Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work

ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY
IN PRIMO LEVI’S WORK

Damiano Benvegnù
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
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Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK
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In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our treat-
ment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of other
scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From being a
marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics and in
multidisciplinary inquiry. This series will explore the challenges that
Animal Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional
understandings of human-animal relations. Specifically, the Series will:
• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished,
scholars;
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in
character or have multidisciplinary relevance.
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Damiano Benvegnù
Animals and
Animality in
Primo Levi’s Work
Damiano Benvegnù
Department of French and Italian
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH, USA
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series

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Series Editors’ Preface
This is a new book series for a new field of inquiry: Animal Ethics.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our
treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of
other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From
being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics
and in multidisciplinary inquiry.
In addition, a rethink of the status of animals has been fuelled by a
range of scientific investigations which have revealed the complexity of
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v
vi Series Editors’ Preface
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stand the influences—social, legal, cultural, religious and political—that
legitimate animal abuse. This series explores the challenges that Animal
Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional under-
standings of human-animal relations.
The series is needed for three reasons: (i) to provide the texts that will
service the new university courses on animals; (ii) to support the increas-
ing number of students studying and academics researching in animal
related fields, and (iii) because there is currently no book series that is a
focus for multidisciplinary research in the field.
Specifically, the series will
• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals;
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished,
scholars; and
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in
character or have multidisciplinary relevance.
The new Palgrave Macmillan Series on Animal Ethics is the result of a

unique partnership between Palgrave Macmillan and the Ferrater Mora
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Series Editors’ Preface
vii
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Villanova, PA, USA Priscilla Cohn
Preface
In their introduction to Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western

History, editors Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior write that “from the
darkest depths of the Holocaust to the comically absurd present, the tale
of the twentieth century can be told as an animal act” (6). According to
the two scholars, no other time like the last century has so evidently
staged—in a tangle of horror and progress, technological advancement
and unbearable suffering—the contradictory performances of that pecu-
liar animal we call human. These contradictions seemed to corrode the
already challenged idea of the human as the autonomous and coherent
center of the universe, who, through the supreme power of reason, mas-
ters not only his own history, but also all other creatures. Conversely,
with the crisis of such anthropocentric humanism, the other animals
became not simply “good to think with”—according to Lévi-Strauss’s
famous phrase—but also emergent characters both on the conscious
stage of the ecological debate and on the Freudian anderer Schauplatz
[other stage] of our phantasmal dreams, fears, and desires.1
Few other writers have manifested through both their personal experi-
ence and their work the contradictory complexity of the twentieth cen-
tury than Primo Levi. Born in Turin, Italy, in 1919 into a family of liberal
and almost completely secular Italian Jews, between December 1943 and
October 1945 Levi went through the horror of Auschwitz and returned,
after a long difficult journey, to his hometown. Later he embarked on a
ix
x Preface
double career, both as a professional chemist in the paint industry and as

a writer, until his tragic death in 1987.2 His literary production mirrors
the diverse aspects of his life: he wrote, among other things, about his
experiences as a prisoner in the concentration camp as well as about his
love for chemistry; a novel on a group of Jewish Russian partisans during
the Second World War as well as two books of (more or less autobio-
graphical) poetry; several short stories on a wide range of topics and a
fundamental volume of theoretical reflections upon the Holocaust and its
personal, social, and cultural consequences.3 He has thus engaged in an
impressive number of literary genres, including science fiction and jour-
nalistic essays, with a particular predilection for crossing boundaries and
giving birth to hybrid literary forms.
Even in this complex variety of experiences, forms, and contents a
common theme seems nonetheless to run through all of Levi’s works. His
whole literature has been in fact read as a celebration of what is human; a
celebration that is allegedly already expressed in Levi’s first book, Se questo
è un uomo [If This Is a Man], the testimonial account of his time in
Auschwitz. Scholars have thus usually acclaimed Primo Levi as one of the
few truly humanist personalities of the last century, capable of preserving
his (and the assumption here is “as well as our own”) humanity even
through the dehumanizing hell of the Holocaust. The recent publication
of The Complete Works of Primo Levi cannot but confirm such reading,
depicting Levi as one of the greatest intellectual figures of the twentieth
century, whose language is—according to Toni Morrison—“the deliber-
ate and sustained glorification of the human” (CW, xii). Yet, Levi’s first
and still most important work sets out—from the studiedly incomplete
and suspended syntax of its title—a defining and rather divergent objec-
tive for (his) testimony: the interrogation of the crisis in the human her-
alded by the war, Nazi-Fascism, and genocide. As Dalya Sachs has pointed
out in her exhaustive examination of the title of Se questo è un uomo, Levi’s
investigation of what is human engages both his literary characters and
the readers in a quest that at times appears to be more a “dismantling of
human-ness” than its rehabilitation (Sachs, 772).
This book investigates the ethical and aesthetical dimension of this
problematic engagement with Levi’s question of the human from the
perspective of his animal imagery. More precisely, we will explore the
Preface
xi
boundaries between human and non-human in Primo Levi’s work

through a detailed analysis of his literary animals. As we will see, Levi’s
literature features a pervasive presence of non-human animals, striking
for its volume, significance, and variety. Relatively unexamined by schol-
ars, this complex and extensive animal imagery offers new insights into
the aesthetical and ethical function of testimony, as well as an original
perspective on contemporary debates surrounding human-animal rela-
tionships and posthumanism.
There are two main objectives of this project. First, it aims to prove that
Levi’s literary animals function as problematic devices that replicate the
unsettling doubleness required by testimony. Levi’s literary animals con-
tinue to produce testimonial literature after and beyond Auschwitz, explor-
ing and expressing the limits of our own human comprehension of both
what happened in the concentration camps and of what we are. In fact,
through his animal images Levi is not just witnessing the nature of human-
ity in Nazi Germany. He instead expands the inquiry to reflect upon how
we traditionally have depicted ourselves as a species, as well as our relation-
ships with all other creatures. This book claims that Levi’s entire literary
work can be read as the unique manifestation of a new literary genre that
challenges readers to reflect upon their reading habits and consequently
deconstruct assumed, traditional boundaries between what is human and
what is non-human. I would call this genre “animal testimony.”
Second, my interpretation of Levi’s work alters the conventional pic-
ture of him as the direct heir of an anthropocentric tradition that begins
with Humanism and continues through the Enlightenment and moder-
nity. My focus on Levi’s literary animals shows how the whole of his lit-
erature belongs instead to a highly critical more-than-human humanism
that forces readers to move beyond the question of the human and face
what is now widely called “the question of the animal.” Animals and
Animality in Primo Levi’s Work reveals that Levi’s literature answers this
question of the animal from both a subjective and ethical perspective—a
questioning that comes from an animal which faces us, whose gaze seems
to question our own existence (including the human-animal [animale-
uomo] Levi observed in Auschwitz)—and an objective and epistemologi-
cal perspective—an investigation of the ways in which we narrate both
this animal per se and our own relationship with it.
xii Preface
To provide a representative and comprehensive—but inevitably not

exhaustive—analysis of Levi’s literary animals, this book begins with an
introduction meant to contextualize my research within both Levi’s
scholarship and Literary Animal Studies. This first chapter is then fol-
lowed by three major sections that directly address Levi’s animals. Each of
these three sections are divided in two discrete chapters for reading con-
venience, but they are structured around three intertwined themes,
respectively named suffering, techne, and creation. I will explain in the
introduction the reasons behind such a progression.
As the title underlines, “Suffering” deals with the issue of animal suf-
fering and compassion. This section begins with an analysis of an article
by Levi that ends with an autobiographical note about his encounter with
some real squirrels locked in a cage in a scientific laboratory. My reading
explores the ambiguity of Levi’s reported attitude toward the suffering of
these rodents and compares it to the philosophical debate which recently
occurred around Jeremy Bentham’s famous statement on animal suffer-
ing. Authors like Peter Singer and Jacques Derrida are examined to clarify
Levi’s position, which is however explicitly stated in another article pub-
lished in 1978 and entitled “Contro il dolore” [Against Pain]. My research
shows for the first time how “Contro il dolore,” usually taken by scholars
as an autonomous piece, belongs to a debate about animal vivisection
happening in the Turinese newspaper La Stampa in the second half of the
seventies. The attention toward the material suffering of animals as it is
expressed in this article drives me to investigate how Levi deals with other
manifestations of suffering. Specifically, my focus is on the suffering of
those creatures Levi saw in Auschwitz and called with the hyphenated
term “animale-uomo” [human-animal]. An attentive and comparative
reading of several occurrences of this term and its equivalents reveals how
Levi’s concern goes to those creatures completely defenseless and unable
to express such suffering. The chapter ends with a double analysis of two
moments in which Levi deals with two mute creatures: his comment on
the suffering of the donkey in Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli’s poem entitled
Se more [One dies], and the famous episode of Hurbinek in La tregua
[The Truce]. My reading stresses how Levi structures his fiction according
to a double impossibility of identifying with these mute creatures that,
paradoxically, triggers the recognition of a shared vulnerability.
Preface
xiii
The following section, entitled “Techne,” deals with the system of ani-
mal representations Levi uses to reflect upon his own writing, seen both
as a specific human technology and as a practice with its definite param-
eters. As the previous one, “Techne” begins by exploring an article written
by Levi, “Una bottiglia di sole” [A Bottle of Sunshine], in which Levi sets
the human-animal divide in terms of technological ability. Levi’s position
is this time first contextualized within the Turinese and generally Italian
cultural milieu of his education, and then compared to two philosophers
who both dwell upon the issue of human technology, Hannah Arendt
and Martin Heidegger. The uncanny similarities between Heidegger and
Levi force me to search in his fiction for different clues about this ambig-
uous issue. Particularly, a close reading of some passages of La chiave a
stella challenges the human-animal divide as it was presented in “Una
bottiglia di sole.” Yet, the connection between technology and animals is
staged explicitly in some of Levi’s short stories. In narratives such as
“Angelica farfalla” [Angelic Butterfly], “I costruttori di ponti” [Brigde
Builders], and “Quaestio de Centauris” Levi presents to his readers a
series of difficult questions about the link between human technology in
general, his own writing, and the human-animal divide. The conclusion
shows how Levi represents himself as a homo faber, but to be such, he
needs a hybrid literary strategy, according to which the focus on the
human-animal limitrophy (rather than unique divide) displays both the
possibilities of this approach and the hubris of traditional anthropocentric
humanism.
The last section before the conclusion begins from this discovery.
Entitled “Creation,” it emphasizes how Levi’s animal representations
offer him the opportunity to reverse that regime of “counter-creation” he
identifies with Auschwitz. Initially the focus lies on an article, “Romanzi
dettati dai grilli,” in which Levi makes a very interesting connection
between animals and what he calls “uno scrivere nuovo” [a new writing].
Wondering about the nature of this “new writing” brings me to examine
how Levi’s literature seems to replicate a pattern of creation–de-creation–
re-creation that belongs to two biblical texts very dear to him, the Book
of Genesis and the Book of Job. The former, whose philosophical
importance in animal studies is tested by a brief analysis of the two
accounts of the creation of man according to Hannah Arendt and Jacques
xiv Preface
Derrida, is in some ways recalled by Levi’s short story entitled “Il sesto
giorno” [The Sixth Day]. The exploration of this story suggests Levi’s
concern about the almost impossible task of inventing a new animal: a
task he undertakes in other stories, included “I figli del vento,” in which
biblical references are intertwined with the writings of Charles Darwin.
My work demonstrates that Levi takes from Darwin not only the theory
of the struggle for life, as it is usually assumed, but also a certain anti-
anthropocentrism and, more importantly, a new enchantment of the
world based on the material reality of what I call the chaosmos. This atti-
tude is also apparent in Levi’s legacy toward the Book of Job. Although
Levi states in his personal anthology, La ricerca delle radici [The Search for
Roots], that Job is the manifestation of unjust and incomprehensible suf-
fering, my analysis underlines how Job’s story also displays an animal
imagery that forces him to re-forge his own identity in terms of commu-
nity, wonder, and limitrophy with the other creatures. This new chaotic
cosmos of limitrophy is staged by Levi in the short story entitled
“Disfilassi,” with which this section ends.
A conclusive chapter gathers all the themes as they have been explored in
the previous sections through the analysis of a short story about a kangaroo
and Levi’s both most explicit and most fictional autobiographical poem.
* * *
Friendship and community are two key concepts in Levi’s work which
have come to inform how I think about intellectual life and ethics. With
this in mind, I’d like to thank a few of the many friends and colleagues
who have contributed to this book in one way or another. First, I would
like to thank Robert S.C. Gordon who suggested that I write this book
instead of the one I originally planned. My gratitude goes to Vittorio
Montemaggi, John P. Welle, Ben Heller, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Joseph
A. Buttigieg, and W. Martin Bloomer, with whom I had countless con-
versations about Primo Levi while I was at Notre Dame. I am also grateful
to the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Albert Ravarino fam-
ily, whose grants allowed me to travel to Turin and explore Levi’s archives
at the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi. Once there, I was wel-
comed by Fabio Levi, Cristina Zuccaro, and Domenico Scarpa to whom
Preface
xv
goes my gratitude as well. My thanks go also to Enrico Cesaretti, Serenella

Iovino, Elena Past, Monica Seger, Matteo Gilebbi, Massimo Lollini,
Sabrina Ferri, Zyg Baranski, and Marco Belpoliti, whose rigorous schol-
arship has been as important to me as their kindness and intellectual
generosity. This book would not have been possible without the generous
support of Andrew Linzey, the anonymous referees who reviewed it, and
the whole editorial team at Palgrave, with special thanks to April James. I
cannot end without offering my sincerest thanks to my friends A. Erik
Larsen, Anna Siebach-Larsen, James Martell, Stefano Scanu, Mauro
Pandolfino, Chiara Capodici, and Paul Morrow with whom I have dis-
cussed some of the ideas behind this book on several occasions. Lastly,
but most importantly, none of this would have been conceivable without
the constant support, friendship, and love of Hailey J. LaVoy, to whom
this book is dedicated.
Hanover, NH, USA Damiano Benvegnù
Notes
1. Although this book challenges the traditional divide between the Human
and the Animal, only for readability reasons I will keep at times using the
terms “humans” and “animals” (and their derivatives) to address and refer
respectively to human animals and non-human animals.
2. For an exhaustive but manageable survey of Levi’s life, see the “Cronologia”
by Ernesto Ferrero included in Levi 1997. Three massive biographies are
available, however: see, in chronological order, Anissimov; Angier 2002;
and Thomson 2002.
3. The biblical word Shoah (also spelled Sho’h and Shoa), meaning “calam-
ity”, became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the
1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Primo Levi himself expressed dis-
satisfaction toward the term “holocaust” not for its specific reference to
paganism and animals, but rather for the general idea of a “sacrifice,” for
him unacceptable. However, the term “Holocaust” is commonly used in
scholarly studies in the Anglo-American academy and therefore it is used
here as well.
Contents
1 Introduction. Primo Levi and the Question of the Animal 1

1.1 Testimony, Identification, Literary Animals 14
1.2 Animal Studies and Italian Literature 26
1.3 Suffering, Techne, Creation 30
Works Cited 46
2 Suffering I. Shared Vulnerability 51

2.1 “Can They Suffer?” 56
2.2 “Contro il dolore” and the Debate on Animal
Vivisection 64
Works Cited 87
3 Suffering II. Muteness and Testimony 89

3.1 Useless Violence, Bare Life, Testimony 90
3.2 Belli’s Donkey and Hurbinek’s Muteness 98
Works Cited 109
xvii
xviii Contents
4 Techne I. Animal Hands 111

4.1 From Homo Faber to Techne118
4.2 The Hand that Writes: Writing as Techne
and the Orangutan130
Works Cited 144
5 Techne II. Hybrids and Hubris 147

5.1 Science Fiction and the Monstrous Work
of Zoomorphism149
5.2 Centaurial Literature, Hybrid Techne163
Works Cited 174
6 Creation I. A New Writing 177

6.1 Toward “uno scrivere nuovo” 180
6.2 Creation and Re-Creation: Genesis 195
Works Cited 208
7 Creation II. Re-Enchantment 211

7.1 Invented Animals and the Work of Testimony 212
7.2 Darwin, Job, and the Re-Enchantment of the World 220
Works Cited 240
8 Conclusion. Animal Testimony 243

Works Cited 272
Works Cited 275
Index 293
Note on Abbreviations and Translations
Citations from Levi’s works in Italian are mainly drawn from the two-
volume 1997 edition of Opere edited by Marco Belpoliti. This is referred to
throughout as OI and OII, preceded by the abbreviated form of the rele-
vant text, as specified in the following list. Where no abbreviation is used
other than the volume number, the citation comes from notes or from texts
that have not been published in book form. When necessary, I gave the full
reference to some of the very relevant articles I examine in detail.
English translations are provided, drawn from published texts as far as
these are available, as listed in the “Works Cited” section, and indicated
by their abbreviated form. When no abbreviation is indicated, the trans-
lation comes from the published version offered in the first occurrence of
the same text. When necessary, I offer in the footnotes alternative transla-
tions for passages that have been already translated and published. When
instead there is no published translation available, I state it and provide
my own. Notice that there is no overlap between some of Levi’s books
and the English edition, as in the case of the short stories of Lilít, spread
among different volumes.
xix
xx Note on Abbreviations and Translations
Individual works by Primo Levi, and the English translations, are

abbreviated as follows (the dates here always refer to the first edition of
the book. Important following editions are acknowledged in the “Works
Cited” section.):
Se questo è un uomo (1947) SQU
La tregua (1963) LT
Storie naturali (1966) SN
Vizio di forma (1971) VF
Il sistema periodico (1975) SP
La chiave a stella (1978) CS
Lilít e altri racconti (1981) L
La ricerca delle radici (1981) RdR
Ad ora incerta (1984) AOI
L’altrui mestiere (1985) AM
I sommersi e i salvati (1986) SeS
Racconti e Saggi (1986) RS
Conversazioni e interviste (1997) SI
L’ultimo Natale di guerra (2000) UNG
If This Is a Man ITIM

The Truce T
Survival in Auschwitz SA
The Sixth Day SD
The Periodic Table PT
The Wrench W
Moments of Reprieve MR
A Tranquil Star TS
The Search for Roots SR
Collected Poems CP
Other People’s Trades OPT
The Drowned and the Saved DS
The Mirror Maker MM
The Black Hole of Auschwitz BHA
The Voice of Memory VM
The Complete Works of Primo Levi CW
1
Introduction. Primo Levi
and the Question of the Animal
Since the first edition of Se questo è un uomo published by De Silva in

1947 and almost completely overlooked by contemporary scholars,
Primo Levi has been increasingly acclaimed as one of the few truly
humanist personalities of the last century, resisting dehumanization even
in the hell of Auschwitz.1 His work has been read as a direct inheritance
of the Enlightenment: as the first anthology of Levi scholarship published
in English suggests, his books bring reason and light not only to the black
hole of the concentration camp but also to our own understanding of the
very possibility of such horror.2 Levi thus became for some scholars
almost a humanistic peak, whose “austere humanism” has been exemplar-
ily summarized by Joseph Farrell in the introduction of the eponymous
collections of essays:
The only philosophy or current of thought to which [Levi] owed allegiance

is the culture which can be termed, broadly, ‘humanist,’ or perhaps
‘Enlightenment,’ in the sense that the eighteenth-century cult of reason
represents the highest peak of that vision of human being as a ‘rational
animal’ which has deep roots in European culture. (Farrell 2004, 9)3
© The Author(s) 2018 1

