ricorso al lavoro del filosofo Umberto Curi, Meglio non essere nati. La condizione umana tra Eschilo e Nietzsche (Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). Incrociare l’opera di Levi con questo lavoro ci permette di fare luce su alcuni aspetti meno conosciuti del pensiero di Levi e di approfondire la sua concezione dell’esistenza.
Why did Levi associate The Trial with his Holocaust experience? Why did he identify himself with Josef K.? Why did he ‘feel assaulted’ by Kafka? What does Levi’s encounter with Kafka tell us about the shame of being human and about our capacity to ‘give an account of ourselves’? How did this encounter feed into the reflections of The Drowned and the Saved? By addressing these questions, my essay aims to fill a partial gap in the existing scholarship on Levi, namely how Levi’s (re)encounter with Kafka, which started with a commissioned translation, progressively acquired more significance, becoming an important factor in Levi’s late ruminations on the Holocaust, and a vantage point for interpreting and elaborating his thoughts on the shame of being human. The studies published so far by Marco Belpoliti, Lisa Insana, Antonio Castore, Arianna Marelli, and others already move in this direction. Still, there is space for more theoretical and far-reaching explorations of the Levi-Kafka pairing. In light of this, my essay will draw from the insights of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Salvatore Satta, Giorgio Agamben, and Massimo Cacciari to reinterpret Leviʼs the issue of the “trial” in the broader context of Leviʼs work. As I shall argue, reading Levi’s translation as a trial that reenacts the trauma of his own arrest helps us to understand why he saw K.’s case as a metaphor of the human condition, within and beyond Auschwitz.
The shame of being human arises from the survivor’s feeling of having been diminished as a human being, from the awareness of having lived for months and years at a level that is ‘inhuman’ or ‘non-human’. This feeling is ‘comparative’, for it measures two different conditions of the subject against one another. The shame of being human involves indeed an ideal standard, a notion of what is ‘properly human’, and, at the same time, something that calls into question this ‘proper’. Borrowing Derrida’s terminology, we could say that the person who feels this type of shame bears within herself the ‘trace’ of her previous status and beliefs, which she compares to her new degraded condition. Shame hinges indeed on the structure of ‘iterability’, on the repetition-as-difference that constitutes the subject as a ‘text’. This means that the person feeling shame is never fully present in herself. She is always ‘out of joint’, divided within herself, and haunted by the spectre of what she takes to be her ideal self. Thus, by ‘intersecting’ Levi with Derrida, Curi and other philosophers, my paper aims to show how his account of shame operates a deconstruction of any essentialist conception of the human subject. My argument is indeed that in Levi’s testimony there are significant elements – most importantly the ‘If’ of If This is a Man – that overturn the simplistic binary opposition between the human and the inhuman.
Taking Italy’s citizenship laws and Europe’s mobility policies as a study case, I ask: How does it feel to be part of a country or a political community whose citizenship and migration policies are profoundly discriminatory and perpetuate global injustice? How are feelings of belonging related to feelings of implication (Rothberg 2023)? In which ways and to what extent does the subject-position we are born into implicate us in the coloniality of national formations (Mellino 2012) and in the violence produced by border regimes? And how should we ‘take responsibility for’ (Young 2011; Vázquez-Arroyo 2016) the structures of power we are born into to contest the racialised production of borders and citizenship? Exploring how the randomness of birth places us in different predicaments of power, this essay investigates how diverse affective dynamics might facilitate one’s implication in the violence of the global border regime or catalyse the resistance to it.
compromised positions, thus creating the pre-conditions for transformative interventions.
KEYWORDS: borders, disorientation, empathy, implication, refugees, responsibility, solidarity.
Journal website: https://closeencountersinwar.org/issue-n-3-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-as-aftermath-of-close-encounters-in-war/
Much has been written on Levi’s Jewish identity, but his complex attitude toward the question of Palestine/Israel is relatively underexplored. Starting from Levi’s writings and interviews on the subject, my essay will therefore investigate the impact that this thorny question had on the Italian Jewry. I will structure my essay as follows: first, I will give a brief account of how the changing historical circumstances, like the foundation of Israel, the Eichmann trial, and the Six-Day War, have shifted the geopolitical position of the Jewish intelligentsia (both inside and outside Italy); second, I will analyse Levi’s struggle to find a position within this shifting scenario; finally, I will study how Levi’s public interventions fed back into Italian Jewish community.
