- Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work by Damiano Benvegnù
There could hardly be a more relevant moment to read Damiano Benvegnù's powerful book, Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work. COVID-19 taught the wider world about zoonosis and the complex processes via which the virus was "liberated" from its evolutionary niche: Launched across the borders [End Page 105] of different species, the pandemic calls attention to our often failed cohabitation with more-than-human others (Iovino, 2020). Then, in the midst of a global pandemic, George Floyd's horrific murder on camera sparked a global reckoning about race and racism and about the vulnerabilities and injustices that cause disproportionate suffering for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. The "tangle of horror and progress" that Benvegnù describes on the first page of the preface, the "unbearable suffering" and the rampant contradictions that "corrode" any possible belief in "the human as the autonomous and coherent center of the universe" (p. ix) have been front and center in the past months. This book makes imminently clear why Primo Levi's work is vibrant, troubling, and urgent: both for its historical accounting of the horrors of the Holocaust and for the enduring (and unresolved) ethical questions it poses about human autonomy, coherence, and positioning in a diverse, multispecies universe.
Part of the Animal Ethics Series published by Palgrave MacMillan in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work is an insightful and timely new reading of the eclectic work of Primo Levi (1919–1987), Auschwitz survivor, chemist, and writer. As a writer, Levi is best known for his works of testimony, Se questo è un uomo [1947, If This Is a Man], La tregua [1963, The Truce], and I sommersi e i salvati [1986, The Drowned and the Saved], but he also wrote novels, poetry, short stories in various genres, and many articles for the cultural pages of Italian newspapers. Arguing that Levi's work constitutes an "animal testimony" that should be understood as a form of "more-than-human humanism," Benvegnù deftly unpacks Levi's curiosity for and commitment to the nonhuman world. Throughout Levi's work, Benvegnù shows, a "zoological richness" prevails (p. 9), sometimes as metaphor, sometimes as scientific study, sometimes as testimony to the suffering of specific creatures.
As the introduction delineates, scholars have often acclaimed Levi for having reached the apex of enlightened humanism, "resisting dehumanization even in the hell of Auschwitz" (p. 1). In the process, however, they have neglected to recognize the significance of animals in the author's work, forcing a kind of anthropocentric purity on his thinking. Such studies fail to understand how neglecting the undeniable zoological richness risks reproducing the dangerous dichotomies and exclusions that Levi's entire career works to destabilize: the thought processes endemic to Fascism, racism, and cruelty to nonhuman others. Benvegnú shows instead how, by establishing a tension between recognition and alienation (an "anti-mimetic strategy," p. 36), by never quite allowing a reader to settle complacently into a sense of true knowledge of the life of the other, Levi's works manage to "give testimony to an experience that cannot be spoken or that can be distorted by speaking it" (p. 24).
Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work is organized into three major sections (on the themes of "Suffering," "Techne," and "Creation"), each subdivided into two chapters considering writing from different genres and periods. As Benvegnù outlines helpfully in the Introduction, the concept of "suffering" uncovers the bioethical origins of Levi's thinking; "techne" shows how animality, writing, and technology are intimately intertwined; and "creation" refers both to the creative process of representing suffering of all kinds and offers a key to understand Levi's multispecies literary cosmos (p. 31). In organizational terms, from the Introduction onward, Benvegnù often articulates and revisits the book's structure so that complex philosophical concepts emerge as limpid...