D. Benvegnù, Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work, The Palgrave Macmillan
Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71258-1_1
2 D. Benvegnù
This Aristotelian and almost statuesque interpretation of Levi has been

gradually challenged in the last fifteen years. For instance, in his seminal
study of Levi’s “ordinary virtues,” Robert Gordon has redirected our atten-
tion from the absolute power of reason to the complexity of the ethical
values such as friendship or storytelling (Gordon 2001). More recently,
other scholars such as Jonathan Druker and Charlotte Ross have instead
read Levi’s legacy vis-à-vis the current debate on posthuman and posthu-
manistic philosophy (Druker 2009; Ross 2011). From these new interpre-
tations, Primo Levi comes out as a more intricate and multifaceted figure,
whose work questions any understandings of humanism based on what
Tony Davies has called “the attraction of the Humpty Dumpty’s approach
to the problem of definition” (2). As Davis has pointed out, one of the key
terms in Farrell’s definition, namely “humanism,” has in fact a very com-
plex history and an unusually wide range of meanings and contexts. We
should thus pay attention any time this complexity seems to be reduced,
almost as arbitrarily as in the speeches of the egg-shaped character in
Through the Looking-Glass, to one straight line or continuum. In the case of
Levi, different traditions concur to create what Tzvetan Todorov in a
famous article for the tenth anniversary of Levi’s death has described as a
rejection of any Manichaeism (Todorov 1997). As we will see, Levi in fact
rejects any dualism that is based upon a sharp division between body and
mind, or almost metonymically between the animal and the human, as an
Aristotelian approach would instead suggests.
Yet, even in these more multifaceted accounts, at least one point of
Farrell’s Aristotelian argument mentioned above has gone almost com-
pletely unchallenged, namely, the definition of the human as “the ratio-
nal animal.” This definition is neither conceptually obvious nor ethically
neutral; one would have thought that the Aristotelian model would have
been already superseded, as his cosmology model has been about five
hundred years ago. Instead, such a model is still the tip of a philosophical
iceberg built upon the almost tacit belief according to which an abyss lies
between the human and the other animals, leaving mankind as the soli-
tary master and peak of creation. This distinction has not only deep
roots but also continuity in European culture. In fact, it belongs to a
lineage that goes from Aristotle to some of the major figures in Christian
Introduction. Primo Levi and the Question... 3
theology, from Descartes to Heidegger, and arrives at our contemporary

relegation of animals to the status of metaphor or raw material (for con-
sumption, entertainment, or experimentation).4 It is thus not surprising
that this very tradition has been recalled and reiterated by Farrell in a
recent volume devoted to Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism after
Auschwitz (in Pugliese 2011, 87–102).
At the very beginning of his essay entitled “The Humanity and
Humanism of Primo Levi,” Farrell comments upon what he calls “a wide-
ranging polemical lecture” Primo Levi delivered in Turin in 1979. In this
lecture, published only posthumously in the first volume of the Opere
with the title “L’intolleranza razziale” [The racial intolerance], Levi dis-
cusses the roots and variations of racial prejudice in history. As Farrell
correctly points out, one of Levi’s major ideas is that first and foremost
racial prejudice has an animalistic origin (“di origine animalesca”). Levi
believes that racial prejudice is something barely human: he thinks that
racism is pre-human, preceding the human as it belongs to the animal
world (BHA 109; “qualcosa di assai poco umano, penso che sia preumano,
che precede l’uomo, che appartenga al mondo animalesco piuttosto che
al mondo umano;” OI 1298). Farrell reads into this sentence “a dialecti-
cal opposition between the ‘animal’ or the bestial and the ‘human’”
(Pugliese 2011, 87). According to him, this is a recurrent and deeply
significant theme in Levi, “while the underlying fundamental, even fun-
damentalist, reassertion of a basic humanistic credo in the values of being
human contained in these words represents his enduring and authentic
voice as writer and intellectual” (87). Farrell’s essay then goes on unfold-
ing in detail Levi’s humanism (surprisingly focusing only on Levi’s testi-
monial literature) but the foundation is set: the human-animal distinction,
according to the scholar, is “a philosophical dogma” to which Levi tena-
ciously held all his life, “even in the face of the atrocities he himself had
endured and had seen perpetrated by human beings” (88).
Farrell’s reading of Levi’s public lecture is particularly relevant because
it epitomizes a specific topos within Levi scholarship, according to which
Levi belongs to as well as embraces a humanistic tradition that not only
establishes non-human animals as inferior creatures, but also ascertains
that being confused or identified with an animal automatically means
degradation. I will return shortly on this general overlap between
4 D. Benvegnù
animalization and degradation and on whether it is carried throughout

the whole of Levi’s work as Farrell seems to believe. For now, I prefer to
focus on this specific lecture and notice that, despite the unquestionable
good faith of Farrell’s reading, there are nonetheless at least a couple of
problems with his interpretation.
The first one lies at the very core of Levi’s lecture. Farrell does not men-
tion in his article what is the source of Levi’s convictions about racial
prejudice. They are in fact not Levi’s autonomous production. Instead, as
Levi explicitly states, they come from one of his favorite readings:
Nei libri di Konrad Lorenz, premio nobel fondatore dell’etologia, che ha

scritto dei bellissimi libri di divulgazione soprattutto in quello che si inti-
tola in italiano Il cosidetto male, dove si parla dell’aggressione, c’è un capi-
tolo dove si parla dei ratti che secondo me può servire perfettamente come
base per spiegarci, per giustificare quella mia affermazione, cioé che
l’intolleranza razziale ha origini lontanissime, non solo preistoriche, ma
addirittura preumane, addirittura è incorporata in certi istinti primordiali
che sono dei mammiferi e non solo dei mammiferi. (OI 1299)
[In the book of Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Prize winner, founder of ethology
and writer of some wonderful books of popular science, especially On
Aggression, is a chapter on rats which I think will serve perfectly to explain
and justify my statement that racial intolerance has long-lost origins that
are not only prehistoric but pre-human, and that is indeed enmeshed in
particular primordial instincts of mammals, but not only mammals. (BHA
110)]
This passage is remarkable for several reasons. For instance, we become

aware of Levi’s interest in ethology (i.e., the study of animal behavior)
and fascination for animals, as well as his implicit belief in evolution. It is
this latter conviction that also seems to force him to point out, immedi-
ately afterward, that being human is couched precisely in learning how to
“contravvenire, ostacolare certi istinti che sono la nostra eredità animale”
[transgress, to put an obstacle in the way of certain instincts that are our
animal inheritance]: a sentence that indeed goes in the same direction
outlined by Farrell. The problem does not in fact lie in Levi’s formulation
per se—challenged nonetheless by more recent ethological studies5—but
it is hidden in his source, namely, Konrad Lorenz’s theory of aggression.
Although a widespread controversy arose around Lorenz’s past when

he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1973, we
cannot say whether Levi knew about the former life of the man who is
considered the father of modern ethology. He actually makes an explicit,
but very casual, connection between Lorenz and the gas chambers in an
interview he gave in 1981. Responding to a question about the animal
presence in his work, Levi first confesses his interest toward “quanto c’è
di animale in noi, quanto c’era di animale nei nazisti” [how much ani-
mal is in us, how much animal there was in the Nazis], and then states
that what Lorenz tells about aggression among different tribes of rats “è
agghiacciante, son le camere a gas insomma” (Belpoliti 1997, 77) [it is
appalling, in conclusion it is the gas chambers]. Given the overall sober
tone of the reference, we may infer that he probably did not know very
much, for otherwise he would have been at least as suspicious as he was
toward other intellectuals who had had any kind of official involvement
with the Nazi regime. Specifically, he would have been more careful in
quoting a book, Il cosidetto male, which so evidently carries ideas that
suspiciously recall a series of articles that Lorenz wrote immediately
after his voluntary affiliation with the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in 1938.
According to Friedlander’s Origins of Nazi Genocide, Konrad Lorenz’s
affiliation with the Nazi Party after the Anschluss was more a matter of
opportunism than real political faith. When the doctrine of racial hygiene
became a prerequisite for advancement, the then young Austrian researcher
Lorenz, whose studies on animal behavior had already attracted the atten-
tion of the German scientific establishment, simply declared loyalty to the
Nazi ideology to have access to research grants and job opportunities
(Friedlander, 126–127). Whether Lorenz truly believed in the new doc-
trine proposed by Hitler or not, his ideas indeed gained popularity in the
new regime, and Lorenz became an important public speaker during the
years 1939–1943, before he was captured in Poland and then imprisoned
by the Russian army until 1948. Specifically, the most appreciated part of
his work, and the part which Lorenz himself was keen on promoting, dealt
with two important topics. The first of them is the homology between
characteristics that animals have acquired during domestication and that
humans have acquired through civilizing processes. As Deichmann writes,
6 D. Benvegnù
for Lorenz such homology “was proven:” as animal domestication leads to

disturbance in instinctive behavior and therefore genetic decline, so
human civilization as a result faces decadence and degeneration (179).6
The second topic is the associated “biological justification for the value of
pure racial stock” (189), namely, the attempt to preserve racial purity to
fight the negative effect of civilization. These two theories found a unique
expression in an article Lorenz devoted to “The Inborn Forms of Possible
Experience” [“Die angeborener Formen möglicher Erfahrung”] com-
pleted in July 1942 and then published a year later in what was one of the
most important scientific journals of Nazi Germany, the Zeitschrift für
Tierpsychologie (Burkhardt, 270–275). In this long article Lorenz’s ideas
about domestication, racial policy, and National Socialist ideology, met in
what Kalikow has called a “process of reciprocal legitimation, whereby the
Nazis lent political power to ideas which were already part of Lorenz’s
world view” (56). In fact, Lorenz never fully abandoned some of these
ideas, and they are still present in more subtle forms even in publications
Lorenz wrote long after the end of the Second World War. Particularly, in
a book he published in 1963 Lorenz seemed to insist on what Vogel called
a “mysterious principle of species preservation” (quoted in Deichmann,
197). This volume was entitled Das sogenannte Böse [The so-called evil],
and it is indeed the same book on aggression Levi quotes in his lecture
sixteen years later.
Pointing out uncanny correspondences within certain parts of Konrad
Lorenz’s work allows us neither to nullify what he and other eminent
ethologists have discovered in the field of comparative animal behavior,
nor to disregard Levi’s theory about racial prejudice. Nonetheless, it
underlines how problematic it is to move from particular observations to
general statements, or, to be precise, from the observation of animal
behaviors to biological theory and then to social and, more importantly,
moral evaluation. As Deichmann simply puts it, “one cannot deduce
from modern theories of selection a moral value of egotism or the favor-
ing of kin. Ethical norms for how humans ought to live together cannot
be drawn up through scientific analyses” (198). Furthermore, it helps to
develop a critical attitude toward concepts that seem evident and almost
“neutral:” as we will see, Levi was the first in other circumstances to
criticize the myth of the neutrality of science. Finally, and most impor-
tantly, to avoid building a humanistic divide between humans and non-
humans on such a controversial ground, Lorenz’s Nazi past and its
influence on his later theories should have been at least acknowledged, if
not by Levi himself, then by a volume explicitly devoted to the relation-
ships between Humanism and science after Auschwitz.
The second problem with the monolithic interpretation of the human-
animal divide that Farrell attributes to Levi, is that the analysis is usually
and almost exclusively restricted to the testimonies and essays that deal
with Levi’s ongoing comprehension of the Holocaust.7 It is not so sur-
prising, then, that in this part of his production Levi refers to a distinc-
tion between humans and animals that seems to mirror the division
between human and inhuman made by the Nazis. The complex and con-
tradictory animal symbolism utilized in Nazi Germany could have had
several implications, but one was quite clear: the Jews were animals, often
compared to parasites or vermin, and therefore they could be eliminated
without any concern (Sax 2000, 47–100; Raffles 2007). The famous pas-
sage of Se questo è un uomo in which Levi reports how the camp prisoners,
without any explicit coercion, preferred to name their eating with the
German verb “fressen,” usually reserved for animals, is just one example
of how violently and thoroughly the perspective of the Nazis was imposed
on the prisoners themselves (SQU, OI 71).8 Yet, if we expand our explo-
ration to the other literary genres practiced by Levi, we easily recognize a
different set of distinctions at work. Levi himself puts it clearly in an
interview about the reasons behind his moving from testimonial litera-
ture to the new science fiction production of Storie Naturali (1966) and
Vizio di forma (1971). In this interview Levi maintains that
conclusa La Tregua (…) mi è parso di essermi completamene bruciato

come testimone, come narratore e interprete di una certa realtà, diciamo
pure di un capitolo di storia. Ma mi pareva di avere ancora alcune cose da
dire, e di non poterle dire che con un altro linguaggio: un linguaggio che
sento definire ironico, e che io percepisco come stridulo, sbieco, dispettoso,
volutamente antipoetico, disumano insomma quanto il mio linguaggio di
prima era stato inumano (Lamberti 1971; CeI 111)
8 D. Benvegnù
[With The Truce (…) I felt I had completely burned myself out as a wit-
ness, narrator and interpreter of a certain reality or let’s say a chapter of
history. But I still thought I had few things left to say, things I could only
say in another language, a language some might call ironic, but which I see
as shrill, oblique, spiteful, deliberately anti-poetic; anti-human [disumano]
where my earlier language had been inhuman [inumano] (VoM 88)]
Although the difference between inumano and disumano is not as clear

in this statement as it might instead appear in the English translation,
Levi is pointing out a fundamental distinction between two ways of fac-
ing the properly human.9 The disumanità expressed by Levi’s science fic-
tion, in fact, must at least differ from the human-inhuman divide
conveyed in Se questo è un uomo, and therefore does not fit within the
supposedly coherent “dialectical opposition” between the human and the
not-human, that is, the animal, attributed to Levi by Farrell. If there are
more than two terms implicated in the opposition, most likely it is not
such a sharp, dualistic, opposition as it would appear, and any overall
binary polarization is destined to fail. It is not that such a distinction or
divide is not present in Levi’s oeuvre, but rather that it is set alongside—
sometimes contradictorily—other possible terms, in a structure that can-
not be simplified into pure dichotomies.
But an attentive reading of the whole of Levi’s literary production
causes also at least another revelation. In his novels, short stories, poems,
and articles not only the human-animal divide is variously articulated,
but the very presence and significance of animals is impressive for volume
and variety. According to Nystedt and her computational investigation of
the whole of Levi’s oeuvre, there are over 307 nouns referring to various
species and to the animal kingdom, with a frequency of nearly 2600 in a
corpus of 712,000 words (407).10 That is to say, the animal world is lin-
guistically present with a frequency matched by very few other semantic
themes. Moreover, as Belpoliti and Gordon have underlined, animals are
not only one of the most interesting and all-pervading presences in Levi,
but they also often appear at climactic or clinching moments, in his writ-
ing about Auschwitz and indeed in all his other works (Gordon 2007,
52). As these two scholars have recognized, these animals are spread
throughout the whole of Levi’s oeuvre in a variety of forms and contexts:
as they write, animals “are present as metaphors, models and myths—in

other words as language—but also as real presences, vivid objects of
observation and interest, tools for understanding behavior” (52).
Dismissing such massive animal occurrence as only the negative side of a
dichotomy in which what counts is the purely human cannot but be an
interpretative hazard.
Despite such zoological richness, only few scholars have however
attempted an overarching exploration of Levi’s animals or at least an
analysis not limited to the process of forced dehumanization and ani-
malization Levi underwent in Auschwitz. In this paucity, and beyond
the two essays already cited, two articles stand out for their insightful-
ness and devotion to the topic.11 The older of the two is the key entry
entitled “Animali” written by Marco Belpoliti for the monographic issue
of the journal Riga in 1997 (Belpoliti 1997, 157–210). Belpoliti’s article
is exhaustive in terms of internal references to the whole of Levi’s oeuvre,
but, as the author himself admits, is not analytical and it can be consid-
ered neither systematic nor conclusive, but only a kind of survey in sight
of synthesis (157). Yet, it is incredibly helpful not only because it sheds
light on an aspect of Levi’s literature usually ignored, but also because it
is an indispensable bibliographical tool as well as a source of insights
into specific aspects of Levi’s literary zoology. Nevertheless, it resembles
very much what we might call a modern bestiary, presenting a series of
animals without offering any structural synthesis capable of assisting the
reader in grasping the overall significance of such heterogeneous
taxonomy.
The second and more recent work is instead a short article by Ilona
Klein entitled “Reconciling the Controversy of Animal Cruelty and the
Shoah: A Look at Primo Levi’s Compassionate Writings” (Klein 2011).
In this innovative but very brief piece, Klein interprets some of Primo
Levi’s textual examples as expressing a possibly reconciliatory position in
one of the most controversial debates of the last decades, namely the
comparison between the suffering of Jews during the Second World War
and the general suffering of animals in the Western world. As Klein
points out, this divisive comparison found a key expression in a book
written by Charles Patterson and published in 2002 with the title Eternal
Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Patterson’s book
10 D. Benvegnù
relies on a renowned statement made by the 1978 Nobel Prize Laureate

Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Russian-American and Jewish writer who
famously made the main character of his short story “The Letter Writer”
claim that in relation to our treatment of animals, “all people are Nazis;
for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”12 Patterson argues that such
comparison is not only valid historically, given the “animalization” of
Jews perpetuated by Nazis, but also offers us a provocative but truthful
vision of our modern treatment of animals, especially as regards industri-
alized slaughtering and scientific experimentation. Needless to say,
Patterson’s book became immediately a watershed between those animal
activists who embraced fully, and sometimes uncritically, the compari-
son, and those who instead refused it as trivial and offensive.13 More
recently—that is: around the same time of the publication of Klein’s
article—other authors tried to engage this difficult comparison from a
less polarizing and therefore refreshing point of view, in certain respects
following the philosophical lead offered by Jacques Derrida and his rela-
tively new interest for what he called “the question of the Animal.” An
example of this new tendency is a 2010 book by Andrew Benjamin enti-
tled Of Jews and Animals. In this volume, Benjamin questions and reposi-
tions the terms of the debates about justice and universality by
reconstructing a critical genealogy of the joined and dis-joined figures of
the “animal” and “the Jew” in the history of Western philosophical con-
ceptions of subjectivity, community, and universality. As he explicitly
states in the first chapter of his work, Benjamin’s goal is not to reinforce
or reiterate “the prejudice in which Jews were equated, to their detri-
ment, with animals” (A. Benjamin, 3). Instead, he explores the reasons
behind the historically important relationship between Jews and animals
in philosophy, art, and theology to show how both the figure of the Jew
and the figure of the animal “mark the manner in which dominant tradi-
tions construct themselves” (3).
Of course, such an investigation, focused on a dialectics of power and
representations, may appear to be alien to a writer such as Primo Levi.
However, many of Levi’s works in which animals play a role are marked
by a general tone of respect and compassion that indeed seems to stem
from Levi’s first-hand experience as a slave prisoner in Auschwitz, “of hav-
ing suffered profoundly (both physically and psychologically) while in
the camp” (Klein, 48). Klein’s intuition is confirmed by the French phi-
losopher and president of the “Commission Enseignement de la Shoah”
Élisabeth de Fontenay, who, in her massive work Le Silence des bêtes,
explicitly brings to our attention how many Jewish thinkers of the twen-
tieth century (and Levi is among them) inscribed a concern about the
fate of animals within their corpus (741–748).14 The issue, then, is no
longer whether the comparison between our modern slaughter of ani-
mals and the murder of millions of Jews is logically and ethically justifi-
able. Instead, at stake there is, on the one hand, the use and abuse of a
human-animal divide whose representative dichotomy allows exploita-
tion and oppression of those who are identified as being on the animal
side. On the other hand, the question lies with how we can bear witness
for those who cannot speak our language (almost) at all, such as animals,
or for those who cannot speak anymore, such as those who have died in
a concentration camp, or, as Levi writes, have come back mute (“è tor-
nato muto” SeS, OII 1056). As Klein points out at the end of her article,
Levi’s strongest legacy seems to consist in his ability to give to these voice-
less creatures “a lasting voice of dignity and self-respect” (49). We will
return to the link between animals, suffering, and compassion in the
following chapter.
To assert the link between animals, representation, and testimony in
Primo Levi’s oeuvre, though, is just establishing the ground on which the
edifice of his animal imagery is built. This edifice does not have the infer-
nal atmosphere of the famous skyscraper described by Horkheimer in his
critique of animal exploitation in capitalist societies.15 Yet, it still repre-
sents a challenge to any consolidated theory according to which the
human is not only the pure and essential peak of history and creation, but
is also separated from the entire rest of the animal kingdom by an impass-
able abyss. Actually, Levi’s literary animals can be interpreted as both
agents of and witnesses to the radical deconstruction of anthropocen-
trism that has in the last decade taken the name of “the question of the
animal.”
According to Matthew Calarco, this “question of the animal” is one of
the central issues in contemporary critical discourse, and it is primarily
marked by a double concern: first for the being of animals, or “animality,”
and secondly for the human-animal distinction (Calarco, 2). Moreover,
12 D. Benvegnù
the ambiguity of the genitive in the expression “the question of the ani-
mal,” forces upon us a questioning that comes from an animal which
faces us, whose gaze seems to call our own existence and the ways in
which we narrate it into question. If once again we consider that this
animal can also be the human-animal [animale-uomo] Levi observed in
Auschwitz,16 we can easily recognize how his work might play a major
role in this inquiry.
Several times Levi makes explicit connections between his experience
in Auschwitz and the zoological interests he carried throughout his liter-
ary work. For instance, already in Se questo è un uomo, Levi describes
Auschwitz as a “gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale” (SQU, OI 83)
[a giant biological and social experiment]. In a famous passage of his
second book about the tragically picaresque journey from the concentra-
tion camp back to his home in Turin, Levi instead compares his own
observations about his fellow prisoners to those of a “naturalista che stu-
dia le attività di un animale dagli istinti complessi” (LT, OI 250) [natural-
ist studying the activities of an animal with complex instincts]. Levi’s
attention was thus focused not merely on the human, but rather on the
human animal, exploring both the common animality we share with
other creatures and the specific differences of our species. This naturalistic
attitude, however, does not focus exclusively on the various literary char-
acters he describes, but it is also oriented toward the author himself. For
example, in one of the short stories that composed Il sistema periodico
[The Periodic Table], Levi analyses his own animality in Auschwitz:
Se non si comincia da bambini, imparare a rubare non è facile; mi erano

occorsi diversi mesi per reprimere i comandamenti morali e per acquisire le
tecniche necessarie, e ad un certo punto mi ero accorto (con un balenio di
riso, un pizzico di ambizione soddisfatta) di stare rivivendo, io dottorino
per bene, un cane vittoriano e darwiniano che viene deportato, e diventa
ladro per vivere nel suo “Lager” nel Klondike, il grande Buck del Richiamo
della foresta. Rubavo come lui e come le volpi: ad ogni occasione favorevole,
ma con astuzia sorniona e senza espormi. Rubavo tutto, salvo il pane dei
miei compagni. (SP, OI 860)
[If you do not begin as a child, learning how to steal is not easy; it had
taken me several months before I could repress the moral commandments
and acquired the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realized
(with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliv-
ing—me, a respectable little university graduate—the involution-evolution
of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian, Darwinian dog who is deported
and becomes a thief in order to live in his Klondike Lager—the great Buck
of The Call of the Wild. I stole like him and like the foxes: at every favorable
opportunity but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole
everything except the bread of my companions. (PT 140)]
As Cicioni has pointed out, in this passage a certain Darwinian posi-