Primo Levi, ed. by Alberto Cavaglion (Carocci, 2023)
The collection contains 23 chapters on different aspects and questions related to Primo Levi’s work. You can find more information and the Table of Contents on the publisher’s website: https://www.carocci.it/prodotto/primo-levi
Letteratura e Potere/Poteri
Atti del XXIV Congresso dell’ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti)
Catania, 23-25 settembre 2021
a cura di Andrea Manganaro, Giuseppe Traina, Carmelo Tramontana
Roma, Adi editore 2023
Questo capitolo si propone di analizzare la corrente tragica nell’opera di Levi e di offrirne un’interpretazione filosofica. La via proposta è quella di studiare il rapporto tra Levi e Giobbe e tra Levi e Leopardi seguendo il tema della massima “meglio non essere mai nati”. Per interpretare il significato di tale massima si farà ricorso al lavoro del filosofo Umberto Curi, Meglio non essere nati. La condizione umana tra Eschilo e Nietzsche (Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). Incrociare l’opera di Levi con questo lavoro ci permette di fare luce su alcuni aspetti meno conosciuti del pensiero di Levi e di approfondire la sua concezione dell’esistenza.
Why did Levi associate The Trial with his Holocaust experience? Why did he identify himself with Josef K.? Why did he ‘feel assaulted’ by Kafka? What does Levi’s encounter with Kafka tell us about the shame of being human and about our capacity to ‘give an account of ourselves’? How did this encounter feed into the reflections of The Drowned and the Saved? By addressing these questions, my essay aims to fill a partial gap in the existing scholarship on Levi, namely how Levi’s (re)encounter with Kafka, which started with a commissioned translation, progressively acquired more significance, becoming an important factor in Levi’s late ruminations on the Holocaust, and a vantage point for interpreting and elaborating his thoughts on the shame of being human. The studies published so far by Marco Belpoliti, Lisa Insana, Antonio Castore, Arianna Marelli, and others already move in this direction. Still, there is space for more theoretical and far-reaching explorations of the Levi-Kafka pairing. In light of this, my essay will draw from the insights of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Salvatore Satta, Giorgio Agamben, and Massimo Cacciari to reinterpret Leviʼs the issue of the “trial” in the broader context of Leviʼs work. As I shall argue, reading Levi’s translation as a trial that reenacts the trauma of his own arrest helps us to understand why he saw K.’s case as a metaphor of the human condition, within and beyond Auschwitz.
The shame of being human arises from the survivor’s feeling of having been diminished as a human being, from the awareness of having lived for months and years at a level that is ‘inhuman’ or ‘non-human’. This feeling is ‘comparative’, for it measures two different conditions of the subject against one another. The shame of being human involves indeed an ideal standard, a notion of what is ‘properly human’, and, at the same time, something that calls into question this ‘proper’. Borrowing Derrida’s terminology, we could say that the person who feels this type of shame bears within herself the ‘trace’ of her previous status and beliefs, which she compares to her new degraded condition. Shame hinges indeed on the structure of ‘iterability’, on the repetition-as-difference that constitutes the subject as a ‘text’. This means that the person feeling shame is never fully present in herself. She is always ‘out of joint’, divided within herself, and haunted by the spectre of what she takes to be her ideal self. Thus, by ‘intersecting’ Levi with Derrida, Curi and other philosophers, my paper aims to show how his account of shame operates a deconstruction of any essentialist conception of the human subject. My argument is indeed that in Levi’s testimony there are significant elements – most importantly the ‘If’ of If This is a Man – that overturn the simplistic binary opposition between the human and the inhuman.
I will start by analysing the cultural and political consequences of what the historian Enzo Traverso has called the ‘conservative turn’ that followed the ‘end of the Jewish modernity’. This historical transition has profoundly influenced the ideological shifts and geopolitical strategies of the West, thereby engendering new forms of anti-Semitisms and a widespread ‘Islamophobia’. These racialised discourses are strictly connected to the question of Palestine/Israel, to 9/11 and its aftermath, and to the post-Eichmann trial gradual rise of Holocaust Studies and politics of memory. To contrast these discourses my paper will ask: what kind of Jewish and Palestinian ideas, traditions, and authors harbour a potential for constructing models of coexistence? What kind of concepts should we re-discover and elaborate in order to foster self-criticism, open debate, and transversal recognition on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict? And what kind of connections can we draw in order to deconstruct and bridge over the very idea of the ‘two sides’?
