According to the international critical consensus, Holocaust writer Primo Levi experienced and interpreted Auschwitz through the lens of the Enlightenment and secular humanism. This book reassesses Levi’s memoirs and essays in light of the posthumanist theories of Adorno, Levinas, Lyotard, and Foucault, four major thinkers that find causal links between certain Enlightenment ideas and the Nazi genocide. Jonathan Druker argues that even as Levi speaks for the victims in good faith, his texts actually reveal that Holocaust writing framed by humanist assumptions risks complicity with the murderous master narratives of Nazism and Italian Fascism. Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz explores the consequences of this complicity for the future of Man, the universal human subject whom Levi urgently tries to defend.
Author(s): Jonathan Druker
Edition: First Edition
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 192
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction......Page 12
1 Judaism, Enlightenment, and the End of Theodicy......Page 26
2 The Shadowed Violence of Culture......Page 46
3 Survivor Testimony and the Hegelian Subject......Page 66
4 Ethics and Ontology in Auschwitz and After......Page 82
5 Traumatic History......Page 100
6 The Art of Separation from Chemistry to Racial Science......Page 118
7 The Work of Genocide......Page 130
Conclusion: A New Humanism?......Page 142
Notes......Page 146
A......Page 178
D......Page 179
G......Page 180
L......Page 181
M......Page 182
S......Page 183
Z......Page 184
