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c h a p t e r 2 Guilt or Shame? Amy Simon Primo Levi’s corpus of writings has become an important part of a larger discussion in trauma, emotion, guilt, and shame theories. Because he is the Holocaust survivor who most articulately, poignantly, and openly discusses his own experiences during the Holocaust and his own relationship to survivor guilt and shame, many have used his writings to promote their own interpretations of these theories. Ruth Leys has outlined recent trends in these fields in her 2007 book From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. As the title suggests, this book claims that the past twenty years has seen a change from a focus on survivor guilt to survivor shame. She traces the discussion from the 1960s through the present, concluding that ‘‘whereas in the past the theorization of survivor guilt remained within an intentionalist or cognitivist paradigm of the emotions, current shame theory shares the positivist ambitions of the medical sciences by theorizing shame in anti-intentionalist (or anticognitivist) terms.’’1 In other words, those who used to speak about survivor guilt argued that guilt originates in an action or a fantasy of action, suggesting that Holocaust survivors were either themselves guilty, guilty by association with the Nazis, or guilty through mimesis identification with the perpetrators. Conversely, those who now speak of survivor shame are concerned not with actions and mimesis, but with ‘‘an experience of the self when the individual 31 32 Amy Simon becomes aware of being exposed to the diminishing or disapproving gaze of another.’’2 Thus, these new theories of shame take responsibility away from the victim and suggest that their feelings of ‘‘guilt’’ are really feelings of shame stemming from their sense of self’s being diminished by another ’s viewing. My project here is to conduct a close reading of Levi’s manifold interpretation of the specific shame experienced by victims of the Holocaust as outlined in his essay ‘‘Shame’’ from his 1986 collection entitled, The Drowned and the Saved, as well as in If This Is a Man and The Truce. Though Leys uses Levi herself, taking special notice of Giorgio Agamben, Lawrence Langer, Sue Miller, and Emmanuel Levinas in her analysis of his works, she nowhere examines his works in depth. As opposed to Leys’s, my project seeks to understand specifically how Levi understood shame and guilt and represented them in his writings rather than to speak of these concepts more generally. Rather than bringing literature to theory, I seek to bring theory to literature. Thus, I will examine Primo Levi’s interpretation of shame and guilt for its own sake, only in the end fitting it into the larger picture of guilt and shame theory. The theme of shame in Primo Levi’s writings holds a place of central importance. Levi defines shame as ‘‘a feeling of guilt during the imprisonment and afterwards,’’3 thereby conflating the two states of mind. As the psychologist Sue Miller suggests, ‘‘the victim experiences a mix of both guilt and shame, according to whether he focuses on guilty recollections of what he did or imagines he did, or on the moral shame he feels for being a weak or inferior person.’’4 I propose, however, to keep the emotions of shame and guilt separate as much as possible in my analysis in order to examine Levi’s use of the term ‘‘shame.’’ This essay will demonstrate that his descriptions do point to a distinction between the two sentiments even though he does not personally address this divergence. That shame and guilt are not exactly the same and should not be read as such in Primo Levi’s works is essential given the importance of both to the psychological well-being (or lack thereof) of many survivors after the Holocaust, including Levi himself. Thus, my reading fits into the larger trend of moving the discussion away from the notion of survivor guilt to shame. Although Levi himself does feel guilt and does feel shame, I agree that the future of Holocaust studies would do better to focus on shame as an emotion that imparts less responsibility to the victims of atrocity. While not negating the ideas of victim complicity and mimesis, I suggest here a reading that allows the postwar, non–Holocaust survivor reader a stance of neutrality. That is, a switch from guilt to shame lessens the impulse of those who have [18.188.241.82] Project...

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