These questions will be addressed by investigating two different works: Hannah Arendt’s The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition (1944) and Edward Said’s lesser known articles on contrapuntal music. Arendt’s essay on the ‘pariah Judaism’, on the stateless, ‘outsider’ minorities excluded from any form of citizenship, offer us a very interesting conceptual basis for discussing the situation of the Palestinian people confined to the Gaza strip. Said’s brilliant exploration of the relationships between musical canons, literature and society, in Music at its Limits and Parallels and Paradoxes (co-written with the Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim), offer us a way of reading the numerous voices that compose the question of Palestine/Israel. My argument is indeed that Arendt’s concept of ‘pariah’ and Said’s theory of contrapuntal reading will provide us a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is uncritically presented to us as a commodified, packaged, irreversible, and unsolvable ‘clash of civilisations’.
Abstract:
Several scholars have highlighted Italy's difficulty in coming to terms with its recent violent past and take responsibility for its national crimes. Italy's public memory is a particularly fertile ground for studying 'multidirectional forgetting'. This is due to several factors, among which we could include the following: Italy's national formation developed almost in parallel with its colonial expansion; the colonization of overseas territories was preceded by the 'internal colonization' of the South; Fascism appeared for the first time in Italy; racial regulations in the colonies anticipated the Racial Laws of 1938; and in WW2 Italy was first the main ally of Nazi Germany and then one of its enemies, first an occupying power and later an occupied, fractured country.
This paper analyzes some aspects of Italy's multidirectional forgetting through the interviews and writings of Primo Levi, one of its most influential memory agents. I highlight a tension that characterizes Levi's memory narratives: on the one hand, a subtle tendency to partially subscribe to the myth of the 'good Italian' (Del Boca, 2005) and a faltering postcolonial consciousness; on the other hand, an attention to the protean transformations of fascism and a willingness to project his Auschwitz experience onto the present, tracing careful parallels (and distinctions) between the structures of power that led to the Lager and contemporary forms of violence and injustice. By examining this tension, I discuss both the critical potential and the limitations of Levi's 'ethical memory' (Gordon, 2001) and 'mnemonic solidarity' (Mihai, 2022).
Literature is particularly apt for studying the entanglements of responsibility, for it exposes how individual agents and assemblages of forces influence the conduct of other agents, determining specific situations and processes. Stories are a way of bearing witness, of reckoning with one’s past, of imagining different situations and identities, and of engaging with otherness in its different forms. In doing so, they illuminate both the conceptual and affective dimensions of global responsibility. By ‘global responsibility’ I understand a responsibility that: 1) is concerned about ‘worldly things’ (matters of concern for subjects across the globe that are both common and contentious); 2) takes seriously the complex interactions between human, animal, material, and technological bodies; 3) considers the ‘whole’ (be it a society or the globe) as more than the sum of discrete individual agents, events or processes; 4) foregrounds how we are implicated in the condition of distant and invisible others. Yet the ‘global’ as a meta-geographical category is also a contested notion (Lewis & Wigen, 1997; Krishnan, 2007; Shankar, 2016; Mufti, 2018), for it runs the risk of flattening local realities, complex relations, and uneven positionalities. By reflecting on how literature might help us to think and feel in global terms, as well as on the challenges and risks of such a project, this paper will introduce the questions that will be explored and discussed in the rest of the seminar.
The story springs from the accidental encounter of the son of a Republican victim with one of the murderers of his father, seventy years after the events. But the story is not told from a sectarian perspective. The omniscient narrator disappears, leaving the space to a plurality of points of view, one for each character of the novel. The composition of fragments that thus emerges foregrounds the polyhedric and dialogical nature of memory, as well as the different positionalities of victims, perpetrators, implicated subjects, perpetuators, and the ‘guardians of memory’ (Pisanty, 2020). Trapiello uses this literary technique to address questions of implication and responsibility, the uses and abuses of memory, and the relationship between history and fiction. Most importantly, the novel brings to the fore the grey zone that cuts across – in different ways – the Republican and Falangist blocs, as well as the ‘third Spain’, that of the innocents. Starting from Trapiello’s novel, I will discuss the complex relationship between history and memory (Flores, 2020) and explore both the risks and benefits of cultural representations that emphasise the multiperspectivity of memory. The leading question will be: How can literature foster practices of ‘mnemonic care’ (Mihai, 2022) that attend to both the heterogeneity of perspectives and the need for historical truth and political responsibility?
