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c h a p t e r 4 Kenosis, Saturated Phenomenology, and Bearing Witness Marie L. Baird Any appreciative reading of Primo Levi’s The Reawakening is experienced, at least in part, as an avid cheering on of Levi and his assorted companions as they wend their way homeward to Italy (via Russia) in a circuitous meandering that is somewhat reminiscent of a picaresque adventure. Indeed, to read of his safe arrival in Turin fills one with a special satisfaction born of the sense that justice is sometimes permitted to prevail against even the worst of odds. But The Reawakening does not end there, as is well known. It ends with a dream, or rather ‘‘a dream within a dream,1 in which Levi, caught in the cruelest of reversals, discovers that his putative recovery of a beloved home, family, and friends is itself the dream, and that the only reality is Auschwitz: ‘‘nothing is true outside the Lager’’ (207). It is perhaps the relentlessness of this haunting that may have first forced Levi to pick up the pen and recount the tale of his survival. I believe we can say with relative confidence that Auschwitz created Levi the ‘‘writer-witness’’ (230). He writes: ‘‘if I had not lived the Auschwitz experience, I probably would never have written anything’’ (230). In this sense, Auschwitz can be said to have literally given Levi to himself as a writer. It is this realization that provides a direct link between Levi’s Auschwitz -bestowed vocation as a writer and the thought of French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion. Such is the case because Marion’s philosophical 56 57 Kenosis, Saturated Phenomenology, and Bearing Witness analyses of ‘‘saturated phenomenality’’ delineate the process whereby an overwhelming historical event such as Auschwitz can indeed be understood as having positioned Levi as a writer, a vocation to which he had not previously aspired.2 Provisionally, Marion characterizes certain phenomena , including some historical events, as ‘‘saturated’’ ‘‘in that [conceptual] constitution encounters there an intuitive givenness that cannot be granted a univocal sense in return. It must be allowed, then, to overflow with many meanings, or an infinity of meanings, each equally legitimate and rigorous, without managing either to unify them or to organize them.’’3 The contention here is that the searing unmanageability of what Levi had experienced overwhelmed his attempts at rational mastery and control, thereby casting him into the hitherto unanticipated vocation of ‘‘writer-witness’’ as a way of coping with the psychological and emotional aftereffects of his ordeal. Although one might argue that psychological analyses of trauma provide an adequate key to understanding this kind of experience, I contend that such analyses are less able to account adequately for the creative blossoming forth of Levi’s literary oeuvre after his homecoming . One is left with the question of how it is that experiences of trauma are able to form the basis for a successful literary career. Marion’s analyses of saturated phenomenality, on the other hand, can offer an explanation of Levi’s authorial vocation if such a vocation can be shown to have emerged, seamlessly, from Levi’s experience of incarceration—as he held to be the case. In this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate that such an explanation is possible from a philosophical perspective. I also contend that Levi’s status as a ‘‘writer-witness’’ is relatively resistant to a more traditional metaphysical analysis of writer as transcendental subject because such an undertaking is unable to explain as adequately as Marion’s analyses of saturated phenomenality do Levi’s seemingly obsessive need to write about his ordeal upon his return to safety—a need that literally took hold of him at the time of his arrival back in Italy and that held on throughout the rest of his life. More specifically, invoking Marion’s delineation of the saturated phenomenon , I will argue that what we might call the ‘‘self’’ of the Lager casts Levi into the position of a more or less pure recipient of what Marion would call the ‘‘self’’ of the Lager’s phenomenality as a historically overwhelming event. Such positioning relativizes Levi’s pre-Lager capacities as an autonomous, self-constituting agent as typically understood by modern philosophies, especially those with a traditional metaphysical foundation . It is in this sense that I characterize Levi’s ordeal as a form of kenosis, or self-emptying, in order to accept the position of witness-recipient even [3.138...

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