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Levi

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on December 18, 2005 at 2:43:31 pm
 
  • __Modernity, Culture and 'the Jew'__
"The Ethical Uncertainty of Primo Levi" by Bryan Cheyette (268-281)Cheyette argues that traditional depictions of Primo Levi's depiction of his experiences in Auschwitz as scientifically disinterested ignores ambiguities inherent in all of Levi's writings. The scientific disinterestedness that is ascribed to Levi reduces the disturbing aspect of his writing by placing it within a system (of good vs. evil, of unproblematic representation, etc.), which is - at its extreme - representative of Fascism. (Cheyette makes the distinction between the "certainties of Fascism" and uncertainty in Levi's conception of chemistry as "a mess...full of mysteries," 279 [Levi quote from Periodic Table__, 60]. Think also about Arendt's "banality of evil" and Adorno's reified society as ways of getting at the same problem. In a world that is entirely certain, in which all problems are black and white [they move me up in commercial society or do not], thinking about the problems brought up by an atrocity like the Shoah becomes foreign.) The key examples for Cheyette are Levi's uncertainty about language and about memory. Levi's memories push him (involuntarily) to tell his story and to write, but he is never convinced that his language can get at what he wants to depict. He realizes (in both his early and his later writings) that he cannot "dress a man in words" (Cheyette, 275; Levi __Periodic Table 48-9), cannot - in other words - perfectly represent the people who died and thus cannot represent themselves. (We should compare this with the Gordon essay, in which Gordon cites Levi as claiming that we can and have a moral imperative to communicate. These two positions are not mutually contradictory, but the Levi quote here shows that Gordon is wrong in making a simple link between Levi and the author who claims that the there is nothing that is ineffable.) On another level, Levi has an ambiguous relationship with his memory, which he at times claims is perfect (even as he claims that memory naturally slips away - Cheyette, 273; Levi __The Drowned and the Saved__, 21), while at the same time admitting that he fails to remember certain aspects of his experience (Amery's face, attractive things about Bandi - Cheyette, 274). These two uncertainties highlight, for Cheyette, an ethical uncertainty in Levi, an uncertainty about whether everything fits into the categories "good" and "evil," that these categories too allow for a certainty that Levi eschews. Cheyette claims that Levi's uncertainty is not fully skeptical - Levi still pushes to remember and to depict his experience with language, and he does not forgive those who participated in the Shoah - but that Levi is trying to point us to something other than a complete, easy system. This ambivalence between certainty and skepticism, because it centers around questions of remembering the victims and avoiding Facsist thinking, is what Cheyette calls Levi's "ethical uncertainty" (see title). It is, in the end, characterized most by "the continual negotiation between Levi's authoritative documentary realism as an eye-witness and his profound uncertainty at narrating the 'simple and incomprehensible' stories of those that he would wish to redeem through memory" (279, notice the word 'authoritative')

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