tivism that indeed pertained to Levi “is at the same time reiterated and
transcended” (74). This means that Levi is playing here with the ant-
onyms evolution/involution: if to survive he had to become dog-like or
fox-like, to return to an allegedly less complex form of life (pre-human,
according to the vocabulary of the public lecture picked up by Farrell), at
the same time this very transformation allowed him to pass through the
unnatural Selektion of Auschwitz. More importantly, though, in this pas-
sage Levi is also forcing us, the readers, to imagine his own experience in
and of the concentration camp through the lenses of a literary animal,
whose status is ambiguously both real and fictional. Consequently, to
have just a partial idea of what Levi’s metamorphosis during his impris-
onment was, we are asked to reflect not only on the ethological and psy-
chological value of his animal comparison, but also on its representational
and literary aspects, on its overall testimonial quality. For instance, we
might wonder how this animal element works within the whole system
of Levi’s testimony: are these animal images a recurrent theme? Are they
accessory or do they signify a fundamental and conscious strategy of his
testimony? And finally: is this link between animal representations and
testimony part of the whole of Levi’s oeuvre? How does it fit within the
more public and prosaic activities exemplified by the 1979 lecture on
racial intolerance?
To answer these questions and thus understand the specificity of Levi’s
use of animal representations in his work, we need to focus preliminarily
on two issues. On the one hand, we must explore the nexus between
testimony and representability and how it fits Levi’s own witnessing. On
the other hand, we must instead investigate the contemporary debate on
what Copeland has called “literary animal studies” (Copeland 2012). It is
14 D. Benvegnù
my belief, in fact, that these two otherwise disparate and discrete fields
find in Levi’s work a complex but original convergence and resolution,
valid both ethically and aesthetically.
1.1 T
estimony, Identification, Literary
Animals
For no other circumstance in human history have scholars questioned the
possibility of understanding and describing the enormity of an event as
they have for the Holocaust. The destiny of millions of prisoners, the
large majority of whom were Jews, in Nazi Germany not only has been
considered “a watershed event that divides culture into a before and an
after” (Berger and Gronin, 2), but also forced the survivors and in general
those still alive after 1945 to ask fundamental questions “about the politi-
cal, social, cultural, and theological constructs of western civilization”
(Kremer, xxi), traditional humanism included. Moreover, and despite the
unanimous claim for the necessity to remember what happened, the
Holocaust has offered a unique example for testing not only memory
itself, but also what Kremer has called “the propriety and ‘limits of repre-
sentation’” (xxi). Primo Levi himself challenges his readers and paradoxi-
cally his own account to designate and comprehend an experience that is
beyond words: as he writes at the very beginning of Se questo è un uomo,
“la nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questa offesa, la demol-
izione di un uomo” (SQU, OI 20) [our language lacks words to express
this offence, the demolition of a man]. The amount of scholarship alone
on whether there is a human language adequate for the description, con-
ceptualization, and understanding of Auschwitz is therefore overwhelm-
ing. In the last few years, however, a new tendency has seemed to prevail:
analyzing the Holocaust within the theoretical frame of trauma studies,
several scholars have compared the difficulty of bearing witness to what
happened in the concentration camps to the experience of the sublime as
it has been theorized in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.17 Other scholars have
nonetheless criticized this approach, underlining the risk of aestheticizing
an event that does not exclusively belong to the realm of aesthetical
aporias and philosophical melancholia. Specifically, LaCapra has pointed

out that an accompanying phenomenon of this tendency is “the collapse,
via the sublime and its excess, of any distinction between event and expe-
rience, both of which exceed knowledge and representation to the point
of becoming ineffable, yet paradoxically demanding impossible testi-
mony” (LaCapra, 65). According to LaCapra, this first collapse brings a
second conflation of subject positions that may well involve the confu-
sion of empathy or compassion with identification, while for him
“empathic unsettlement or compassion respectful of the other does not
mean identification, denial of important differences, and appropriation
or incorporation” (66).
This link between the limits of representation and identification in
Holocaust witnesses has been specifically explored in a book published in
2004 and entitled The Holocaust and the Postmodern. In this volume, the
author Robert Eaglestone argues that postmodernism, especially in the
work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, is, pace Habermas, a
deeply engaged response to the Holocaust. More importantly, in the first
part devoted to reading the Holocaust and literature, he follows a sugges-
tion made by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and claims that testimony is
a new and singular literary genre because it imposes over its readers a
different understanding of the process of identification. Testimonial lit-
erature is in fact marked, Eaglestone asserts, by a fundamental paradox:
“despite the impossibility of understanding, and the admonition made
against identifying with the victims, Holocaust testimonies are read and
the readers do identify with narrators and other characters, precisely
because that is what they expect to do in reading” (Eaglestone 37).
Eaglestone begins his investigation of the relationships between the
issue of identification and the genre of testimony by asking why Primo
Levi is fascinating to read, but, according to him, not pleasurable (15).
What he means is explained through the analysis of what he calls “Levi’s
smile.” Eaglestone refers to a famous episode Levi includes in the seventh
chapter of his last work on the Holocaust, I sommersi e i salvati, published
in 1986. As he had done in the school edition of Se questo è un uomo
prepared for Einaudi in 1976, Levi collects in this section some of the
questions that are supposedly the most common he has been asked since
he began his activity as public witness of the Holocaust. As Eaglestone
16 D. Benvegnù
reports, in this episode Levi recalls “con un sorriso” (SeS, OII 1115) [with
a smile] a discussion in a fifth-grade class when one of the students asked
him why he did not escape from Auschwitz and went on explaining to
the writer how he could have done it. Levi is clearly amused but troubled
by the boy’s logic, especially because
Nei suoi limiti, mi pare che l’episodio illustri bene la spaccatura che esiste,
e che si va allargando di anno in anno, fra le cose com’erano “laggiù” e le
cose quali vengono rappresentate dalla immaginazione corrente, alimen-
tata da libri, film e miti approssimativi. Essa, fatalmente, slitta verso la
semplificazione e lo stereotipo; vorrei porre un argine contro questa deriva.
In pari tempo, vorrei però ricordare che non si tratta di un fenomeno ris-
tretto alla percezione del passato prossimo né delle tragedie storiche: è assai
più generale, fa parte di una nostra difficoltà o incapacità di percepire le
esperienze altrui, che è tanto più pronunciata quanto più queste sono lon-
tane dalle nostre nel tempo, nello spazio o nella qualità. (1115–1116)
[Within its limits, it seems to me that this episode illustrates quite well
the gap that exists and grows wider every year between things as they were
down there and as they are represented by the current imagination fed by
approximate books, films and myths. It slides fatally toward simplification
and stereotypes; I would like here to erect a dyke against this trend. At the
same time, however, I would like to point out that this is not a phenome-
non confined to the perception of the near past and historical tragedies; it
is much more general; it is part of our difficulty or inability to perceive the
experience of others, which is all the more pronounced the further these
experiences are from ours in time, space, or quality. (DS 127–128)]
Eaglestone uses Levi’s story to stress how it is not only children who
make the identification exhibited by the fifth grader. Instead, readers of
testimonial literature in general tend to identify themselves with the
victims, willingly or unwillingly, often confusing what might look like
an adventure for a testimony and vice versa. The gap, the “spaccatura”
noticed by Levi between things as they were in Auschwitz and things as
they are presented by the current imagination, then, becomes “not sim-
ply an epistemological problem about other minds: it is an ethical con-
cern” (22). In fact, while through identification the incomprehensible
seems to become comprehensible, Levi reminds us that instead one

cannot—or perhaps one must not—understand what happened “per-
ché comprendere è quasi giustificare” (OI 197) [because to understand
is almost to justify]. Moreover, this identification happens, despite any
wish for the contrary, because we expect identification to happen when
we read prose narrative (Eaglestone, 23), that is to say because of our
basic assumptions about narratives and reading. Although Eaglestone
acknowledges that identification as historical, communicative, and lin-
guistic event cannot be explained clearly, nonetheless—he continues—
it happens and lies at the very heart of the mimetic process, namely of
the whole Western thinking about literature. For instance, the impor-
tance of identification has been recently rediscovered by Martha
Nussbaum—“a neo-Aristotelian philosopher,” according to Eaglestone
(27), and definitely one of the most influential contemporary American
moral thinkers—as central for the moral significance of literature. In
Poetic Justice and in other essays, Nussbaum explores how the literary
imagination is an essential ingredient of impartial and just public dis-
course and democratic societies. Her analysis focuses, among other
issues, on how “realist social novels” such as, tellingly, Dickens’s Hard
Times, help the development of a kind of social sympathy that might
allow those judging to understand better the persons they have to judge
(Nussbaum 1995, 87). As Eaglestone points out, Nussbaum suggests
that readers identify with characters and, in a way, enact their stories:
this imaginary enactment is meant to make readers in general, and
judges in particular, “more sensitive and able to respond to other peo-
ple’s pain and the moral demands placed on us” (Eaglestone, 27).
Although Nussbaum’s proposal has genuine merits, Levi and other sur-
vivor writers warn—or in Levi’s words, want to “porre un argine” [to
erect a dyke]—precisely against a similar over-comprehensive identifica-
tion between readers and the characters and events of a testimony.
Therefore, not only they “do not believe that they can or should be iden-
tified with, even through their testimony” (Eaglestone, 28), but they also
applied in their memories a series of strategies aimed to avoid a pure and
simple emphatic identification between the author or narrator, the “char-
acters,” and the readers.18 As Eaglestone stresses,
18 D. Benvegnù
many forms of prose writing encourage identification and while testimony

cannot but do this, it at the same time aims to prohibit identification, on
epistemological grounds (a reader really cannot become, or become identi-
fied, with the narrator of a testimony: any such identification is an illusion)
and on ethical ground (a reader should not become identified with a nar-
rator of a testimony, as it reduces and ‘normalizes’ or consumes the
otherness of the narrator’s experience and the illusion that such an identi-
fication creates is possibly pernicious.) (42–43)
Inevitably, this very process creates a “doubleness” which is thus central

to the genre of testimony because it both “leads to identification and
away from it simultaneously” (Eaglestone, 43). In order to achieve this
duplicity, writers utilize several textual and meta-textual tropes and strat-
egies, such as the use of historical evidence and style, the narrative fram-
ing, the way the flow of the narration is interrupted or disrupted,
moments of excessive identification, and so on.19 All these strategies give
birth to a new genre, “testimony,” which is both familiar and unfamiliar,
unheimlich, uncanny, and which therefore traces the limits of our own
human language and rhetoric with the glimpse of what is and should
remain incomprehensibly other.
This otherness or alterity challenges what Levinas has called “the privi-
leges of humanity of which humanism had considered itself the reposi-
tory” (Levinas 1990, 281), both externally—that is to say the exclusion
of what has been historically and socially labeled as inhuman or not-
human—and internally—the distinction in each human being between
zoe (the simple fact of living common to all living creatures) and bios (the
social form of living more appropriate to human animals).20 Relying on
the work of Blanchot and Kofman on Robert Antelme, another survivor
writer, Eaglestone concludes that this double motion, which accepts the
possibility of a human and it is open to its inevitable failures and limits,
finds its meaning in the interplay between the animality we share with
the other animals and our own human specificity (338). The genre of
testimony is in general marked by this complex tension.
This last quotation gathers animality and humanity, and thus leads us
to discuss literary animal studies and their function within the large spec-
trum of the Humanitas. At the very beginning of her critical introduction
to what was in 2012 a still emerging field, Weil notices correctly that “in
the past few years, there has been an explosion of conferences, books, and
discussion networks around the question of the animal” (Weil, 3). If the
recent “animal turn” has been indeed impressive for volume and atten-
tion, we can however trace the origin of this question back to the seven-
ties. It is actually a double origin, which accordingly gave birth also to a
double focus: prevalently ethical and dealing with what we might pre-
liminarily call the “real” animals on the one hand, and on the other
instead more aesthetical, keen on exploring the symbolic presence of ani-
mals in cultural products. The key source of the former can be pinpointed
as the polemical outcry created by the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal
Liberation in 1975. As it is well known, in this book Singer exposes the
often hidden but definitely atrocious realities of today’s factory farms and
animal experimentation, claiming for a “liberation” of animals from
human exploitation that, although it was received critically for its termi-
nology, inspired a worldwide movement to transform our attitude to ani-
mals. Moreover, if Singer’s book was not the only one in that period to
expose the cruelty we inflict on other creatures, it has the merit to publi-
cize the term “speciesism” to name our systematic disregard of non-
human animals.21 This term stuck and “anti-speciesism” has become the
current label under which a large majority of the animal-rights move-
ment lies.
The latter, more aesthetical, attention toward the question of the ani-
mal might be instead dated back to a very influential essay originally
written in 1977 by the art critic John Berger. In his article “Why Look at
Animals?” Berger explores the marginalization of animals within modern
Western societies and offers an investigation of why in our contemporary
cultures “animals are always the observed. (…) The fact that they can
observe us has lost all significance” (Berger, 16). His essay begins, how-
ever, by noting how for millennia animals acted as intercessors between
man and their origin, between man and nature. Non-human animals—
Berger continues—“are both like and unlike man” (6) and therefore they
have been considered able to respond to the human gaze in an ambiguous
but evocative way. This is the reason why, according to him, “the first
metaphor was animal” and the whole relation between the human and
the other animals was metaphoric: “within that relation what the two
20 D. Benvegnù
terms—man and animal—shared in common revealed what differenti-

ated them. And vice versa” (7).22 This uncanny alterity of animals, then
translated into human symbolic language and animal representations, has
been however first marginalized and then co-opted “into the family and
into the spectacle” by the increasingly capitalistic industrialization and
postindustrialization of Western societies. According to Berger, what
were once the disturbing animal dreams of humanity, still testified in the
work of Grandville, have become alternatively the normalized familiar-
ization of Walt Disney or the lethargic and depriving exhibition displayed
in modern zoos (15–27).
Berger’s critique invited especially art-historians to look at animal rep-
resentations with a new attention on those artifacts capable of preserving
a resistance against this normalizing and consumerist tendency. Baker’s
The Postmodern Animal represents one of the most advanced surveys of
this focus on animal representations in modern and contemporary art,
investigating how “postmodern” animal imageries transgress the limits of
our stereotyped idea of the human-animal divide (Baker 2000). However,
even literary studies, albeit late, began to explore the possibility of a new
emphasis on animals capable of challenging both a certain legacy of
humanism and the traditional idea of human subjectivity. This necessary
transition has been especially emphasized in the 2009 issue of the PMLA
largely devoted to animal studies. Although disappointingly engrossed
almost exclusively by the Anglophone and Francophone worlds, several
contributions of the PMLA have tried to respond to the question posed
by Marianne DeKoven in her guest column: Why Animals Now? (DeKoven
2009). The most theoretically poignant response came from Cary Wolfe.23
In his essay entitled “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the
Humanities,” Wolfe invokes Jacques Derrida in order to claim that if
Animal Studies wants to be something other than a mere thematics, it
must fundamentally challenge “the schema of the knowing subject and
its anthropocentric underpinnings sustained and reproduced in the cur-
rent disciplinary protocol of cultural studies (not to mention literary
studies)” (Wolfe 2009, 568–569). Only such an approach would in fact
intersect
with the larger problematic of posthumanism, not in the sense of some

fantasy of transcending human embodiment (…) but rather in the sense of
returning us precisely to the thickness and finitude of human embodiment

and to human evolution as itself a specific form of animality, one that is
unique and different from other forms but no more different, perhaps,
than an orangutan is from a starfish. (572)
The conclusion is simple: if the Animal Studies wants to overcome the

human-animal divide as it has been depicted by Western anthropocen-
trism, it will have to return “to a new sense of the materiality and particu-
larity not just of the animal and its multitude of forms but also of that
animal called human” (572).
Wolfe’s important theoretical advice will play a role in my analysis of
Levi’s literary animals. Yet, his article does not offer any practical guid-
ance on how to approach animal imageries at work in different authors.
This very issue is instead at the core of a more recent and already quoted
piece written by Marion Copeland, entitled “Literary Animal Studies in
2012: Where We Are, Where We Are Going,” published in Anthrozoos in
August 2012. Although Copeland’s article relies on an unchallenged defi-
nition of “identification,” mostly taken from the already discussed theory
of Nussbaum’s literary imagination, it has the merit of trying to develop
what the author calls “a critical theory of animal issues in fiction.”
Explicitly drawing on an earlier but shorter article written by the same
Copeland and Kenneth Shapiro in 2005, as well as on the work of Randy
Malamud, Marian Scholtmeijer, and Erica Fudge, this new piece con-
firms what seem to be the three major approaches to a critical theory
suited to any literary animal study or review:
1. To “deconstruct reductive, disrespectful ways of presenting nonhuman

animals”
2. To “evaluate the degree to which the author represents the animal ‘in
itself,’ both as an experiencing individual and as a species-typical way of
living in the world,” and
3. To analyze the “human-animal relationships in the work at hand,” add-
ing that “it is not enough to describe instances of such relationships.
The critical task is to explicate the form of the relationship and to place
it in the universe of possible relationships—from the animal as forgot-
ten resource for a consumer (the steak, medium rare) to the animal as
more or less equal partner in a relationship—the fruit of which is a com-
mon project, a shared world.” (92)24
22 D. Benvegnù
If these three points constitute the grounds on which any literary ani-
mal criticism ought to be built—present study included—Copeland
adds, however, that literary animal studies should also have what she calls
a “faith in the power of imagination to stretch beyond the anthropocen-
tric barrier Western culture has adopted” (94). Whether we name this
imagination as “sympathetic” or “metamorphic,” according to Copeland
it has to engage critically the issue of our inevitable anthropomorphism.
Nevertheless, the examples she offers at the end of her article seem to sug-
gest a return to a kind of syncretic, if not mystic, identification process
according to which
the roots of Literary Animal Studies lie in reminding us of the power of

humans’ earliest response to the world and those they shared it with and
from whom they had evolved. The arts still retain the power to rekindle
that deep time when the boundary between human and animal was perme-
able, when humans knew they were one among many other animals, and
anthropocentrism had not yet emerged to deny that kinship. (102)
This final insight is indeed suggestive, but I do not believe this some-
how regressive direction, still based upon processes of identifying with a
mythical past, is the only practicable one. Instead, literary imagination
can shape the human-animal relationship in ways that not only do not
suggest identification and final pacifying synthesis, but offer to both par-
ties involved in the event a deep, uncanny, encounter with an alterity that
cannot be easily settled or dialectically resolved. Such an at times disturb-
ing literary encounter does not eliminate either a potential sympathetic
response and compassion, but instead triggers the possibility of what Levi
calls “fare ‘gli altri’ partecipi” (SQU, OI 5), namely, make “the others”
participate in a community that goes beyond (our human) intraspecific
interests.
Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer are pioneers in this as yet
barely explored path. As early as 1996 the two scholars began analyzing
some postmodern stories to suggest that “the only real challenge to the
way humans presently construct and understand their relationship to
nature can be found at the narrative level” (Raglon and Scholtmeijer
1996, 19). Working within the largest context of ecocriticism, they did
not simply defend storytelling, that is, literature, as a way of knowing the
natural world, but more importantly they pointed out how postmodern
stories “may dwell upon the difficulty of referring to nature and the natu-
ral animal” (38). This meta-epistemological difficulty forces readers to
reflect upon the stories’, as well as their own, construction in the process
of referring to nature, therefore shifting rather than removing “the ground
for understanding” (38). The impossibility of a plain reading and an
unconscious “mimesis” is developed further in a second article by the
same two authors, published five years later. Still framed as ecocriticism
rather than as literary animal studies, this newer piece examines how
what we like to call “nature” seems to resist, at least partially, any narrative
at all. Examining the different animal representations of Gordimer,
Hoban, and Kafka, Raglon and Scholtmeijer conclude that “while we
might attempt to make a symbol of Gordimer’s termite queen, or Hoban’s
turtle, or Kafka’s chimpanzee, ultimately each of these creatures eludes
capture” by the author as well as by the readers (Raglon and Scholtmeijer
2001, 261).
This elusion is accomplished through a double process. On the one
hand, these animal representations do not and cannot simply represent
the ‘real’ animal, and therefore they are meant to avoid our usual sym-
bolic incorporation and practical commodification of animals as objects
(Baker 2001, 193). On the other hand, though, these very animal rep-
resentations also lie on some physical relationship with or knowledge of
the (body of ) real animals, and they thus “do have consequences for
living animals” too (197), namely they might trigger an ethical response.
Ultimately, this double movement of suggested incorporation and par-
tial elusion created by certain animal representations can also challenge
the structure of binary oppositions that support the identity of a reader
who must deal with a series of images that lie at the threshold between
the figural (the symbolic value of animals in literature) and the real (our
experience of their embodiment and finitude, so close to the human
one). According to Glenney Boogs, animal representations can function
as the relay between the representational (bios) and the physical (zoē)
that the modern state creates (39) and thus “mark the limit of the sub-
ject and reveal the mechanisms of its functioning” (19). Experiencing
certain animals through the medium of literature or art has therefore the
24 D. Benvegnù
special power to “generate a process of destabilization” that affects the

core of the liberal subject (36). This self-revelatory experience offered by
animal representations can be traumatic for the reader, who is framed
between a series of double tensions (ontologically, epistemologically,
ethically, etc.) capable of displaying the different fissures of his own
structure and of his relationships with what it is other-than-self. This is
the reason why Weil compares animal studies to trauma studies: like
trauma studies, she writes, animal studies
stretch to the limit questions of language, epistemology, and ethics that

have been raised in various ways (…): how to understand and give voice to
others or to experiences that seem impervious to our means of understand-
ing; how to attend to difference without appropriating or distorting; how
to hear and acknowledge what it may not be possible to say. (Weil 2012, 6–7)
Weil’s comment emphasizes how both animal studies and trauma

studies raise questions about how one can give testimony to an experi-
ence that cannot be spoken or that may be distorted by speaking it. It also
suggests, once again, that the impossibility of identifying completely with
the animal, its uncanny presence in the structure of our knowledge, can
be used as a fruitfully true tension between different spheres of percep-
tion and comprehension of the world.
From this perspective, the function performed by certain animal repre-
sentations can be compared to what anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt
Tsing has called “friction.” Working within a larger ecological frame, both
practical and theoretical, Tsing names “friction” the interactions in which
cultures are continually co-produced, or, as she writes, “the awkward,
unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across differ-
ence” (Tsing 2005, 4). In a chapter of her book devoted to non-human
species and the production of knowledge, Tsing offers a further concep-
tual insight on how this “friction” works, operating in what she calls
“powerful projects of categorization, including development and conser-
vation (as well as your scholarly reading practices, whatever they may be)”
(172). This overlap between ecological issues and reading practices—
between the “real” encounters with animals and the “symbolic” systems of
knowledge offered, in our case, by literature—is crucial. According to
Tsing, in fact, “our categories and discriminations always produce zones

of ‘boredom’ and unreadability” (172). She names these zones gaps: they
“develop in the seams of universal projects; they are found where univer-
sals have not been successful in setting all the terms” (202). “Gaps” are
not good or bad per se, but they are sites of unspeakability within recog-
nizable or acceptable languages or hegemonic discourses; they are almost
blind and mute spaces in which different epistemai get in touch and react
to each other within a given system of knowledge. According to Tsing,
only a devoted attention to these gaps offers us the possibility to gain
authentic knowledge: they in fact reveal knowledge as it grows through
the frictions of encounter in a world of interconnected complexities,
without neglecting to explore what are the values of those universals
which are still “at the heart of contemporary humanist projects” (7). In
other words, paying attention to these “gaps” does not reject once and for
all the whole system of universal knowledge embodied by the humanistic
tradition, but instead explores those (more-than-metaphorical) moments
or spaces in which different relationships of empowerment and subjectiv-
ity are at stake.
Given the already mentioned tension and ambiguity of animal repre-
sentations, we can easily see how they might function as “gaps” as well.
Specifically, if we borrow from Akira Lippit the concept of “animeta-
phor,” we recognize that “the animal brings to language something that is
not a part of language and remains within language as a foreign presence”
(Lippit, 166). Animals can therefore work in a text as a living, represen-
tational metaphor that exceeds, complicates, and somehow denies meta-
phorization itself. As Lippit pointed out, “because the animal is said to
lack the capacity for language, its function in language can only appear as
another expression, as a metaphor that originates elsewhere, is transferred
from elsewhere” (166). In a way, wittingly or not, any representation of
an animal in art points toward the alterity of language, or, if we prefer, its
unconscious. In this sense, then, literary animals can indeed produce
zones of friction, opacity, and partial unreadability within what has been
the hegemonic discourse of Western humanism and its legacy. A goal of
my analysis of Levi’s work is to demonstrate how animals in literary texts
force upon readers a question about how our identity as humans has been
built and uncritically transmitted.
26 D. Benvegnù
1.2 Animal Studies and Italian Literature