Online Summer School, 23-26 July 2021
https://primolevisummersch.wixsite.com/website
For Cacciari, we always struggle to determine the temporal and spatial limits of Europe for, rather than being a stable reality, Europe is a task, a mission always inflected in the future tense. The core principles of the so-called European Constitution seem to confirm this radical indeterminacy: free competition, anti-protectionism, and stability are the ideological pillars on which the European Community is structured. Yet, even this decision betrays Europe’s lack of a strong political identity: in the time of crisis and epochal change that has followed the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe has decided that it ‘would prefer not to’ decide.
To reinvent a politics beyond the state Cacciari argues in favour of a federalist organisation of Europe. By federalism he means a system ‘based on the synergy among not necessarily weak sovereignties (all conceived as original and not as by-products of others), though still responsible and competent across well-defined fields of interest and expertise’ (Europe and Empire, 41). An authentic federalism would reconfigure the old Continent as ‘a network of distinct individualities, united precisely by what appears to distinguish them most, given to dialogue and to listening, unable to know themselves without reflecting on what is other from them’ (43).
In my paper I discuss the theoretical foundations of Cacciari’s idea of Europe, how he bridges between philosophy and political praxis, and the challenges and potentialities of his federalized, dialogical, and ‘archipelagal’ conception of Europe.
To discuss these questions, this paper analyses the way in which Andrés Trapiello’s "Ayer no más" represents two types of 'grey zone': the political-moral and the epistemic.
In the second part of the paper I briefly discuss Hannah Arendt's and Michel Foucalt's reinterpretation of the figure of Socrates to explore ways of overcoming the friend-enemy dichotomy.
Poem: https://causticfrolic.org/issues/di-dove-sei-dove-vai/
Full digital release: https://causticfrolic.org/current-issue/
L’opera di Primo Levi presenta un caso straordinariamente ricco e articolato di intertestualità. Lettore curioso, onnivoro, asistematico, Levi esplorò molteplici campi del sapere – letterari, scientifici, storici, ecc. – navigando tra libri e riviste specializzate e di divulgazione, per motivi di ricerca o di puro divertimento, spesso accostandosi alle culture straniere in lingua originale, mosso da una curiosità eclettica e dal desiderio intenso di conoscere e di comprendere. Già scandagliata in parte da Levi stesso nella sua antologia La ricerca delle radici (1981), la biblioteca di Levi rimane comunque tutta da scoprire. Questo volume intende tracciare i lineamenti di una mappa critica degli innesti, intertesti e trapianti che collegano l’opera leviana ai libri altrui, mettendola a confronto con ventuno autori, in una galleria «poliglotta e polivalente» che include classici come Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Baudelaire e Carroll, autori di letteratura moderna come Kafka, Mann e Calvino, e scienziati come Galileo, Darwin, Heisenberg e Lorenz.
Bringing together literary and cultural studies, art and film studies, critical race theory, environmental humanities, and philosophy, this international conference will explore how different cultural texts might facilitate our critical and political engagement with forms of violence and injustice that are global in nature and scope. Drawing connections between the concepts and the practices of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’, the conference will discuss how different natural, social, and cultural forces shape the habitability of different environments on Earth, as well as our individual and collective responsibility for making the world not just habitable but also compatible with the flourishing of different beings.
Website: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
This episode belongs to UCL Institute of Advanced Studies series ‘Concepts for the New Normal’. The idea of these series is to bring together colleagues to explore a key concept of our times; offering a variety of perspectives from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, on the ideas that are shaping our lives. Today’s concept is ‘implication’.
How might we be implicated in structural problems like racism, the decline of democracy, social discrimination, modern slavery, and sexual violence? What are the background conditions that allow structural violence and injustice to take place? When and how does implication become significant? And how can we transform our implicated positions into collective solidarity work?
By exploring the issue of implication in different contexts, the speakers in this podcast will address some of these questions. I am aware that there are many different forms and degrees of implication. This podcast does not aim to be comprehensive, but rather to open a conversation and invite all listeners to reflect on how they might be implicated in large-scale structures of violence and injustice.
