Primo Levi

Summary

Dominique Pagani reads Primo Levi, above all *If This Is a Man*, as testimony about the gaze that does not recognise the other. In the session devoted to Proust, he starts from the scene where Doctor Pannwitz examines Levi, a chemist interned at Auschwitz, and makes it the illustration of the opposite of recognition. This gaze that recognises nothing is the starting point of the session. He returns to the same scene in connection with the reconstruction of Nazism: Levi is looked at like a fish in a bowl, which for him amounts to denying the universality of the other1. Later, he takes up the episode of the SS man who snatches an icicle from the prisoner and answers him "there is no why". He sees in it the image of cynicism, a gaze without qualms, in a reflection on the cynicism of the "extreme centre"2. He also mentions testimonies about SS men who killed a prisoner and then sobbed over a mistreated dog.

1. 1#6.6 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism29 Mar 2020 · 1:47:05
2. 2Cynicism of the extreme centre or epistemic heroism? The dialectic of the middle20 May 2021 · 17:21

Summary produced automatically from 5 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.