There is no doubt that Animal Studies as a field deals with a series of
interdisciplinary issues that not only have a peculiar relevance in aca-
demic scholarship, but they have also an impact on a larger audience and
contemporary society in general. Animal Studies engages in fact transver-
sally not exclusively the humanities and the sciences, but also different
cultures and traditions. Nevertheless, any survey of what has been pro-
duced in this field in the last twenty-five years shows that especially
Literary Animal Studies scholars have focused heavily on the Anglophone
tradition, with some exceptions coming from the Francophone world or
from Postcolonial Studies. This attitude is pushed even further by some
authors, who have practically come to declare the superiority of the
Anglo-American approach to animals, while southern European coun-
tries like Italy and Spain, according to them overly influenced by Roman
Catholicism, are somehow shamefully late, if not inevitably reactionary
(Simons 2002, 10–11). It is undoubtedly true that the Anglo-American
academe has led the discussion about both animal treatment and animal
representations: the already mentioned names of Peter Singer and John
Berger testify to this leadership. However, in the last two decades, schol-
ars coming from other cultures and traditions have stepped into the
debate, often with ideas and approaches able to play significant roles.
This is the case, for instance, of Italy.
As it is well known, Italian cultural and literary production is histori-
cally rooted in a long-standing humanistic tradition that has often made
the human being the measure by which life is defined and judged. Yet,
modern and contemporary Italian writers have increasingly been looking
not only at alternative narratives within that humanistic tradition, but
also directly at non-human animal life in different terms, raising aesthetic
and ethical questions about the traditional divide between the human
and the non-human. Well-known scholars such as Giorgio Agamben,
Roberto Esposito, and Roberto Marchesini witness to Italy’s recent atten-
tion toward animals and the relationships between humanism and ani-
mality. They have not only offered original speculative contributions to
our contemporary re-thinking of the politics surrounding human and
non-human life, but their work also generated a new wave of Italian
scholarship on the similar topics.25 We might recall here, just to name a

few, Massimo Filippi and Marco Maurizi, whose interesting works com-
bine Agamben’s post-Heideggerian approach with Adorno’s critical and
political theory; Claudia Furlanetto and Eliana Villalta, elaborating sug-
gestions coming from Jacques Derrida’s “animal turn;” or even such
younger thinkers as Leonardo Caffo, who instead seems to combine con-
tinental philosophy with the established tradition of Anglophone (and
analytical) thought on moral issues. This new focus has also led to the
creation of journals completely devoted to Animal Studies, first online,
the web-journal Asinus Novus, and then in print, the relatively newborn
(2012) Animal Studies: Rivista italiana di antispecismo, which aims to
become the very place where the contemporary debate on humans and
animals is presented for and carried out by the increasingly interested
Italian audience.26
Even in such a blossoming landscape, though, a broad philosophical
approach to Animal Studies dominates the scene, and, as a result, very
few scholars engage literary Italian animals. When they do, two main
tendencies are often displayed. On the one hand, a small number of
books deal with a specific author and their animal imagery. The final goal
of almost all these rare studies—even when they stand out for both depth
and breadth of inquiry27—is to characterize the poetics of the author
under study. Therefore, the animal imagery is not usually explored in
terms of its ethical and epistemological consequences, but only as a privi-
leged entrance into the writer’s oeuvre.28 The recent publication of
Thinking Italian Animals, the first collection of essay truly devoted to the
connection between the use of animal representations in Italian literature
and film and the larger context of posthumanism represents an encourag-
ing exception to this tendency (Amberson and Past 2014).
More recent works that do not focus on singular authors but rather on
singular animals represents instead the other trend.29 The most important
example of this second type of scholarship is the massive work edited by
Gian Mario Anselmi e Gino Ruozzi entitled Animali della letteratura itali-
ana.30 Despite the good intentions expressed by the two editors in the intro-
duction and the often quite astonishing erudition and depth of the singular
explorations, these essays usually offer neither synthetic interpretations, nor
theoretical insights on animality. It is not a coincidence, then, that the
28 D. Benvegnù
volume belongs to a “trilogy” in which the other themes are respectively

“objects of Italian literature” and “literary banquets: food, dishes, and reci-
pes in Italian literature from Dante to Camilleri.” Animals are thus only one
theme among others: they do not seem to have—at least within the struc-
ture of this “trilogy”—any specific aesthetical or ethical characteristic capa-
ble of distancing them from, let’s say, a pack of cigarettes, or a recipe for
risotto.31
This relative paucity of studies on modern Italian literary animals
described above is surprising for at least a couple of reasons. First, because
the very uneven cultural and economic development which occurred in
Italy between the Unification in 1861 and the still problematic present
have provided artists and intellectuals with a peculiar point of view from
which they have explored the human-animal divide in its cultural, socio-
anthropological, and historical aspects. The presence of animals in mod-
ern and contemporary Italian authors is overwhelming and presents a
range of different geographical, historical, and cultural contexts and
approaches that few other European countries can offer. However, even
such extensive production mirrors the double sociocultural condition of
many Italian intellectuals, caught between the national (and interna-
tional) culture of progress and modernity, and a regional—in most cases
rural—context, with a strong and variegated sense of belatedness. As a
result, the disparate approaches to animals and animality offered by mod-
ern Italian literary texts reproduce the uneven and problematic modern-
ization and industrialization of the country. I believe that the geographical
and socioeconomic fragmentation of Italy would bring richness to
Literary Animal Studies as a comparative and transnational field, adding
dialectical complexity to a scholarly frame based on the Anglo-American
model we otherwise risk taking for granted.32
Secondly, because the significance of animals for Italian modernity has
been already underlined by two of the most important literary critics Italy
had after its unification. In his last public lecture in 1883, Francesco De
Sanctis—author of the first and still fundamental History of Italian
Literature (1870)—discussed in fact the importance of Darwinism in art,
stressing how the proximity between human and non-human animals
suggested by Darwin’s theories would offer refreshing perspectives to
modern Italian authors.33 De Sanctis’s death in December of the same
year did not allow any further exploration. However, another literary
critic, Giacomo Debenedetti, picked this very topic up more than seventy
years later and identified the peculiar entrance of Italian literature into
European modernity in the ways Italian authors represented the human-
animal divide and animality. Specifically, in the series of lectures he gave
in Rome at the end of the fifties (then collected posthumously as Il
romanzo del Novecento [The Novel of the Twentieth Century]), Debenedetti
pointed out that the modernity of Italian authors lies in their use of
uncanny animal representations. According to Debenedetti, these animal
representations are diverse attempts, by different authors, to fix on page a
sense and an intentionality that is perhaps non-articulable, non-declar-
able through words (Debenedetti 1971, 85). In other words, Debenedetti
recuperates De Sanctis’s insight on “animalismo” to stress that animals in
Italian literary works offer an encounter with a problematic reality that
philosophical and conceptual thought struggle to grasp. The animal
images Debenedetti highlights are in fact staged by Italian authors with-
out intellectual or rational explanations: as with Franz Marc’s famous ani-
mal paintings, non-human animals in Tozzi, Pirandello, Landolfi, and so
forth, escape our usual linguistic knowledge. As a result, the connection
between these animals, the writer, and the reader “è semmai quello che
deriva dall’essere tutti compartecipi, il mondo che appare, l’artista e il let-
tore, del fenomeno ‘vita’” [stems, perhaps, from the common participa-
tion of the world depicted, the artist and the reader in the phenomenon
of ‘life’ (85)]. This rationally mute but fully expressed “life” embodied by
literary animals as they appeared in modern Italian literature has thus a
double function. On the one hand, it connects and deconstructs the real
and symbolic spheres at stake in any cultural creation, suggesting a ten-
sion between two modalities of representation and interpretation—the
objective-scientific and the subjective-expressive—that are present at the
very core of every modern enterprise (see Latour 1993, 23–24). For
Debenedetti, the modernity of Italian writers arises from their ability to
create literary animals that in some ways reflect the division already affect-
ing modern subjectivity. On the other hand, charged with this excessive
and uncategorizable life, animal images seem to become blind spots for
conceptual thought. According to the Italian scholar, they elude the
30 D. Benvegnù
attempt made by the subject to incorporate their otherness through natu-

ralistic description (or its counterpart: symbolization) and the work of
synthesis, thus questioning the epistemological boundaries of the subject’s
discursive knowledge (Debenedetti 1971, 62, 154).
As we will see shortly, Levi’s work embodies both aspects of this Italian
originality. On the one hand, his literary animals are shaped by his expe-
riences of being a Northern Italian who had a professional career in the
scientific industry in a crucial moment of Italian industrialization. His
experiences with and understanding of the boundaries between human
and non-human have been therefore shaped by his regional milieu in
ways that were very different from, for instance, some of his contempo-
rary fellow writers from the rural South, for whom Levi had nonetheless
an ambiguous fascination. On the other hand, Levi’s animals engage with
the same set of issues about representations, conceptual thought, and life
as presented by Debenedetti. Yet, there is a difference between these two
great Jewish-Italian intellectuals. While Debenedetti was in fact able to
avoid the deportation, Levi’s work cannot but be interpreted also in the
light of what he experienced and saw in Auschwitz. In a way, we might
say that Levi’s modernity lies on both the technological advancement of
a newly industrialized country and the unrepresentable crisis of the
human he observed in the concentration camp, making his literary ani-
mals the perfect witnesses to what happened to (human and non-human)
life in the twentieth century.
1.3 Suffering, Techne, Creation

Despite the incredible variety of animal representations presented by
Levi’s literature, the vast majority of them are actually gathered around
three themes which I decided to name, respectively, suffering, techne (a
Greek term, etymologically derived from the Greek word τέχνη, and
often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art), and creation. Without
doubt, other organizations of such abundant material are theoretically
possible. However, a structure with these three themes in this precise
order displays, through its very progression, one of the assumptions that
informs the present volume. It is in fact this book’s aim to show that
1. Levi’s approach to non-human animals and animality moves from an

unquestionable bioethical origin (“Suffering”);
2. go through a deep and wide investigation of the relationships between
writing, techonology, and animality (“Techne”);
3. to then enter upon a creative intellectual project in which the animal
imagery both counterbalances the inevitable suffering of human and
non-human animals, and proposes a neither linear nor dualistic
understanding of the cosmos (“Creation”).
This movement is also partially replicated within each section, devoted

respectively to one of the three themes mentioned above. Every section
thus begins with the exploration of one of Levi’s works, usually an article
or a short essay, in which Levi makes a strong theoretical statement that
seems to justify his reputation as the last traditional humanist. Nonetheless,
every time Levi seems to draw a line between what is human and what is
not, according to the fixed image of the humanistic statue we have already
mentioned, he faces any number of troubles and contradictions. Despite
the apparent clarity of both his prose and his thought, in fact, each time
Levi attempts to reflect upon a sensitive issue using a binary system or
essentialist dichotomy—such as human versus non-human, in our case—
both his own experience and his own literature seem to rebel against him.
The outcome then, while it superficially appears to be a fundamental,
even fundamentalist, reassertion of a basic humanistic credo—to quote
Farrell’s sentence previously cited—shares instead features with some of
the most innovative, in some cases uncannily innovative, thinkers of the
twentieth century. A comparative analysis, both conceptually and histori-
cally, of Levi’s theoretical difficulties with some of the issues brought to
our attention by philosophers such as Peter Singer, Martin Heidegger,
Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida, just to name a few whose thoughts
will be discussed, reveals how his work challenges, often precisely via its
problematic contradictions, any essentialist discourse about the purity of
the human and its allegedly privileged place within the ecosystem.
For Levi’s readers, this should not be so surprising. One of the para-
digms of his literature is in fact the rejection of purity, which he instead
compares to “fascism.” This position is explicitly maintained in one of the
chapters of Levi’s chemical autobiography, Il sistema periodico:
32 D. Benvegnù
Sulle dispense stava scritto un dettaglio che alla prima lettura mi era sfug-
gito, e cioé che il cosí tenero e delicato zinco, cosí arrendevole davanti agli
acidi, che se ne fanno un solo boccone, si comporta invece in modo assai
diverso quando è molto puro: allora resiste ostinatamente all’attacco. Se ne
potevano trarre due conseguenze filosofiche tra loro contrastanti: l’elogio
della purezza, che protegge dal male come un usbergo; l’elogio
dell’impurezza, che dà adito ai mutamenti, cioè alla vita. Scartai la prima,
disgustosamente moralistica, e mi attardai a considerare la seconda, che mi
era piú congeniale. Perché la ruota giri, perché la vita viva, ci vogliono le
impurezze, e le impurezze delle impurezze: anche nel terreno, come è noto,
se ha da essere fertile.
Ci vuole il dissenso, il diverso, il grano di sale e di senape: il fascismo
non li vuole, li vieta, e per questo tu non sei fascista; vuole tutti uguali e tu
non sei uguale. Ma neppure la virtú immacolata esiste, o se esiste è detest-
abile. (SP, OI 768)
[The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped
me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which
gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different
fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One
could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusion: the praise
of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impu-
rity, which gives rises to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the
first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered to consider the second, which
I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived,
impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as
is known, if it is to be fertile.
Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism
does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it
wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue
does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.]
According to this account, Levi’s suspicion of purity finds its origin

during his university training in the early forties, and therefore belongs to
an interrogation about humanity that was largely due to the historical
circumstances, as the work of other contemporary authors seems to sug-
gest.34 However, Levi did not dismiss it after the war and the end of
Mussolini’s era. Rather, exposing the potential dangers of purity became
even more part of his literary endeavors, as Duschinsky has pointed out
in reference to Levi’s Italian translation of Mary Douglas’s Natural

Symbol—an enterprise undertaken for Einaudi more or less at the same
time of the publication of Il sistema periodico. Specifically, Duschinsky
notices how Levi’s writings indicate not solely the complicity of purity
discourses in the Holocaust, but “above all the need to make sense of and
evaluate such discourses as they appear in cruel actions our world today”
(313). We will see in the following chapters how specific discourses of
human purity can be and have been used to justify our cruel treatment of
non-human animals, and how this issue was indeed discussed publicly by
Levi on the Turinese newspaper La Stampa. Levi’s subsequent “embrace
of the organic, the feminine, and the earthly” (Magavern, 157) was there-
fore not an oddity, but a rejection of the masculine ideologies of purity
that have plagued the twentieth century and a fundamental element of
his intellectual life.
Levi’s preference for what is not pure—but is instead impure, cha-
otic, ambiguous, hybrid—is also testified by a seminal passage in Il
sistema periodico in which he describes the human being as a “centauro,
groviglio di carne e di mente, di alito divino e di polvere” (SP, OI 746)
[centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust]. This
metaphor of the centaur—widely replicated by Levi and, as we will see,
also applied to himself—immediately reveals how the animal is clearly
another element Levi uses to resist and denounce the attraction of
purity. However, once again it is not just the implicit duality of the
image that matters, but rather the term “groviglio” [tangle], which
addresses a unity made of elements that cannot be dialectically recon-
ciled. As Cicioni has pointed out, the notion of tangles is in fact so
recurrent in Levi’s writing that it seems to stand as a dyke against the
idea that his literature creates a “linear movement toward the ‘light’”
(Cicioni 2007, 137), whether this light refers to reason or to a general
ability to master reality. Therefore, even the animal element belongs to
what Cicioni calls the cognitive notion of tangles, “the uncertainty
experienced when facing cultural or ethical t angles that usually leads to
gaining new knowledge, which in Levi’s perspective is the main purpose
of life” (138). The epistemological similarity between these tangles and
what Tsing calls “friction” is quite striking and we will keep it in mind
throughout our exploration.
34 D. Benvegnù
This uncertain entanglement or friction is very much manifested when

we shift our focus from Levi’s theoretical or “philosophical” statements to
his more fictional and poetic production. Although he was not a system-
atic thinker at all, even in Levi’s work we might notice a tendency toward
what Cora Diamond has called “the difficulty of reality and the difficulty
of philosophy,” the idea that there are experiences of reality in relation to
which philosophical concepts and words encounter difficulty (Diamond
2003). It is thus fundamental to elaborate an intellectual practice that
resolves without eliminating this difficulty, and it is particularly signifi-
cant that Diamond picks as examples two writers who dealt, in very dif-
ferent ways, with “the question of the animal,” that is, J.M. Coetzee and
Ted Hughes. As Cary Wolfe has pointed out, when it comes to grasping
the exposure of the material body which we, as humans, share with other
animals, there is indeed a suggestion in Diamond “that imaginative and
literary projection can somehow achieve in this instance what proposi-
tional, syllogistic philosophy cannot achieve” (Wolfe 2008, 23). This very
thought seems to be true for Levi too, whose fiction carries a structure of
values and differences between what is human and what is not that is far
more complex, respectful of otherness, and insightful than his (few)
purely conceptual statements.
Every section moves thus from the philosophical and historical discus-
sion and contextualization of a single text toward a thorough exploration
of the given theme as it is presented in the entirety of Levi’s oeuvre.
Broadly speaking, this detailed textual survey reveals Levi’s ethical and
aesthetical care for the activity of writing. The representations of animals
and animality are in fact singularly crafted and more widely organized in
an almost meta-literary fashion, continuously referring and questioning
the very concept of writing both as a technology and as a practice. This
meta-literary function leads each section to end with an analysis of one or
two examples capable, this time, of demonstrating how Levi’s animal cre-
ation as it is presented in his fiction challenges his and our philosophical
discourses about human and animal natures, forcing instead the readers
to consider and embrace a nonlinear, nondualistic, in certain ways non-
mimetic literary creation. Through his fiction, in fact, Levi creates various
systems of differences that deny access to a clear identification with a
specific essence or nature. Instead, they reveal the very possibility of

