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Overview
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.
Synopsis
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.