Speakers: Professor Michael Rothberg (UCLA), Dr Brian Klaas (UCL), Dr Jennifer Ferng (IAS / University of Sidney), Dr Maya Goodfellow (University of Sheffield) and Professor Alexis Shotwell (Carleton University).
Music by Fuubutsishi, and Fingerspit.
Artwork: Greet Van Autgaerden, Excursie #2 (2017) | 200 x 300 cm | oil on canvas
Sound effects are by the BBC Sound Archive
Producer and Host: Dr Stefano Bellin (IAS/ University of Warwick)
Co-Producer: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
Editor: Patricia Mascarell Llombart
Executive Producer and Host: Professor Nicola Miller (IAS Director)
The Jewish-Italian Holocaust survivor, writer, and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) is arguably one of the most influential European intellectuals of the 20th century. My talk aims to challenge the stereotypical image of Levi as a purely rational and calm writer, advocate of clichéd versions of Enlightenment and humanism, and to show that Levi has much to offer to contemporary debates on ethics, posthumanism, and human-animal studies. To do so I will read his testimonial texts through Roberto Esposito’s analysis of the category of the person. Although Levi used the term ‘person’ sparingly, preferring the false universal ‘man’, I will argue that in If This is a Man and in all his subsequent reflections on the Holocaust we can trace a tendency to react to Nazi violence by reclaiming and reaffirming the sort of excess, of a spiritual or moral character, that defines the notion of personhood. However, alongside narratives that present a Cartesian split between the thinking self and the material body, Levi’s work also contains narratives that celebrate the body as a valuable instrument of knowledge and recognize the complex interaction between the thinking, sentient, and social ‘parts’ of our self. Levi’s fictional works and some of his articles challenge traditional human-centered ontologies, question and mock the normative assumptions that shape our intersubjective concept of the human, and explore our own animality as well as our relationships with other animals and the environment. These narratives run counter to the ‘personalism’ that prevails in his testimonial accounts, effectively deconstructing the conceptual apparatus that divides the human in two parts. Following Esposito, I define these narratives as ‘impersonal’, that is to say, as practices that, by reconnecting the personal part of the human with its biological layer, try to think the human as a complex and multiple unit, thus recasting what many see as noble and worthy in the term person in a non-discriminatory framework. Taking stock of the tensions between the ‘personalist’ and ‘impersonal’ aspects of Levi’s work, I will argue that that we should not see these tensions as negative contradictions or as evidence of conceptual inconsistency, but instead as negotiations that are constitutive of Levi’s ethics. The latter is based on a ‘practice’ that conceives the human as something that is ‘enacted’ as a claim and a commitment that acknowledges the singularity of each.
Bringing together literary and cultural studies, art and film studies, critical race theory, environmental humanities, and philosophy, this international conference will explore how different cultural texts might facilitate our critical and political engagement with forms of violence and injustice that are global in nature and scope. Drawing connections between the concepts and the practices of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’, the conference will discuss how different natural, social, and cultural forces shape the habitability of different environments on Earth, as well as our individual and collective responsibility for making the world not just habitable but also compatible with the flourishing of different beings.
The key questions that this conference seeks to address are:
How can literature, film, and other forms of art help us to think through the notions of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’?
What makes the Earth habitable, and how does human culture, action and neglect affect that habitability?
To what extent and in what sense are we responsible for making the Earth a place where different forms of human and nonhuman life can live and thrive?
What are the conditions for a good life and how are these conditions represented in mass culture?
How and to what extent can cultural work challenge political and social structures of oppression?
How can different cultural texts and artistic media develop our political imagination and sense of responsibility?
How does the past influence habitability and life conditions in the present?
How do ongoing patterns of violence, injustice, and accumulation affect habitability and life’s capacity to flourish?
What does it take for life to survive and flourish?
This international conference welcomes scholars across the arts & humanities working in all geographical areas and theoretical frameworks, and encourages proposals that take an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach.
Suggested topics include (but are not restricted to):
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the question global responsibility
Critical perspectives on what makes an environment habitable sociologically, culturally, and ecologically
Intersectional analyses of ‘global responsibility’ and ‘habitability’
How the global racial empire affects ‘habitability’ and ‘global responsibility’
Cultural texts that address forms or patterns of injustice that are global in nature and scope
Cultural work, differentiated solidarity, and the challenge of ‘elite capture’ (Táíwò 2022)
Literature, film, art, philosophy and the struggle of ‘remaking the world’ (Getachew 2019)