becoming which lies at the bottom of his “more-than-human human-
ism.”35 As the fully reported passage about purity from Il sistema periodico
testifies, this becoming is the very possibility of new life and knowledge
that, in our case, refuses the violence implicit in the human/animal divide
as it is presented in the large majority of our anthropocentric tradition.
This effect is, however, never obtained through a plain rejection of the
discourse per se, as it happens in certain postmodern literature and phi-
losophy. Levi is too aware of the risks of any dialectics that begins with an
antithesis and ends confirming, via synthesis, the original thesis it was
trying to deny. Therefore, in his literature Levi never fully embraces what
we might call the subjective position of the animal, negating differences
to situate both the author and the reader on the alleged right side of a
binary opposition. It is not a coincidence that the pervasive, although
violent, opposition between what is purely human and what is not, with
the consequent dehumanization and animalization of those who are
oppressed, is the mark of the concentration camp as Levi experienced it
and describes it. Moreover, Levi was also aware of the risk of a simplifying
anti-anthropocentric position that refuses any form of anthropomor-
phism.36 Levi’s approach to the human-animal divide and to the issue of
animal imagery can instead be labeled as “critical,” that is to say, it aims
to liberate both human and non-human animals from the circumstances
that might enslave them.37 The animal representations created by Levi
have in fact the characteristic of challenging any consolidated idea about
the boundaries between humanity and animality without denying com-
passion or even a certain idea of re-enchantment and community. This
difficult double goal is achieved through what I would call “a double
impossibility,” both a concept and a practice that I will describe and ana-
lyze in the following chapters. However, even at this introductory phase,
we can at least say that the first impossibility comes from the inability of
certain protagonists of Levi’s literature to speak for themselves; while the
consequent, second, impossibility of identifying with these characters
offers the paradoxical ground for an understanding that is at the same
time before—in terms of shared, corporeal vulnerability—and beyond—
in terms of cosmological experience—the human-animal divide. This
36 D. Benvegnù
duplicity can be obtained only through a hybrid literary practice in which

limits and ambiguities are used to challenge the ordinary identificatory
approach of Western readers.
This last sentence leads us to discuss briefly a significant aspect of my
research. As I have already mentioned, almost all scholars of Levi agree on
the hybrid nature of his work. One of the goals of this book is to demon-
strate that this hybridity belongs to a general anti-mimetic strategy
according to which Levi’s work can be labeled as an animal testimony.
Animal representations not only signal Levi’s personal fascination for
other creatures, but they are also and foremost a fundamental element of
this anti-mimetic strategy and therefore of his testimony as a whole. If
this interpretation is correct—as I aim to prove—then the limits between
literary genres, although still active in general terms, tend nevertheless to
fade away and gather under the indeed powerfully disturbing category of
testimonial literature. Just one distinction seems to resist in my investiga-
tion of Levi’s literary production, namely, between his sometimes desire
to theorize according to universal categories in his more official work as
an intellectual, and his fiction, whether it is his commonly recognized
testimonies, or rather his poetry, his novels, or his science fiction.
However, such distinction not only marks some of Levi’s most apparent
contradictions, as I will prove, but it does not necessarily invalidate the
possibility to consider his fiction as a coherent and cohesive whole. This
is the reason why in the following chapters I will move quickly among
different literary genres: not because I do not believe these genres do not
affect the decisions and the results of writers in general, but because Levi
uses the thresholds between them to build a literature in which question-
ing the human-animal divide plays a significant role.
A second, in certain ways similar, remark can be made for the chronol-
ogy of Levi’s works. At first sight it might seem that I have not considered
in what follows the different stages of Levi’s literary career, and so I did
not take into account the specific personal and historical moments in
which he was writing. If this were the case, I would have made the same
mistake made by those scholars who, according to Alberto Cavaglion,
have labeled Levi as a “centauro” [centaur] without bearing in mind the
real history of his oeuvre and therefore misreading it as a synchronic
whole (Cavaglion 2002; Mattioda 2009). Whether Cavaglion’s critique is
appropriate as regards Levi’s scholarship or not, it does not affect my

book. Instead, every time I find it appropriate and useful, I offer not only
a general historical account of the context in which a specific Levi’s pub-
lication found its space and the traditions in which he was elaborating his
own thoughts, but also the possible inconsistencies with other moments
of his literary production. Moreover, Levi himself seems to suggest a read-
ing of his works that if it is not synchronic per se, still returns constantly
and problematically to its own tracks, drawing on specific themes that
therefore became organic parts of his whole oeuvre as they were almost
synchronic. As several scholars have pointed out, between Levi’s different
books there are unique intertextual and hypertextual relationships that
force readers to necessarily move back and forth among the disparate
moments of his career to achieve an overall interpretation. Even the pro-
gression I will be using as a structure for this book does not thus suggest
a linear chronological development, but an epistemological loop, moving
back and forth toward reconstructive knowledge instead of extensionist
progress (cf. Kim 2015, 287).
It is in this context of textual dispersion and diffusion that we must
also read Levi’s reply to Adorno’s well-known but often misquoted pro-
nouncement about the state of poetry after Auschwitz. Interviewed by
Giulio Nascimbeni in 1984 about his first collection of poems, Levi
maintains that, contrarily to the German philosopher,
Allora mi sembrò che la poesia fosse più adatta della prosa per esprimere
quello che mi pesava dentro. Dicendo poesia, non penso a niente di lirico.
In quegli anni, semmai, avrei riformulato le parole di Adorno: dopo
Auschwitz non si può più fare poesia se non su Auschwitz. (CI 137)
[At that point, I thought that poetry was more appropriate than prose to
express what I had inside me. By saying poetry I am not thinking of lyrics.
In those years I would have amended Adorno’s statement: after Auschwitz,
we cannot write poems except about Auschwitz.]
Such comment on Adorno’s famous statement is revealing for at least a

couple of reasons.
On the one hand, it suggests that Levi has a concept of poetry that
does not necessarily match the idea of (lyric) poetry embodied by main-
stream Italian tradition. Although he indeed distinguishes poetry from
38 D. Benvegnù
prose, the implicit boundaries he draws here suggest an unusually wide

understanding of what is “poetic,” capable of incorporating a large sec-
tion of his whole literary production, whether it is in actual verses or
not.38 This does not go without consequences, of course. Levi mentioned
several times his inability to completely understand poetry, his own
included, because it seemed to him that both the poetic impulse and the
poetic form come from something “che la mia metà razionale continua a
considerare innaturale” (AOI, OII 517) [that my rational half keeps con-
sidering unnatural]. As a result, though, poetry does not epistemologi-
cally correspond for him to that comprehension of the world according
to which we are forced to simplify our experiences and “ridurre il conos-
cibile a schema” (SeS, OII 1017) [to reduce the knowable to an outline;
CW, 2430]. For this latter goal, we have—Levi states—“il linguaggio ed
il pensiero concettuale” (1017) [language and conceptual thought39].
Instead, poetry reproduces that “groviglio infinito e indefinito” (1017)
[infinite and undefined tangle] that is the reality around and inside us.
Levi’s reply to Adorno, then, suggests that (a large part of ) his oeuvre
might have been structured to replicate and deconstruct, at the same time
proposing and resisting it, the very simplification that every conceptual
thought proposes. Once again, even if we recognize Levi’s uneasiness
toward poetry, the epistemologically relevant distinction here is not
between literary genres, but between and around these two different ways
of using language and thought: the poetic (which includes also part of his
prose and the testimonies proper) and the conceptual. We will see in the
following chapters how these two modes of expression often collide when
they deal, in different moments of Levi’s life, with human and non-
human animals.
On the other hand, Levi’s comment reveals how his whole literature
deals (someone would say copes) with Auschwitz. This is not surprising:
even in works that are apparently unrelated to what happened in the
concentration camp, there is at least one reference to that horror. For
example, even in a book devoted to an ethnography of labor such as La
chiave a stella, we have a short but sharp comment about the Germans’
ability to build ovens, which represents an almost unique case of Levi’s
humour noir. This pattern of returning on his own tracks and calibrating
the differences between different stages of his reflection is obviously a
fundamental element of Levi’s last book, I sommersi e i salvati. Here, he

not only returns to dwell upon concepts he had already developed in his
first testimony, but he also refers explicitly to Se questo è un uomo as “un
libro di dimensioni modeste” that nonetheless “come un animale nomade,
ormai da quarant’anni si lascia dietro una traccia lunga e intricata” (SeS,
OII 1124) [a book of modest dimensions (…) like a nomadic animal, for
forty years now it has left behind it a long and intricate track]. Whether
this track denotes the impact of Se questo è un uomo in Levi’s own life or
in the general reception of the Holocaust (probably in both), what sur-
prises and intrigues is the association between the book and a nomadic
animal able to make and, in some ways, follow tracks. This analogy
between a cultural practice—like writing, reading and interpreting a
book—and the (real) life of an animal is in fact quite original and seems
to authorize alone the specific attention my research gives to the relation-
ships between Levi’s animal imagery and his whole work as a witness.
Furthermore, it suggests a reading that must be prepared to deconstruct
and follow the tracks left by the different (animal) themes, rather than to
imagine a progression or “evolution” that unescapably goes from the first
book to the last. In what I hope is a Primo Levi fashion, how successful
this deconstructive reading is going to be will be determined by the read-
ers of the present volume.
Notes
1. Some of the scholars who overlooked Levi’s first book remained suspi-
cious of his later fictional books at least till his death; on this controver-
sial topic see Cavaglion (1999).
2. I am referring to the first anthology of Levi scholarship published in
English, Reason and Light: Essays on Primo Levi, edited by Susan Tarrow
(Tarrow 1990). The two terms in the title are traditional methonomies
for the Enlightment in general.
3. Although in this passage Farrell explicitly mentions the Enlightenment,
his interpretation lies mostly on the Se questo è un uomo chapter entitled
“Canto di Ulisse” and, more specifically, on how Levi allegedly reads the
Dantean lines “fatti non foste a viver come bruti / ma per seguir virtute
e canoscenza” [you were not made to live your lives as brutes, /but to be
40 D. Benvegnù
followers of worth and knowledge; Inf. XXVI, 119–120]. Farrell and

most of the Levi scholars have seen in Levi’s treatment of Ulysses a sign
of his Aristotelian humanism. However, other readings are possible: for
instance, we cannot forget that Dante puts Ulysses in Hell mostly for his
indeed too human hubris. We will return to Levi’s identification with
Dante in due course, but on the similarities between the two writers and
in particular on the “Canto di Ulisse” episode, see at least Sodi (1990),
65–70; and Patruno (2005). On Dante and non-human animals, see
instead Crimi and Marcozzi (2013).
4. For a general overview on the difficult relationships between Western
philosophy and animal life, see at least Fitzgerald and Kalof (2007).
5. For an overview of recent studies on “the moral lives of animals,” see
Bekoff and Pierce (2007).
6. On this very topic see also Sax (1997, 2000), 124–138. For a different,
positive, reading of Lorenz’s theories of domestication in connection
with Primo Levi, see instead Porro (2009), 152.
7. The problematic tendency in Levi’s scholarship to privilege almost exclu-
sively his testimonial literature has been recently addressed also by Lina
Insana, in her compelling exploration of Levi’s translations (Insana
2009), and by Berel Lang (Lang 2013).
8. See also the interview with Daniel Toaff, Sorgenti di Vita (Springs of
Life), a program on the Unione Comunita Israelitiche Italiane,
Radiotelevisione Italiana [RAI] (25 March 1983); trans. by Mirto Stone:
“It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in lan-
guage: in German there are two words for eating. One is essen and it
refers to people, and the other is fressen, referring to animals. We say a
horse frisst, for example, or a cat. In the Lager, without anyone having
decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the
perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all.” On the topic
of animalization and identification cf. Fanon (2001).
9. On Levi’s puzzling distinction between “disumano” and “inumano” see
Ross (2011), 72–73 and Lepschy, 134. On the psychological process of
dehumanization and at times correspondent animalization see at least
Bain; Haslam; and Volpato in the bibliography.
10. According to Nystedt, we find in Levi’s whole prose oeuvre 192 verte-
brates (22 reptiles, 20 fish, 55 birds, 95 mammals), 54 insects/entomata/
spiders, and 25 invertebrates/others.
11. The importance of non-human animals in Levi’s work has been increas-
ingly recognized by Italian scholars, as testified by the recent publication
of a volume in which all of Levi’s stories in which animals appear are

collected (Levi 2014) and by the international symposium “L’uomo e
altri animali. Primo Levi etologo e antropologo,” organized by Marco
Belpoliti and Mario Barenghi and held in Bergamo and Milan on May
2016. I avail myself of this opportunity to thank again both the organiz-
ers of this event for their kind invitation.
12. First published on The New Yorker, January 13, 1968. Now in Singer
(2004).
13. The amount of articles on this topic is indeed extensive and often too
emotionally charged. For an earlier but sensible survey of the issues at
stake, see at least the whole debate in Anthrozoos, begun with Arluke and
Sax; then continued by Byrke; and closed by Sax (1993). For an intelli-
gent but arguable endorsement of the possibility of such a comparison
see Sztybel. For a rejection of it from the perspective of a Jewish animal
activist, see instead Kalechofsky. A critical take on this whole controversy
capable of including even slavery analogies is Kim (2011). Finally, an
important moment in this debate was the “fictional” lecture J.M. Coetzee
delivered at Princeton University in 1997, then published with other
essays two years later in a volume entitled The Lives of Animals. In his
contribution, Coetzee makes his main character, the writer Elizabeth
Costello, deliver two lectures about animal rights, both marked by the
explicit comparison between slaughterhouses and Nazi concentration
camps.
14. See also the interview by F. Ildefonse, “Un sillage sans bateau, une ren-
contre avec Elisabeth de Fontenay”: ‘Ma rencontre avec la question ani-
male n’est peut-être pas sans rapport avec la métaphore que je cite au
début du livre: « comme des brebis à l’abattoir ». Il y a eu deux événe-
ments, deux rencontres au cours de l’écriture du Silence des bêtes. La
première, massive, c’est celle des auteurs d’après la période de la destruc-
tion des juifs d’Europe. Ces écrivains ont parlé de manière obsession-
nelle des bêtes, de leur exploitation, de l’abattage. Beaucoup de gens me
disent: mais comment osez-vous faire la comparaison avec ce qui est
arrivé aux juifs? Je m’abrite alors derrière des auteurs qui ont une auto-
rité que je n’ai pas: Primo Lévi, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vassili Grossman.’”
[My encounter with the animal question is perhaps not unrelated to the
metaphor that I quoted at the beginning of the book: “like sheep to the
slaughter.” There were two events, two meetings during the writing of Le
Silence des bêtes. The first, substantial one is with the authors of the
period after the destruction of European Jewry. These writers have
42 D. Benvegnù
obsessively talked about animals, their exploitation, their slaughtering.

Many people say: but how dare you make a comparison with what hap-
pened to the Jews? I then hide behind authors who have an authority
that I do not have: Primo Levi, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vasily Grossman
(The English translation is mine)]. Lastly, on the issue of Jewish female
writers and animals, see Lorenz (1998).
15. See Horkheimer, 66 and ff: “A cross section of today’s social structure
would have to show the following: At the top, the feuding tycoons of the
various capitalist power constellations. Below them, the lesser magnates,
the large landowners and the entire staff of important co-workers. Below
that, and in various layers, the large numbers of professionals, smaller
employees, political stooges, the military and the professors, the engi-
neers and heads of office down to the typists; even further down what is
left of the independent, small existences, craftsmen, grocers, farmers e
tutti quanti, then the proletarian, from the most highly paid, skilled
workers down to the unskilled and the permanently unemployed, the
poor, the aged and the sick. It is only below these that we encounter the
actual foundation of misery on which this structure rises, for up to now
we have been talking only of the highly developed capitalist countries
whose entire existence is based on the horrible exploitation apparatus at
work in the partly or wholly colonial territories, ie, in the far larger part
of the world. (…) Below the spaces where the coolies of the earth perish
by the millions, the indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the ani-
mals, the animal hell in human society, would have to be depicted, the
sweat, blood, despair of the animals. (…) The basement of that house is
a slaughterhouse, its roof a cathedral, but from the windows of the upper
floors, it affords a really beautiful view of the starry heavens.” For an
analytical survey of the issue of animal oppression within critical theory
see Sanbonmatsu (2011).
16. The expression “animale-uomo” belongs to a fundamental chapter of
Levi’s first book, Se questo è un uomo, and intends to indicate the specific
beings Levi observed during his imprisonment in the Nazi concentration
camp; see Levi, OI 83.
17. See, for example, Bernard-Donalds and Glejzer (2001).
18. Robert Gordon alludes to something similar when he writes against
what he calls the “inappropriate ‘redemptive’ rhetoric applied to Levi”
and quotes Judith Woolf, according to whom “to be moved by Levi’s
books can be to misread them, to experience a false catharsis” (Gordon
2001, 7, n.10).
19. For an admittedly not-exhaustive taxonomy, see Eaglestone 43–71.

20. This distinction between zoe and bios is central in the work of the Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben. See, for instance, Agamben (1995,
1998). Agamben’s later reflections on this theme led him to question the
whole human/animal divide as it has been conceptually organized by
what he calls the “antropological machine of humanism” (Agamben
2002). Eaglestone, however, criticizes Agamben’s concept of “bare life,”
claiming that his definition is at times too narrow and still too essential-
istic; see Eagleston 321 and ff.
21. Although the term “speciesism” was coined by Richard Ryder in the early
1970s, it is undoubtable that Singer’s book is responsible for spreading
the idea. We will investigate further Singer’s position in the following
chapter.
22. On humans, animals, and metaphors, see also Goatly (2006).
23. Wolfe develops further certain aspects of this article in Wolfe (2003,
2010).
24. The previously mentioned article is Copeland and Shapiro (2005). The
three “seminal” works evoked by Copeland are respectively Malamud
(2003) and Scholtmeijer (1993) (but of the same author see also “Animals
and spirituality: A skeptical animal rights advocate examines literary
approaches to the subject,” 1999); and Fudge (2004).
25. See at least Agamben (2002), Esposito (2004), Marchesini (2001) and
Marchesini and Tonutti (2007).
26. This first Rivista italiana di antispecismo [Italian Journal of Anti-
speciesism] deals with issues connected to our relationships with non-
human animals, incorporating different perspectives but, according to
the introduction offered in its official website, always “from a
philosophical point-of-view.” (http://rivistaanimalstudies.wordpress.

com/about/ [retrieved on July 10, 2016]).
27. As it is the case, for instance, of Oliva’s analysis of Verga’s zoomorphic
metaphors (Oliva 1999), Pirandello’s bestiary by Zangrilli (Zangrilli
2001), or Trama’s volume on Tommaso Landolfi’s zoo-poetics (Trama
2006).
28. More copious is the number of scholarly articles engaging one particular
author and usually one aspect of his or her bestiary, as it is exemplified
by the monographic issue of Italies, the journal of the University of
Provence, published in 2008. Devoted to what the editors called Arches
de Noé [Noah’s arks], this issue of Italies is so far the most ambitious
attempt to offer an overall analysis of the presence of animals in Italian
44 D. Benvegnù
literature and culture, with a series of articles on a wide range of topics,

but especially dedicated to modern literary bestiaries from Giambattista
Lalli’s Moscheide (ca. 1623) to the very recent Marco Paolini’s Bestiario
Veneto (1998). All these articles indeed help us to have a better under-
standing of the writers analyzed. Nonetheless, they usually share an
almost total disengagement from the broad theoretical debate on ani-
mals and literature, avoiding as much as possible any reference either to
the epistemological and methodological reasons behind such interest in
modern bestiaries, or to the contemporary inquiries on the question of
the animal. Needless to say, even within this tendency there are excep-
tions that attempt to reflect upon the animal issue within a larger theo-
retical frame. A good example of a work which is informed by the recent
thriving of the Animal Studies and includes Italian authors is, for
instance, Juliana Schiesari’s Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and
Domestication in the Italian Renaissance. Unfortunately, Schiesari’s book
does not go beyond the sixteenth century, and her more recent compara-
tive work on modern writers and domestication deals with four authors
who have nothing to do with Italy. An attempt to engage with the meth-
odological importance of the animal theme is instead the introduction to
the collection of essays entitled Bestiari del Novecento, edited by Enza
Biagini and Anna Nozzoli. In the introduction, the two scholars connect
their interest in revitalizing thematic literary criticism to the specificity
of animals, with a definite attention to gender roles that seems to mark
the best recent scholarship in this field. However, the true aim of Biagini
and Nozzoli’s project is actually to rethink the role of themes in contem-
porary literary criticism, and therefore the essays that compose the
volume are once again focused on specific authors almost exclusively in
order to clarify their poetics, with nearly no presence of the possible
problematic links with real, material animals.
29. This trend has, of course, numerous antecedents, as testified, for exam-
ple, by Giuseppe Finzi’s L’asino nella leggenda e nella letteratura, a book
published in 1883 and devoted, as the title suggests, to the presence of
donkeys from Apuleius to Giovanni Verga. Probably influenced by the
creation of the first Società Reale per la Protezione degli Animali (then
Ente Nazionale Protezione Animali) in 1871, which was initially focused
on the well-being of donkeys, Finzi’s volume is nonetheless a positivistic
product of its time: the general tone is quite humorous, and the donkey
is depicted with strong anthropomorphic traits, as the “gaglioffa e
ridicola” [good-for-nothing and ridiculous] creature par excellence.
Contemporary scholars of course abandoned this sarcastic anthropocen-

tric tone to focus on more accurate analyses. Cf. M. Comparotto (2013),
Giuseppe Garibaldi: l’animalista che ha fatto l’Italia, http://www.oipa.
org/italia/diritti/notizie/garibaldi.html (retrieved on September 30,
2016).
30. Each essay collected in this voluminous book is devoted to a specific
animal species or genus (from the A of “api” [bees] to the T of “topi”
[mice]), and displays a series of occurrences of the specific animals from
the origin of Italian literature to the present. Cf Anselmi and Ruozzi
(2009).
31. More attention is paid to the specificity of animals in other recent vol-
umes, such as Pietro Sisto’s work which treats the link between books
and animals, and Stefano Lanuzza’s Bestiario del nichilismo: Scrittura e
animali. Both of these interesting studies are in fact keen on exploring,
from different perspectives, the specific connection between animals and
writing. However, while Sisto’s work ends up offering an anthropological
survey of the uses of animal images throughout human history (with
essays on bees, bears, swans, etc.), Lanuzza’s book investigates animal
representations in order to draw a survey of how the Nietzschean cri-
tique of modernity has been picked up by some Italian writers at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, in both cases, very few refer-
ences are made to the current debate developed in Animal Studies.
32. For a longer discussion of the potentially fruitful relationships between
modern Italian literature and Animal Studies, see Benvegnù (2016).
33. On this specific conference, see Stara (2006), 67–68; 109–120.
34. See, for example, the almost contemporary Vittorini’s Uomini e no
(1945).
35. In this sense, and only in this sense, Levi’s humanism has very much in
common with what Massimo Lollini, in his work on Vico, calls “more
than human humanism.” See Lollini (2011).
36. As we will see, several times Levi gives voice to the same concern expressed
by scholars as John Simons, who writes that “every time we represent an
animal we are, however hard we try and however much we wish it was
different, engaging in an act which, to a greater or less degree, appropri-
ates the non-human experience as an index of humanness” (Simons, 87).
37. According to Horkheimer, a theory is critical when it seeks “to liberate
human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer
1982, 244). Despite the anthropocentrism of this definition, the exploi-
tation and oppression of non-human animals has been a constant
46 D. Benvegnù
concern for the thinkers of the so-called Frankfurt school, as testified by

the numerous references to cruelty against animals in Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
38. On this topic, see Giuliani (2003), 73 and ff. According to Massimo
Lollini, from the perspective of what kind of subjectivity they express,
“there is no clear line of separation between prose and poetry in the
works of Primo Levi” (Lollini 2004, 81).
39. While this seems the more reasonable translation for this passage, I
would instead note that in the original Italian the adjective “concettuale”
can refer to both the terms “linguaggio” and “pensiero,” and not only to
the latter, as the English translation suggests.
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2
Suffering I. Shared Vulnerability
On June 22, 1980, Primo Levi published in the Turinese newspaper La

Stampa an article entitled “Nomi e leggende dello scoiattolo” [Names and
Legends of the Squirrel].1 According to Marco Belpoliti, in this short
essay Levi deals with one of the few linguistic animals present in his whole
oeuvre (Belpoliti 1997, 203), and indeed the original title and the open-
ing paragraphs of the article seem to confirm Belpoliti’s opinion. Levi
begins in his peculiar erratic way, moving from his old aunts’ claim that
the Italian surname Perrone derived from the Piedmontese Prùn, mean-
ing “squirrel” in dialect, to the etymology of the term as it comes from
the Latin pronus, alluding—he says—to the characteristically inclined
attitude of the little rodent. Levi then concludes his etymological treatise
by tracing the name even further back to the Greek word for squirrel,
showing how most of the modern Indo-European terms for the animal
derive, sometimes through a diminutive, from this linguistic ancestor.
It is only half way through his article that Levi decides to move from
the linguistic account of the squirrels to his own personal experiences
with animals. After having stated that he had very few encounters with
them, especially in their natural habitats, Levi focuses his attention on

52 D. Benvegnù
two episodes, both involving squirrels kept in captivity (“in prigionia” he

writes). Strangely, these two anecdotes have almost the same protagonists
and the same encaged settings, but display two opposite reactions to the
actual condition of the animals.
In the first episode Levi meets a dozen squirrels in what appears to be
a laboratory or perhaps a shop. Although they are locked in a cage, they
do not appear “meno vivaci né meno allegri dei loro colleghi della
foresta” [less lively or happy than their colleagues from the forest]. Such
a display of happiness leads Levi to describe one of those little creatures,
the one who “aveva inventato un gioco” [invented a game]: the writer is
amused by the ability of the squirrel to jump precisely from its moving
wheel to the other side of the cage, claiming that the squirrel itself
showed a more or less anthropomorphic “visibile compiacimento” [vis-
ible pleasure].
Not all the squirrels in captivity have such an apparently happy life
though. The second episode he recounts has as a protagonist “un altro
prigioniero” [another prisoner] held in what appears to be a laboratory.
The encaged setting looks quite the same as the first episode, but this time
the squirrel is part of an experiment about insomnia and is forced to walk
continuously in a wheel, without the possibility to stop, rest, or sleep.
Levi is definitely less amused:
Lo scoiattolo era esausto: zampettava pesantemente su quella strada senza

fine, e mi ricordava i rematori della galere, e quegli altri forzati in Cina che
venivano costretti a camminare per giorni e giorni entro gabbie simili a
quella per sollevare l’acqua destinata ai canali d’irrigazione. Nel laboratorio
non c’era nessuno; io ho chiuso l’interruttore del motorino, la gabbia si è
arrestata e lo scoiattolo si è addormentato all’instante. È dunque colpa mia
se del sonno e dell’insonnia si sa tuttora così poco.
[The squirrel was exhausted: it was trotting heavily on that end-less path,
and it reminded me of the oarsmen of the galley ships, and of the forced-
labor workers in China who were made to walk for days on end in cages
similar to that one, in order to lift water to be used for the irrigation chan-
nels. In the laboratory there was nobody; I turned the engine off, the wheel
stopped, and the squirrel fell asleep at once. It is therefore my fault if we
have such a little knowledge of insomnia and other sleeping issues.]
Suffering I. Shared Vulnerability 53
With this ironic remark about insomnia the whole article ends. If Levi’s
vision and ethics were univocally shaped by his “lavoro di laboratorio”
[laboratory work]—as some scholars maintained2—“Nomi e leggende
dello scoiattolo” might be considered an example of his ability to put
together different pieces to create an intriguing work of journalism out of
his double nature of both writer and professional chemist. The whole
article then would be read as the enlightened and objective description of
an episode in which Levi’s profession helped him to be analytic and to
move from the linguistic and literary essence of the squirrel to the scien-
tific description of its behavior. In such an interpretation, his intervention
at the end of the story would therefore be a mere accident. I would sug-
gest a different, somewhat challenging, reading of this 1980 short essay.
First, let us take a closer look at the transition from a purely abstract
consideration of the animal—the essential and therefore nonexistent
squirrel, its name, and the etymological excursus connected to it—toward
the personal experience, the individual encounter with the existent ani-
mals. What is at stake in this second type of encounter is the corporality
and, at least in the second and conclusive anecdote, the vulnerability of
the real creature. This kind of transition from the concept to the body, so
to speak, is not exceptional in Levi’s writing about animals and/or hybrids.
As Charlotte Ross has pointed out, multiple narratives of bodies and
embodiment are present in Levi’s work (Ross 2011, 2). What is peculiar,
though, is that often, even where he begins with a very abstract reflection,
the focus of his essays shifts toward the body of the animals and their
embodiment as real, living creatures. This chapter is focused on the analy-
sis of one of the most important examples of this attention toward the
bodily vulnerability of the living creature, that is, the article entitled
“Contro il dolore,” but this shift is also present in several of his other
essays. For instance, in “Paura dei ragni,” Levi ends the examination of his
arachnophobia with the final suggestive and uncanny description of the
body of Aracne “già mezza ragna” (AM, OII 758) [already half spider]. A
similar attention to corporality is also apparent in Levi’s “Il mondo invisi-
bile,” in which even the almost invisible bacteria observed through a
microscope are eventually described in their indeed bodily “misterioso
infinitesimo piacere” (AM, OII 804) [mysterious, infinitesimal pleasure].
54 D. Benvegnù
Second, we must reflect upon the ambivalent double anecdote about

the squirrels as “prigioneri” [prisoners]. The use of this term suggests that
we are facing one of those situations in which the recourse to animal
imagery marks indeed a moment of acute ethical reflection (Gordon
2001, 98). Nevertheless, even this acute reflection is characterized by
what Bryan Cheyette has called the ethical uncertainty of Primo Levi, his
“continual negotiation” (66) not only between communication and its
own impossibility, as Cheyette writes, but also between an almost pre-
rational interest for animals (tied in Levi to his enjoyment in observing
them), scientific experimentation, and useless suffering. If the first story
describes a strangely idyllic and somehow amusing scenario, in which our
prisoners look more like performers in a circus than creatures locked in a
cage, then the second one is imbued with a different (darker) atmosphere.
The main protagonist, the squirrel forced to run incessantly on the wheel,
does not show any sign of “pleasure.” Instead, Levi offers a description
that connects the squirrel’s exhaustion with those humans who suffered
the same imposed restless detention, inviting the reader’s recognition of
the infernal condition of the animal. Put in front of such a vision of suf-
fering, even the scientist Primo Levi felt the need to interfere: he stops the
diabolic machine and therefore ruins the experiment, as the final ironic
sentence underlines.
Even for this second episode a couple of remarks are necessary. On the
one hand, Levi’s decision to arrest the experiment tells us that not all the
experiments have for him the same dignity, and therefore there are limits
to what science can or should do. These limits seem to be set vis-à-vis the
vision of suffering Levi had once in the presence of the exhausted squir-
rel. It was a vision that summoned forth other images of suffering, this
time by humans. A regime of suffering, embodiment, and proximity—or,
to use a term we will properly introduce later, limitrophy—is at work
here, influencing Levi’s experience and forcing him to react against that
animal experiment. His decision to end the narration with such an epi-
sode is a way to transmit and share with his readers a specific understand-
ing of this tangle of different elements. Nevertheless, he offers us no
further explanation except for a final ironic comment about his responsi-
bility for our little knowledge of insomnia.
We are left thus with several unresolved questions. For instance, we

might ask what are the elements forcing Levi to stop the experiment and
within what literary and ethical parameters we have to consider them. Do
those possible parameters belong to a wider philosophical and ethical
system? Are they part of a systematic approach that we can map through-
out his whole oeuvre? Furthermore, we should reflect upon the reasons
why the relation between animal suffering and human suffering seems to
be so relevant for him in this case that he decides to narrate it. Is this
combination of human and animal characteristics a peculiar feature of a
general narrative that, again, is present in the whole of Levi’s works? And
if so, can we also speak—from the perspective of one who wants to stop
the suffering of animals—of an ambivalent use of literary anthropomor-
phism in his body of work?
It is also worth noticing that Levi indeed stopped the machine and
allowed the squirrel to finally fall asleep, but he did not actually set the
animal free, as one might have expected. Thus, although ruining the
experiment somehow revealed how Primo Levi is distant from any idea of
animal experimentation as part of a triumphant scientific progress, this
second consideration does not allow us to include him within the same
category with those who would outlaw the utilization of animals for any
human purposes. Actually, if we had stopped our reading at the first anec-
dote, we might even think that Levi simply enjoyed the vision of con-
fined animals, more or less as if he could forget that those animals were
living not in their natural habitat but in cages. Yet, the persistent repeti-
tion of terms like “prigionieri” or “prigionia” seems to be there precisely
to avoid such (mis)understanding, and to remind us of the overall
deprived condition of the squirrels. Once again, Levi’s bright ambiguity
forces us to face some fundamental questions not simply about the ratio
operandi behind his action, both when he stops the experiment and when
he gives us his testimony of what happened that day, but more generally
about his ethics when it comes to the relationship that we, as humans,
might have with other creatures.
The first anecdote stresses a joyful interaction between the human
observer and the animals—an indeed fundamental aspect of Levi’s life
and literature, as we will see especially in the chapter devoted to
56 D. Benvegnù
“Creation.” The second one poses instead a serious concern about their
suffering, almost claiming that pain and suffering—when directly faced
and witnessed—serve as the grounds on which all the sentient creatures
deserve a basic form of respect, if not compassion. Although this state-
ment could be judged as reasonable, we are then left with some more
questions. What does this double episode tell us about Levi’s position
within the contemporary (his contemporary and ours) discourse on ani-
mal suffering and human ethics? Was he ever really engaged in such a
debate on animal ethics and how much of his possible engagement comes
from being an Auschwitz survivor? And finally, is Levi suggesting here
something akin to Jeremy Bentham’s well-debated statement according
to which, when it comes to our encounter with other animals as moral
agents, the real “question” is not about their ability to perform a “human”
task (“Can they reason? nor, Can they talk?”) but rather “Can they
suffer?”
To respond to all these questions and specifically to the last one, we
must take a closer look at the reasons why this focus on animal suffering
became so important for the current debate on what has been called “the
question of the animal.”3 Before investigating how Bentham’s fundamen-
tal shift has been read and understood by contemporary thinkers, though,
we must consider who forged that sentence, that is to say, the English
philosopher himself.
2.1 “Can They Suffer?”

Better known for his utilitarianism and his involvement in shaping the
British juridical and legislative system, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
wrote that fundamental question (‘Can they suffer?”) in a footnote of the
seventeenth chapter of his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (first edition: 1789). Philosophically “a child of the
Enlightenment,”4 Bentham comes to such a conclusive concern for ani-
mal suffering in a chapter generally devoted to the limits of penal jurispru-
dence,5 by reflecting upon whether or not those other agents who are
under the influence of man’s direction are at the same time susceptible to
happiness. That is to say, according to the utilitarian principle of the
so-called “greatest happiness” (Lee 2003, 64–75), whether or not they are
susceptible to moral concern. The first category of this kind belongs to
“other human beings who are styled persons,” and does not receive any
further explanation. The second group of agents he claims for is instead
composed by “other animals, which on account of their interests having
been neglected by the insensitivity of the ancient jurists, stand degraded
into the class of things.”
A few centuries later Primo Levi would write extensively on the double
process of animalization and reification in Auschwitz, and therefore it is
already fascinating to observe Bentham’s rejection of seeing animals as
things—that is, against the Cartesian claim of animals as automata.6
However, it is also at this point, linked to this last sentence, that Bentham
feels the need to add the above mentioned footnote. In this quite long
addendum he develops the opening idea that other religions, namely
Hinduism and Islam, have already paid some attention to what he calls
“the rest of the animal creation,” claiming then that “the day may come,
when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never
could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.”
Bentham is referring here to a tyranny that was obviously real and practi-
cal, but it seems reasonable to believe that he was also arguing against the
request to perform tasks as reasoning or speaking as humans do; any fail-
ure in being “human” according to these standards meant therefore being
relegated to the status of machines, automata unable to feel anything. As
Jadran Lee in his doctorate dissertation devoted to Bentham and the legal
status of animals explains, such a stand against the Cartesian position is
not so surprising, given that by the second half of the eighteenth century
“English comments on the beast-machine doctrine tended to dismiss it as
absurd, or even as likely to incite cruelty to animals” (Lee, 34). Even less
innovative, although probably never articulated again with such strength
until Charles Darwin, is the implicit thought that the definition of non-
human animals as “the rest of the animal creation” accordingly means
that humans and animals do share the same creation. Therefore, human
and non-human animals both belong to the same group of creatures,
where the differences—as Bentham stated clearly elsewhere—are in
grades within a continuum rather than in kind. What is instead peculiar
to Bentham is the consequences of such an understanding of animals not
58 D. Benvegnù
only from a legal perspective, but also in terms of the parameters we

should use to consider their moral status. He writes:
The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no
reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice
of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of
the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are
reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same
fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty
of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or
dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable
animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But sup-
pose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can
they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? [emphases in the
original]
We will return shortly on the comparison Bentham suggests between

slavery, racism, and animal persecution, not only because Levi himself
alludes to a similar association in some of his works, but also because it
will lead us to what Claire Jean Kim has called a “reconstructive” ethical
project that mirrors Levi’s re-imagination of humans, animals, and nature
outside a system of domination (Kim, 287). First, though, we must
notice the criteria on which Bentham seems to found moral consider-
ation. For him, such a watershed is neither a rational or linguistic ability,
nor physical appearance, but rather what we might call temporarily the
capacity of suffering. Recognizing that animals suffer, Bentham implies,
would stop the human mistreatment of them.
This is not the only occurrence throughout the whole of Bentham’s
published and unpublished oeuvre in which he brings forward an argu-
ment “for anti-cruelty laws, which at the time did not exist in England”
(Lee, 104). However, it is specifically in this apparently marginal foot-
note that his position finds such a powerful explanation, able in a sole
sentence to reject that part of Western thought that denied moral status,
and therefore legal protection, to animals on the basis that only humans
can reason, speak, be conscious. Contrasting a tradition that goes from
Aristotle to most of his contemporary fellows (and then to the majority
of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers), Bentham is
instead saying that language and rationality are not the criteria on which
our relationship with any other being, and therefore also our own self-
consideration, has to be founded when it comes to legislation. Given
how the whole issue is constructed, we might also ask whether Bentham
had in mind a frame larger than practical legislation, being his position
more widely ethical. What is in any case certain is that, within the spe-
cific utilitarian frame in which Bentham’s theory works, such a sentence
on animals’ capacity for suffering extends to them the principle accord-
ing to which, in designing laws that should affect every single moral
agent, we can “ultimately rely only on the various forms of pleasure and
pain” (Lee, 70).
The most famous modern continuer of Bentham’s animal ethics is the
moral philosopher Peter Singer. Singer begins his exploration exactly
from the same consideration on pleasure and pain as expressed by
Bentham, but he soon moves toward a wider ethical picture. He picks up
Bentham’s footnote in what is already considered a classic volume of the
so-called animal movement, his well-known and provocatively titled
Animal Liberation. First published in 1975, Singer’s book extends, by its
very title, the claim for equality and, specifically, equal treatment to any
other (sentient) creature. Picking up Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy,
Singer states that “the interests of every being affected by an action are to
be taken into account and given the same weight as the like interests of
any other being” (5),7 and this formula is valid not only for human beings
but also for non-human ones. Specifically, Animal Liberation recognizes
in Bentham one of the few philosophers who realized that proposing
equal consideration of interests as a basic moral principle means applying
it to members of other species as well as our own (6–7). If in fact, Singer
continues, the capacity of suffering is the vital characteristic that gives a
being the right to equal consideration, then “the capacity of suffering and
enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all” (7) and therefore for
becoming moral agents. The conclusion is that there is no moral justifica-
tion for refusing the suffering of any kind of being taken into serious and
equal consideration: instead, whoever allows the mere interests of his
own species to override the greater interests of members of other species
is what Singer calls a “speciesist” (9). Needless to say, as he writes in the
first sentence of the very following paragraph, “most human beings are
60 D. Benvegnù
speciesists” and therefore do not care about their unethical treatment of

members of other animal species. For them there is no moral way to jus-
tify their beliefs and behaviors: their speciesism is simply immoral.
Having made such a fundamental claim, Animal Liberation then goes on
arguing against the idea that animals cannot feel pain, cannot suffer, and
therefore they have no interests and no moral status.8 Finally, the book
turns into a terrifying account of how many cruel practices human specie-
sism brings upon defenseless animals.
Singer’s utilitarian reading of Bentham not only has led him to for-
mulate one of the most impressive accusations of human unethical
treatment of other animals ever made, but also set the tone—along
with Tom Regan’s animal rights theory9—of the contemporary debate
about the human-animal relationship for at least the following twenty
years. It is in 1997, during a conference dedicated to his own work, that
the French philosopher Jacques Derrida decides to focus his attention
on the same issue and delivered a lecture originally titled L’Animal que
donc je suis (“The Animal therefore I am”). Derrida states several times
that what he calls “the question of the animal” is present from the very
beginning within his reflection upon the whole canon of Western phi-
losophy and therefore lies at the very core of deconstruction.
Nevertheless, it is only in this lecture—published, with other essays on
this topic, under the same ironically pseudo-Cartesian title in 2006—
that he takes a philosophically, at least, precise position toward how we,
as humans, treat animals.10 And he does it by returning once again to
Bentham’s footnote.
Derrida opens his essay explaining the feeling of double shame he
felt once when he found himself naked under the gaze of his female cat.
This experience of being observed naked “as a worm” by an animal led
him to reconsider the question of the animal, both from a philosophi-
cal perspective—denouncing almost the whole of Western metaphysics
for the improper and somehow aggressively violent use of the generic
term “Animal”—and from a definitely intertwined practical point of
view, showing how labeling the “Animal” also meant for humans ascrib-
ing themselves the right to do whatever they want to whomever sup-
posedly fit into such a category (Derrida 2008, 23). Coming from a
Jewish heritage as well as Singer and, of course, Primo Levi, Derrida
then pushes the topic further, maintaining that what he calls the
“unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal” has taken
the dimension of “the worst cases of genocide” (25–26). Obviously
aware of the weight and the problematic resonances of this affirmation,
Derrida explains that “one should neither abuse the figure of genocide
nor too quickly consider it explained away” (26). Yet, he continues,
even the evident differences between, for example, the historical geno-
cide of the Jews during World War II and the extermination of animals
often “by means of their continued existence or even their overpopula-
tion,” cannot obliterate “what a terrifying and intolerable picture a real-
ist painting could give to the industrial, mechanical, chemical,
hormonal, and genetic violence to which man has been submitting ani-
mal life for the past two centuries” (26). The only response to such an
event, according to Derrida, is a new practice of fundamental compas-
sion that would change “even the very cornerstone of the philosophical
problematic of the animal” (27).
The question, though, is about how such compassion ought to be cre-
ated and experienced, and whether the mainstream utilitarian and right-
oriented approach really covers the whole spectrum of the human/animal
issue or not. For instance, is giving animals certain rights a sufficient and
necessary ground for changing our violent attitude toward them? And if
so, can we apply human rights as they are to animals or are we thereby
anthropomorphically answering to an event that must find a response
beyond anthropomorphism? Shouldn’t we rather think about how to
avoid the somehow inevitable but indeed very anthropocentric use of the
generic term “Animal”? To find an answer to all these implicit questions
Derrida turns to Bentham and the same sentence about animal suffering
discussed by Singer.
As Matthew Calarco has pointed out, Derrida takes a completely dif-
ferent path from Singer, whose work receives no explicit acknowledge-
ment. Sharing the same fundamental shift of attention from thinking/
speaking toward suffering, Derrida does not focus on the animals’ capac-
ity to feel pleasure or pain, as instead the utilitarian and hedonistic
approaches of both Bentham and Singer do. Instead he uses Bentham’s
statement to broach the issue of the embodied exposure of animals, their
finitude and vulnerability. Using Calarco’s words we may say that “while
62 D. Benvegnù
the surface level of Bentham’s discourse speaks in terms of capacities and

faculties (Can they suffer?), Derrida wants to suggest that capacities are
not the final foundation of animal ethics” (Calarco, 117). Indeed what
the French philosopher stresses is that Bentham’s sentence is disturbed by
what he calls “a certain passivity:” therefore, rather than being about a
capacity, it “testifies to a sufferance, a passion, a not-being-able” (Derrida
2008, 27). The real question then switches from “Can they suffer” to “can
they not be able?”, or in other words from a capacity to an inability,
because, Derrida adds, “being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a
possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible” (28). Leaving
aside Derrida’s jargon here, the meaning of what he is saying is quite clear,
as he explains immediately afterwards:
mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude
that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude
of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the
possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this anguish, the anguish of
this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish. (28)
The foundation of his proto-ethics, then, is no longer a theory of

agency and interests, a capacity to perform, behave, or even feel in a cer-
tain way at all. Instead, what is at stake is a pre-normative zero degree of
what we might call the creatural being, once reduced to his bare life, to
his bodily vulnerability. Only through the experience of this common
vulnerability, this becoming familiar with the fragile and often defense-
less embodiment we share with other creatures, we might finally have
access to what another thinker, Ralph Acampora, named “corporal com-
passion” (Acampora 2006). That is to say, we must start responding to the
violent treatment of animals through a practice based on what Derrida
calls “limitrophy.” Limitrophy is in fact neither the unification of humans’
and animals’ interests in order to give to the latter an “equal” treatment,
nor the elimination of all differences and limits between species. Rather,
limitrophy is “what abuts onto limits but also what feeds, is fed, is cared
for, raised, and trained, what is cultivated on the edges of a limit. (…)
what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the
limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates
it” (Derrida 2008, 29; emphasis in the original).
According to Derrida, a practice of limitrophy would help us to

account for the fact that the supposed abyssal divide between Man and
Animal not only has a history grounded on human metaphysics, but also
doesn’t describe two edges, a unilinear and indivisible line between
different beings. Therefore, what we call Animal Life and in which we are
involved as peculiar embodiments “is already a heterogeneous multiplic-
ity of the living, or more precisely (…) a multiplicity of organizations of
relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of
organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate
by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, or life and/or death”
(31). The real issue for Derrida is not to eliminate the differences between
human and non-human animals, but to make them more complex, to see
them corresponding to the complexity of the different forms of life
already within the animal sphere. For him this gesture is in itself the
foundation of a possible proto-ethics based on compassion: as he writes,
“casting doubt on responsibility, on decision, on one’s own being-ethical,
seems to me to be (…) the unrescindable essence of ethics, decision, and
responsibility” (126).
It is time to return to Primo Levi. We have already seen how Levi, in
“Nomi e leggende dello scoiattolo,” narrates two quite different episodes.
In them he displays the transition from an ability to an inability, from a
capacity or possibility (to jump out of the wheel and land on the other
side of the cage, as in the first episode) to an incapacity, an impossibility
(to rest and sleep) that leads to suffering. This transition, and the reaction
to animal suffering linked to it, might be considered the literary equiva-
lent of Derrida’s reading of Jeremy Bentham’s footnote, where what is at
stake is precisely the switch from considering suffering inevitable rather
than a real capacity. However, we have also discussed how the two stories
about squirrels have offered us more questions than answers, more liter-
ary dilemma than ethical certainty, as if the very nature of them, their
literary strategy, has been shaped to challenge any stable philosophical
position. There is, however, another article in which Levi seems to express
his opinion on this topic more straightforwardly. Although the issue of
animal suffering, is in fact widespread in Levi’s oeuvre, he explores directly
in the already mentioned “Contro il dolore” at least from the unusual, for
Levi, perspective of moral philosophy.
64 D. Benvegnù
2.2 “ Contro il dolore” and the Debate

on Animal Vivisection
“Contro il dolore” was published for the first time in La Stampa in August
1977. Once collected in L’altrui mestiere (Einaudi, 1985), this little essay
does stand as an original and independent piece, and in such a way has
been usually considered by the community of Levi scholars. Instead, this
article is rather the conclusive (at least for the importance of the authors
involved) moment of a controversy begun almost two years earlier, when
the Swiss racing driver, novelist, and internationally prominent activist
against animal experiments and vivisection, Hans Ruesch, began his bat-
tle to publish in Italian and in other European languages a book entitled
Imperatrice nuda.11
To be clear, Primo Levi does not directly mention Ruesch in “Contro
il dolore.”12 His piece begins with a strong but apparently unrelated rejec-
tion of solipsism, from the typically adolescent one—‘I am the center of
a world that I create’—to the more sophisticated philosophical type. He
claims that the hypothesis that sits at the very core of this kind of thought
not only might be very harmful for society as a whole, but it is also,
although philosophically plausible, highly improbable. This dismissal of
solipsism, Levi continues, is what came to his mind “leggendo su “La
Stampa” del 26 luglio la risposta a Jemolo («Amici animali») di
E. Chiavacci, teologo morale” [reading on “La Stampa” of July 26 the
answer to Jemolo by E. Chiavacci, moral philosopher].
For the then contemporary readers of La Stampa these two names, and
their respective articles, were apparently known well enough to preclude
any further explanation. We cannot say the same for ourselves.
Nonetheless, no scholar of Primo Levi’s oeuvre has ever felt the need to
explain who Chiavacci and Jemolo were and why Levi cited them in his
article, maybe because Levi himself slightly changed the original above-
quoted sentence when he decided to collect the article in L’altrui mestiere.
In the book version the name of Jemolo has disappeared, while Chiavacci
is described as of having written “un articolo in difesa degli animali”
(AM, OII 637–638) [an article in defense of animals], a connotation not
present in the newspaper pristine version. In any case, to understand
what the functions of both Jemolo and Chiavacci in Levi’s article are, we
have to move back precisely to Ruesch and his already mentioned

Imperatrice nuda, that is to say where the whole controversy begins.
It is Tuesday February 3, 1976—a year after the publication of Animal
Liberation—when the first advertisement for Hans Ruesch’s Imperatrice
nuda gets published on page 3 of La Stampa. The ad reproduces visually
the cover page of the book in which there is a dog with a Christ-like
crown of thorns. There is also a written summary of the book that begins:
“Questo libro ha già scatenato una feroce polemica prima ancora della
sua pubblicazione” [this book has already roused a ferocious controversy
even before its publication], explaining then that the “imperatrice nuda”
is current medical science. Once naked, in fact, medical science is revealed
to be based on “una inutile e atroce crudeltà: la vivisezione” [a useless and
dreadful cruelty: vivisection]. Exactly a week later, Nando Pavia puts his
signature on a short review of Ruesch’s book, mostly sympathetic with
the author of Imperatrice nuda and his vision of vivisection as a useless act
of sadism, but the controversy mentioned in the ad is ready to burst even
onto the pages of La Stampa. On February 14, in the special insert called
“Tuttolibri,” the medical researcher Alberto Malliani offers a different
reading of the same book, calling Ruesch a “Savonarola” who sees sadism
everywhere, and basically arguing for the necessity of vivisection and its
actual “humanity.” It is time for the author to intervene: on Saturday
February 27 Ruesch is asked to reply directly to Malliani.13 In the inter-
view, he calls vivisection “a tema scomodo” [a difficult theme], claiming
that we are victims “di una gigantesca truffa, che viene perpetrata ai danni
dei cittadini nonché dei milioni di animali che vengono torturati a morte
per renderla possibile” [of a giant fraud against both citizens and millions
of animals which are tortured to death to make it possible]. If the general
tone of the interview is more scandalmongering than informative, we
cannot say the same about the following article, published in La Stampa
in June of the same year. From the title (“Soffrire come un cane” [suffer-
ing as a dog]) onward, the article—significantly lengthier than the previ-
ous ones—is more focused on the issue of vivisection. Ruesch is called
“uno scrittore contro la vivisezione” [a writer against vivisection], and
space is given to both examples of what he considers unjustifiable animal
suffering, and to his idea that vivisection is useful only to the
pharmaceuticals industry, because animal physiology is, generally speak-
ing, different from human structure.
66 D. Benvegnù
These two are also the main arguments of Imperatrice nuda, which is
fundamentally a long and vibrant collection of examples of how and why
vivisection is a violent and cruel practice. According to Ruesch, vivisec-
tion does not actually bring any kind of progress, mainly because, firstly,
it is impossible “estrapolare all’uomo risultati ottenuti su altre specie”
(Ruesch, 9) [to apply on human beings results obtained on other species];
secondly, the experimental research derived from such a practice is not
reliable, given that “tutte le nozioni valide che abbiamo in materia di
salute provengono dal campo clinico e non da quello sperimentale” (13)
[all the valid notions we have in terms of health come from clinical medi-
cine, not from an experimental one]. Leaving aside the impressive amount
of evidence Ruesch gathers from the past and the present, from our per-
spective it is more interesting to focus on the few fundamental passages
in which the author seems to move from the “scientific” discourse against
vivisection to its moral and ethical implications.
A first occurrence can be found on page 13 of Imperatrice Nuda, where
the author claims that the uselessness of animal experimentation has had
the final proof in Nazi Germany, and more precisely in the Nazi Lagers.
Suggesting something that would later become a kind of topos for part of
the animal-rights movement, Ruesch makes here an exact connection
between animal and human useless suffering, between vivisection and the
Holocaust, without however exploring this topic in detail. It is only
toward the end of the book that Ruesch discusses instead what he calls “il
senso morale” [the moral sense], that is to say the moral reason of his
rejection of vivisection. Here, he explains that the moral law is one of
those intangible realities able to mark “l’irrimediabile fallimento della
scienza sperimentale applicata agli esseri viventi, col tragico retaggio di
errori che ne è scaturito” (162) [the irreparable flop of experimental sci-
ence applied to living beings, with the tragic legacy of mistakes coming
from it]. To clarify his point Ruesch turns to a line of reasoning that
should sound quite familiar:
L’uomo ha o dovrebbe avere pietà sopratutto degli orfani, dei bambini mal-
trattati, dei vecchi, dei malati, di tutti gli indifesi e i sopraffatti. Tra questi
ultimi figura la più parte degli animali. E noi non dobbiamo domandarci se
essi hanno un’anima, o se sono capaci di ragionare, o di parlare, o di contare,
ma dobbiamo domandarci una cosa sola: “Sono capaci di soffrire?” E per loro
sfortuna essi ne sono fin troppo capaci. (162, emphasis added)
[Humanity should show compassion especially toward orphans, abused
children, elders, sick people, and all the defenseless and crushed ones.
Among the latters, animals are the majority. And we have not to ask if they
have souls, or if they can reason or speak or count, but we should ask just
this: “Can they suffer?” Unfortunately for them, they can even too much.]
Although his argument seems lifted directly from Bentham’s

Introduction, Ruesch mentions neither Bentham nor Singer. Nevertheless,
he steals from the British philosopher even another utilitarian idea,
namely, the general thought that cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to
humans and vice versa, claiming finally that if it is legitimate to torture
laboratory animals for the sake of humans, “allora sarebbe anche giusto
torturare un uomo da laboratorio per il bene di mille uomini. Difatti
qualsiasi argomento che giustifica la tortura degli animali è valevole anche
per la tortura di esseri umani” (163) [then it would be right to torture a
laboratory human being for the sake of one thousand humans. As a matter
of fact, each argument that justifies the torture of animals is also valid for
torturing humans].
This idea and others coming from the book find space on two other
later articles/interviews with Ruesch, published in La Stampa in January
and April 1977. Whether Imperatrice nuda was responsible or not, in
May of the same year an article by G.C. Ferraro Caro (“Le sevizie sugli
animali riconosciute dalla legge”) ratifies that a movement against vivisec-
tion is alive in Italy and much inclined to protest against any law that
does not consider animals as moral agents.14 It is within this kind of cul-
tural and political frame that the controversy started more than a year
earlier on the Turinese newspaper takes a decisive turn toward the debate
in which even Levi is involved.
The first article of this new series has the subhead “Oltre la vivisezione”
[Beyond vivisection], clearly referring to the previous series of articles,
and it is written by Arturo Carlo Jemolo, a Jewish Italian jurist and histo-
rian converted to Catholicism who was at that time an important leading
writer for La Stampa. His article is entitled “Amici animali” and was pub-
lished on Wednesday July 20, 1977. This piece starts with a general
68 D. Benvegnù
rejection of vivisection, but suddenly moves toward “un problema più

grave, che mi stupisce abbia così scarso posto nella filosofia dell’Occidente
di tutti i tempi” [a bigger issue that, surprisingly, has very little space in
Western philosophy as a whole]. Jemolo is here asking whether or not it
is legitimate to consider animals and animality only from the human
perspective, even when our goal is, supposedly, to protect other creatures.
This question leads him to sadly reflect on how even the general religious
sentiment “è certo nel considerare l’animale piuttosto come una cosa che
come essere” [is positive in considering the animal as a thing rather than
as a being], while it should be quite the opposite because “il dolore fisico
dell’animale è proprio il nostro; e cosi è la sofferenza della sua reclusione”
[the physical pain of the animal is our own; the same goes for the suffer-
ing of captivity]. The article finally ends by maintaining clearly that we
must not put the animals into the same category with things, requesting
however for
un teologo che mi rassicurasse, mi dicesse che quando afferma che «Dio è

giusto» pensa che in qualche modo, per noi misterioso, ci dev’essere un
compenso per il cane che passò la vita legato alla catena, sempre affamato,
spesso assetato, povero Lazzaro di fronte al cane epulone che visse tra agi e
morbidezze. (Jemolo, 3)
[a theologian who could reassure me, who could say that when he affirms
that «God is just» also thinks that in some mysterious way there should be
a recompense for the dog that spent its whole life chain-tied, always hun-
gry, often thirsty, poor Lazzarus in front of the glutton dog that spent its
life in luxury.]
Having posed the question in this way, a response was bound to

appear. It arrives only six days later, in the form of an article written by
the moral theologian Enrico Chiavacci. The article—still on page three,
that is to say the cultural page of La Stampa—is linked directly to
Jemolo’s piece by the subheading (“Un teologo risponde alla domanda
di Jemolo” [a theologian replies to Jemolo’s question]), but the title is
much broader, “Il cristianesimo e gli animali” [Cristianity and the ani-
mals]. Chiavacci begins by directly addressing the editor-in-chief of the
newspaper, at that time Arrigo Levi, claiming that he writes precisely to
respond to Jemolo’s “lamento commovente e giustificato” [moving and
justified complaint]. In order to achieve his goal, however, he prefers to

begin by copying a section of a book he had just published one year
earlier, “un piccolo manuale di teologia morale sul quinto comanda-
mento (Morale della vita fisica, ed. Dehoniane, Bologna)” [a little man-
ual of moral theology, Morals of physical life], in which he claims to have
attempted “un paragrafo nuovo rispetto alla manualistica morale cor-
rente, sul dovere morale di rispetto della vita subumana”15 [a new para-
graph on the moral duty toward subhuman life]. This paragraph, as he
calls it, is actually edited as two paragraphs in the newspaper, which do
not precisely mirror the titles they have, as indeed one, in the book. In
the book, in fact, the paragraph that has the same title given in La
Stampa, that is, Oltre l’ecologia, starts with this more general statement:
“Ormai è tempo che si cominci a gettare le basi di un nuovo capitolo
della morale Cristiana: quello dell’ecologia” (Chiavacci, 33) [it is time
we start to build the ground for a new chapter of Christian morality:
the ecological one]. Differently, the first phrase in the newspaper cor-
responds to the beginning of the following paragraph in the book, that
is instead entitled Il dovere del rispetto della vita subumana; a title—
Chiavacci says in the corresponding footnote—that refers to an “allocu-
tion” by Pope Paul VI to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) published in
the Vatican newspaper “L’Osservatore Romano” in 1969, and to a vol-
ume by M. Nicholson, La rivoluzione ambientale, in which the author
criticized the total indifference of the Christian churches toward this
topic (36).
Il dovere del rispetto della vita subumana gathers both the paragraphs
present in La Stampa, although in the article Chiavacci adds a little final
reflection to his previous thoughts. However, both in the book and in the
newspaper Chiavacci begins claiming that the lack of respect for what he
calls sub-human life should be considered sinful, because “esperienza
umana e parola di Dio sono là a suggerirci che anche qui [in killing ani-
mals without reason] c’è un problema morale” (37) [human experience
and God’s word are there to suggest that there is a moral issue here]. He
goes on arguing that behind the appearance of each animal there is God’s
design, and therefore every effort made for preserving it is well-deserving
(“benemerit[o]”). Of course, he writes, this does not deny “il principio
biblicamente indubbio che ogni animale è al servizio dell’uomo” [the
70 D. Benvegnù
biblically undoubted principle that animals are in service of Humanity],

and so there might be good reasons to kill some non-human creatures: as
for example vivisecting them when it is useful for the progress of medi-
cine, or even hunting birds when they might harm the life of art works
[sic]. Undoubtedly though, for Chiavacci there is a negative continuity
between how the Western world cruelly mistreats both humans and ani-
mals, and this is shown by the fact that “l’espressione ‘uomini trattati
come bestie’, per indicare un trattamento crudele, non avrebbe senso se
non ci fosse il pre-giudizio che le bestie possono essere trattate crudel-
mente senza alcuna disapprovazione sociale e morale” (37) [the expres-
sion ‘men treated like beasts’, to address a cruel treatment, would be
meaningless without the bias that beasts can be cruelly treated without
any social and moral disapproval].
This is the subjective aspect, or what he calls the human experience of
the issue. But Scripture is also there to lead us through this perilous moral
adventure. If there is no doubt, Chiavacci states again, that in the Bible
humans are called to take dominion over the whole creation, in doing so
they do not have to go beyond “la signoria stessa di Dio: e Dio trova
buone tutte le sue creature” [God’s lordship: and God loves all his crea-
tures]. Actually, creatures are only tools that God uses in order to accom-
plish His good plans, and therefore they also serve the same supreme
good: “gli animali—come tutte le creature superiori nella sfera del subu-
mano—rientrano anch’essi nel disegno della redenzione: anch’essi
gemono in attesa della salvezza finale” (38) [animals—as well as all crea-
tures above the subhuman sphere—are included in the redemption plan].
Finally, he writes:
Senza alcuna forzatura sembra dunque potersi dire che una qualche atten-
zione morale debba essere rivolta anche all’atteggiamento dell’uomo verso
la vita in tutte le sue forme: vegetali e specialmente animali; e che anche in
questo campo il dominio dell’uomo non possa mai giustificare il compor-
tamento arbitrario e gratuito.
[Without straining, we can say that humanity should pay some kind of
moral attention to life in all its shapes: vegetable and especially animal
ones; moreover, even in this field, human dominion should not justify any
arbitrary and gratuitous behavior.]
With the commonly consequent example of Saint Francis, the wolf,

and the birds, the paragraph ends in the book and therefore what is
reported as a direct quotation on La Stampa. But Chiavacci in 1977 has
two more points to make. First, in the relative article, he feels he must
clarify better his position on vivisection. He is not in favor of it, Chiavacci
states, but he is nonetheless convinced that
una campagna globale, indiscriminata, contro la vivisezione sia sbagliata, e

indebolisca la giusta campagna contro la vivisezione (e la sperimentazione
su animali in genere) come strumento arbitrario, moralmente indifferente,
nelle mani di ricercatori che si preoccupano più di pubblicare che di
giovare seriamente all’umanità; e contro la vivisezione operata senza
riguardo sufficiente—proporzionato all’importanza e al buon risultato
dell’esperimento—per le sofferenze dell’animale.
[a global, indiscriminate, campaign against vivisection is wrong, and it
weakens the correct campaign against vivisection (and animal experimen-
tation in general) as an arbitrary instrument, morally cold, in the hands of
researchers who are more interested in publishing than to help humanity;
and against that vivisection that does not take into sufficient account—
proportioned to the importance and the good outcome of the experi-
ment—the suffering of the animal.]
Secondly, he believes that our treatment of animals and humans is

rather the effect of a general “insensibilità morale verso il fatto ‘vita’”
[indifference toward ‘life’ as a fact]. Defending the idea that what we call
‘life’ is something always arbitrarily expendable—he finally concludes—
is the worst service “che si possa rendere alla vita, umana prima, subu-
mana poi” [one can render to human first, then subhuman, life].
As we have already noticed, when Primo Levi decides to pick up this
article and respond, his opening sentences seem to have nothing to do
with such a strenuous defense of the holiness of life with which Chiavacci
had ended. Rather, when a couple of weeks later “Contro il dolore” gets
published on La Stampa, the first two paragraphs talk about the appar-
ently completely unrelated topic of solipsism, until the previously
mentioned sentence in which Levi finally refers to Jemolo’s and, specifi-
cally, to Chiavacci’s article. Only at that point does Levi explain what is
72 D. Benvegnù
the connection between solipsism and what he thinks are Chiavacci’s

main arguments, and consequently the whole content of his arguing
changes. He begins by claiming that he enthusiastically agrees with the
conclusions drawn by the theologian, but he is puzzled about his reason-
ing. The typical narcissist blindness of solipsism toward any kind of oth-
erness is in fact what he sees in Chiavacci’s logic, and what leads him to
reject also the theory, maintained in “Il cristianesimo e gli animali,” that
“sarebbe lecita una certa misura di sofferenza inflitta agli animali perché
‘ogni animale è al servizio dell’uomo’” [a certain measure of suffering
inflicted on animals supposedly is acceptable only because “every animal
is at service of man”]. Levi refutes with a series of quite sarcastic rhetorical
questions one of Chiavacci’s main ideas, that is to say that this world is a
gift given by God specifically to humans, or in other words the biblical
concept of human dominion over creation. This scriptural recourse is not
new: Andrew Linzey has written that within almost the whole of Christian
tradition “is commonly supposed that the power given to humankind
over animals justifies their use or abuse by humans. Dominion has fre-
quently been interpreted as despotism” (Linzey, 34). Of course, Levi is
not directly accusing Chiavacci of such extreme interpretation of
Scripture. He is, however, pointing out how it is at the same time absurd
and possibly harmful—exactly as for solipsism—to convince ourselves
that the whole of creation has been thought and designed as a gift for
humanity; or, as he sarcastically writes, “un dono fatto all’uomo 15 mili-
ardi d’anni prima che nascesse, e destinato a sussistere almeno altrettanto
dopo che della nostra specie sarà estinta anche la memoria” [a gift made
to man fifteen billion years before he was born, and destined to survive at
least as long again and after even the memory of our species is
extinguished].
Having discharged this first point, Levi then moves on, writing that
the paradigm of the goodness of all creatures, maintained by Chiavacci
in the second part of his article, is similarly unreasonable. To prove his
point, he provides a humorous and fearful list of animals (from spiders
to felines) that cannot exactly be considered “good” creatures, at least
according to human standards. Actually, Levi adds, we cannot even say
that these animals are properly “evil”; rather, for him it seems neces-
sary to admit that “le categorie morali, il bene e il male, non si
attagliano ai subumani” [moral categories, good and evil, do not fit

subhumans], because the struggle for life is either below or above
human criteria.
This is not the first time, nor would it be the last, Levi makes such a
statement, in which what seems to be at stake is the possibility of a
sharp—although evolutionary, post-Darwinian—divide between humans
and non-human criteria, human and non-human animals. The idea that
it is a mistake to confuse our human moral world with the animal one,
which lacks any rational and normative morality, is in fact repeated and
somehow confirmed by Levi in several circumstances:
Ora, l’uomo è certamente un animale sociale (…): ma guai se tutte le spinte

zoologiche che sopravvivono nell’uomo dovessero essere tollerate! Le leggi
umane servono appunto a questo: a limitare gli impulsi animaleschi (OI
191).
[Now, man is certainly a social animal (…): but Heaven help if all the
zoological drives surviving within him should be tolerated! Human laws
are there for limiting animalistic impulses]
Se siamo uomini è perché abbiamo imparato a metterci al riparo, a contra-

vvenire, a ostacolare certi istinti che sono la nostra eredità animale (OI
1299).
[If we are men is because we have learnt how to shelter, to break, to
thwart certain instincts that are our animal heritage]
Cercare di ricavare una morale umana dal comportamento degli animali

intorno a noi è un vizio antico ed illogico; indulgervi è rischioso ma diver-
tente (OII 698).
[Searching for human morality into animal behavior is an old and illogic
habit; to indulge in it is risky but amusing]
L’animale non può essere oggetto di giudizi morali, «che di natura è frutto/
tanta vaghezza»: e tanto meno dovremmo essere tentati di esportare i nostri
criteri morali umani ad animali tanto lontani da noi quanto gli artropodi
(OII 755).
[Animals cannot be objects of moral judgment, «che di natura è frutto/
tanta vaghezza»: even less we should export our human moral criteria to
animals as far away from us as the arthropods]
74 D. Benvegnù
Il serpente in carne e ossa, come tutti gli animali, non è soggetto di morale:
non è buono né cattivo, divora ed è divorato, occupa nicchie ecologiche
varie (OII 850).
[The snake in the flesh, as the other animals, is not subjected to any mor-
als: it is neither good or evil, it devours and it is devoured, it occupies vari-
ous ecologic niches]
These passages can be read as isolated but coherent moments of Levi’s

reflection upon the human/animal divide, in which what is stressed is a
sharp moral distinction between a human subject capable of making a
decision based on reason and, as it usually goes, free will, and a non-
human creature subjected to its instincts. If this were Levi’s final thought,
we should agree completely with Jonathan Druker when he writes that
“Levi’s dilemma is that his testimony risks complicity with authoritarian
or Hegelian discourses that fully identify the Western subject with power”
(Druker, 68). All the above quoted passages, included the one from
“Contro il dolore” where we paused, seem in fact to stress two main
thoughts. On the one hand, Levi shares with Hegel and with almost the
whole post-Kantian philosophical tradition the idea that animals have
uncontrollable impulses able to set them apart from what has been con-
sidered the peak of creation, that is, that humanity which instead controls
its instincts. On the other hand, the impossibility to master those instincts
relegates animals to a psychological and ontological plane in which
human morality has no sense, and therefore we must avoid applying our
idea of justice or even equality to them. This might also mean, though,
that we cannot consider animals in any way worthy of the same treat-
ment we use with humans; or, in the best scenario, we have no idea of
how we can treat them, on what kind of moral or immoral ground. The
outcome of such a double reading could then confirm the impression
that Levi suggests a model of humanity capable of distinguishing itself
from the animals on the basis of the ability to perform moral tasks. To
put it differently, Levi seems to believe and ground his world on an ethics
that is necessarily linked to a theory of moral capacity and therefore
agency, both of which belong only to human subjects.
Nevertheless, as both our reading of “Nomi e leggende dello scoiat-
tolo” and Druker’s term “dilemma” underline, such an understanding
of Levi as an orthopedic and enthusiastic enlightened humanist does

not give credit to his personal, and most importantly, literary com-
plexity. If in fact we can recognize in several points of his literature
almost a certain nostalgia for an “Ulyssean” idea of man, a return to
humanity before Auschwitz, this does not lead him either to a self-sat-
isfied image of humanity nor to a complete dismissal of a form of ethi-
cal, or proto- ethical, consideration toward animals. Levi’s whole
literary project is instead articulated precisely to question the very
nature of what we call “human essence,” offering not a coherent philo-
sophical message, but rather a literary device in which the impossibil-
ity for a clear identification provides an experience of alterity somehow
compatible, but not superimposable, with the author’s one. Moreover,
this impossibility is almost paradoxically based on what Derrida has
revealed as another impossibility, namely, the shared vulnerability of
our bodily suffering.
To clarify this point, let us firstly consider a bit closer the term Levi
seems to borrow from Chiavacci, that is, “subumani,” and why such
term—along with what the theologian writes about “uomini trattati
come bestie”—might have triggered his reaction.
One of the most quoted and most striking passages of Se questo è un
uomo—one of those in which Levi strongly expresses what has been called
his ethological gaze—is at the very beginning of the chapter entitled I
sommersi e i salvati:
Vorremmo far considerare come il Lager sia stato, anche e notevolmente,

una gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale.
Si rinchiudano tra i fili spinati migliaia di individui diversi per età, con-
dizione, origine, lingua, cultura e costumi, e siamo quivi sottoposti a un
regime di vita costante, controllabile, identico per tutti e inferiore a tutti i
bisogni: è quanto di più rigoroso uno sperimentatore avrebbe potuto isti-
tuire per stabilire che cosa sia essenziale e che cosa acquisito nel comporta-
mento dell’animale-uomo di fronte alla lotta per la vita (SQU, OI 83).
[We would also like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a
gigantic biological and social experiment.
Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language,
culture and customs, are enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a
76 D. Benvegnù
regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs,
and which is more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to
establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the
human animal in the struggle for life.]
This passage has been commented upon in many ways, focusing on

various specific aspects, and looking at them from several different per-
spectives. We will investigate why Levi decided to describe Auschwitz as
a scientific experiment in the following chapter devoted to the question
of techne and animal technology. For what we are articulating in this
section we have to focus momentarily on the term “animale-uomo” in
the struggle for life. This double hyphenated word, able to shake any
preconceived idea of an autonomous human nature, appears in this form
for the very first time in the above-quoted passage, and, although there
are many avatars of it throughout the whole of Levi’s oeuvre, it is always
explicitly linked to what Levi has seen in Auschwitz, the specific kind of
beings he observed there.16 At the same time, for every reader of Se questo
è un uomo, the lines we found in “Contro il dolore” about our moral
world and the “subumani” recall, without hesitation, the moral dimen-
sion of the Lager, where the only law forced upon everyone seems to be
the one of evolutionary survival (the struggle for life), in which Levi
writes that the words “«bene» e «male», «giusto» e «ingiusto»” [“good”
and “evil”, “just” and “injust”] had a different meaning. Or they could
have even no meaning at all, if Levi challenges readers to judge “in base
al quadro che abbiamo delineato e agli esempi sopra esposti, quanto del
nostro mondo morale potesse sussistere al di qua del filo spinato” (SQU,
OI 82) [on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples
given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on
this side of the barbed wire]. Furthermore, the same term “subumani” we
have seen applied to animals by Chiavacci (and then by Levi himself ) in
La Stampa echoes some of the terms Levi used to describe the status of
the majority of the prisoners (but also sometimes of the SS) in Auschwitz:
from time to time, we can find adjectives and definitions such as “extrau-
mano” (SQU, OI 93), “non-umana” (SQU, OI 68), “sotto uomini”
(SQU, OI 168), “non umane, anzi contro-umane” (OI 197), “extra-
umane, anzi contro-umane” (OI 1176), “esseri antiumani” (OII 873),
“sotto-uomini” (OII 1258) and so on.17 It is not so surprising then that

even the prisoners used an animalistic language with respect to them-
selves. We have already quoted in the previous chapter the most famous
example, according to which the prisoners almost autonomally exchanged
the typical German term essen “to eat” with fressen, a term meaning “to
eat” but reserved specifically for animals (SQU, OI 71).
We might establish, therefore, a preliminary equivalence between the
“animale-uomo” and the “subumani.” Following Anna Baldini’s sugges-
tion, we can say that just as the moral criteria of our human world—
according to “Contro il dolore”—cannot be applied to the animals’ one,
so the same criteria of ethical judgment struggle to be applied in the
Lager—the category of “subhumans”—can be broadened from the animal
universe to the prisoner of the concentration camp (Baldini, 182). In
other words, if we have no ethical certainties when it comes to animals
because they cannot be considered moral agents, the same can be said of
the camp prisoners who need thus to be considered, as the animals in
“Contro il dolore,” below or above human criteria. This inevitable but
dangerous comparison is not easy to untangle because, in Levi’s case, it
seems to extend the proto-ethical features of the testimonial narrative
from human beings, although in the special situation of the Lager, to ani-
mals and vice versa. A distinction is nonetheless necessary. The subverted
world of Auschwitz is witnessed by mostly a language of beasts, of bestial-
ization18: the Häftlinge “bestialmente orinano” (SQU, OI 33) [urinate like
an animal], or are nothing else “che bestie stanche” (OI 38) [than tired
beasts], “bestie percosse” (OI 115) [beaten beasts], “bestie selvagge” (OI
135) [wild beasts], “bestie impaurite” (OI 150) [frightened beasts]; and
finally, to sum it up, “l’opera di bestializzazione, intrapresa dai tedeschi,
era stata portata a termine” (OI 168) [the beastialization, undertaken by
the Germans, had been completed]. The reason for this bestialization is,
paradoxically, a peculiar combination of human gaze and human rational-
ity. On the one hand, we have in fact a gaze able to make the prisoners
mirror themselves in animals, therefore making them available to human
exploitation.19 On the other hand, there is what Levi calls “una legge
umana” (SQU, OI 38) [a human law] based upon a theoretical mecha-
nism that lies at the very core of Western rationality, that is, “un sillo-
gismo” at the end of which “sta il Lager” [there is the Lager], as it is written
78 D. Benvegnù
in the preface of Se questo è un uomo (SQU, OI 4–5). Either ways, the

“opera di bestializzazione” is deeply human rather than “animal,” even if
we simply agree that only human beings can, according to our common
use of language, behave like beasts. Levi seems therefore to describe and
deconstruct through the lens of the literary witness what Giorgio Agamben
has called the “anthropological machine,” that is to say a cultural and psy-
chological mechanism able to create—from a position of supposed
power—the “human,” by dividing arbitrarily and through a double nega-
tion that which is supposedly human proper and that which is not.20
Auschwitz in fact dismantled and destroyed Levi’s previous “civili fan-
tasmi cartesiani” (SQU, OI 6) [civil Cartesian ghosts] about human
nature—whether they were about the dualistic Cartesian idea that ani-
mals are just exploitable automata, bare bodies, or, rather, they were the
solipsistic thought that human thinking, one’s Cogito, actually assures the
existent of the world and one’s own identity.
The connection between Auschwitz and Levi’s use of the supposedly
borrowed term “subumani” thus troubles and complicates his argument
in “Contro il dolore.” Yet, it does not stop him from maintaining that
there is actually a common ground on which we can build, if not a shared
ethics, at least a not-normative one, a proto-ethics able to stand “in difesa
degli animali” [in defence of animals]. Immediately after the sentence
about moral categories and the subhumans we just discussed and the
consequent final rejection of Chiavacci’s case, Levi in fact submits his
own plea. He writes:
gli animali devono essere rispettati, ma per motivi diversi. Non perché sono
«buoni» o utili a noi (non tutti lo sono), ma perché una norma scritta in
noi, e riconosciuta da tutte le religioni e le legislazioni, ci intima di non
creare dolore, né in noi né in alcuna creatura capace di percepirlo. «Arcano
è tutto/fuor che il nostro dolor»; le certezze del laico sono poche, ma la
prima è questa: è ammissibile soffrire (e far soffrire) solo a compenso di una
maggior sofferenza evitata a se o ad altri.
[Animals must indeed be respected, but for different reasons. Not
because they are “good” or useful to us (not all of them are), but because a
rule written in us and recognized by all religions and all legislations
commands us not to create pain, neither in ourselves nor in any creature
capable of perceiving it. “Everything is arcane/but our pain:” the certitudes
of the layman are few, but the first is this: suffering (and inflicting suffer-
ing) is acceptable only if rewarded by the avoidance of greater suffering to
oneself or others.]
Three main considerations must be made about this statement. Leaving

aside for now the issue about what is useful or rather useless when it comes
to other beings, Levi here reaffirms once again that animals are not “good.”
As we have just seen, this very belief not only is complicated by the very
moral language Levi adopted to describe the concentration camp, but it
can also be read as both deeply anthropocentric and disappointingly
anthropomorphic. Yet, it can as well be interpreted as a strategy to avoid a
judgmental understanding of animal behavior. Levi’s suggestion about ani-
mals (or their lack of “goodness”) seems in fact to resemble what Tom
Regan has called “moral patients,” creatures who “lack the prerequisites
that would enable them to control their own behavior in ways that would
make them morally accountable for what they do” (Regan, 152). Moreover,
the lack of certain human characteristics is not necessarily a flaw: as Levi
writes in 1985, “i pidocchi sono animali poco simpatici, ma non hanno
pregiudizi razziali” (RS, OII 889) [lice are not so nice animals, but they
have no racial prejudices]. Most importantly, though, we must notice that
this same belief about the lack of “morality” in animals has been implicitly
contradicted by Levi himself in a few but very revelatory circumstances.
One instance was in the public sphere, when he claims in an interview that
animals actually have more or less human “moral” feelings (“odiano gli
animali, il gatto odia il topo” [animals hate, the dog hates the cat]), ground-
ing his theory on Konrad Lorenz’s ethological theory on animal aggressive-
ness.21 Likewise, with regard to Levi’s private life, it has been reported by
his close friend and fellow writer Mario Rigoni Stern, who during an inter-
view told that Levi once went to visit him in Asiago and tried to convince
him of the treacherous malice of some animals (Dini-Jesorum, 190–194).22
Second, given that Levi declared his own atheism on several occasions,
his references to religions may seem out of place. Of course, “Contro il
dolore” is a response to a theologian and so it may be that Levi was simply
trying to politely find a common ground with his Christian interlocutor.
Nevertheless, there is also the possibility that in his studies on the Jewish
tradition—intensified in writing Se non ora, quando?—Levi came across
80 D. Benvegnù
the Talmudic precept commonly known as Tza’ar ba’alei chayim (“the suf-
fering of living creatures”), according to which it is forbidden to inflict
unnecessary pain on animals.23 We will return on how Levi articulates the
link between Judaism and animals in the chapter devoted to “Creation.”
Third and most importantly, Levi recognizes that for him the real ethi-
cal discriminating factor is not goodness or utility (“buoni o utili’), but
pain, understood both as bodily pain and as psychological suffering.24 This
is not surprising at all. The word “dolore” [pain] recurs frequently in the
whole of Levi’s oeuvre, especially when it comes to his testimonial accounts.
It is in his short stories, however, that he expands, complicates, and reveals
what this term meant for him. Let’s take, for instance, two of them.
The first story is probably one of the most astonishing examples of
Levi’s narrative, “Versamina.” Published in the newspaper Il Giorno in
1965 and then collected a year later in Storie naturali, this short story is
uncannily located in a post-war Germany still bearing the signs of the
catastrophe and tells the consequences of a terrible discovery made by a
German chemist during the Second World War—a discovery that destroys
the chemist’s life. The main point of “Versamina” is that we have to respect
pain, because the inversion between pain and pleasure, induced in the
story by a new chemical element called “versamina,” leads to a special
madness. The young chemist, almost a doppelgänger of Primo Levi, after
having tested the “versamina” on some animals, decides to try it on him-
self, beginning a terrible journey toward a kind of inverted, upside-down
life, in which—as the intradiegetic narrator says—“il piacere e il dolore
avev[ano] cambiato posto definitivamente” (SN, OI 471) [pleasure and
pain have switched places once and for all]. The inversion of pain and
pleasure, and the consequent increasing loss of ethical boundaries and
self-identity, pools together in the same mix of horror, fascination, and
piety (something horrible and fascinating to watch, claims the narrator),
animals and humans, respectively the two dogs that die during the testing
and the chemist who becomes a victim of his own discovery. The animal
experimentation of the story, with all the inverted pain it brings, is then
not only the preamble of human suffering—a consideration that Levi
shares with a lot of thinkers before him, Bentham included—but also
leads to the thought that pain is “il guardiano della vita” (147) [the care-
taker of life], because it lies at the bottom of every life and experience.
This kind of paradox about our existential vulnerability is finally exempli-

fied by the quotation that concludes the story, a manifestation of Levi’s
literary passion for Shakespeare. “Versamina” ends in fact with two famous
lines from Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair:” an expression of an
upside-down ethical world in which, as so often in Levi’s work, we deal
with what he called a “mondo capovolto” [upside-down world] populated
by “esseri antiumani” (OII 873) [anti-human beings].
The second short story pushes the topic even further. Published in La
Stampa twelve years after “Versamina,” “Un testamento”25 belongs to the
same period of “Contro il dolore.” Actually, they might be seen as being
in conversation. We may in fact notice that, with the exception of a story
about Auschwitz that probably was written years earlier and a brief politi-
cal note tied to the contingent Italian circumstances, the only piece that
falls in between “Contro il dolore” and “Un testamento” is a short quasi-
dialogue published initially in La Stampa and then in the volume as
“Dialogo di un poeta e di un medico.”26 Although it focuses on the
importance of pain and suffering in the life of an artist, this quasi-dia-
logue written in the style of Operette Morali is clearly a parody of Giacomo
Leopardi’s “pessimismo cosmico” (cosmic pessimism). Despite several
statements against Leopardi’s thought throughout his whole career, in
those specific years Levi was instead reflecting deeply upon the literary
and philosophical legacy of the poet from Recanati, as Leopardi’s quota-
tion inserted in “Contro il dolore” (“Arcano è tutto/fuor che il nostro
dolor”27) reveals. Anna Baldini has pointed out that during the years
1977–1978 Levi’s reflection on pain, on the role of mankind in the uni-
verse, and on the meaning of human life gets close to Leopardi’s (Baldini,
170), thus forming a coherent group of texts that will have a replica only
in 1983. In this group, “Un testamento” is certainly one of most at the
same time explicit and ironically ambivalent.
Written in the shape of a letter sent by a father to his son, “Un testa-
mento” re-establishes the etymologic link between testimony and testa-
ment, being the final will of a dentist about the best and the worst aspects
of his own profession. In the paragraph entitled “sul dolore,” the dentist/
father makes a fundamental claim that is necessary to quote in its entirety:
L’esperienza insegnerà anche a te che il dolore, anche se forse non è l’unico

dato dei sensi di cui sia lecito dubitare, è certo il meno dubbio. È probabile
82 D. Benvegnù
che quel sapiente francese di cui mi sfugge il nome, e che affermava di

essere certo di esistere in quanto era sicuro di pensare, non abbia sofferto
molto in vita sua, poiché altrimenti avrebbe costruito il suo edificio di
certezze su una base diversa. Infatti, spesso chi pensa non è sicuro di pen-
sare, il suo pensiero ondeggia fra l’accorgersi e il sognare, gli sfugge di tra le
mani, rifiuta di lasciarsi afferrare e configgere sulla carta in forma di parole.
Ma invece chi soffre sì, chi soffre non ha dubbi mai, chi soffre è ahimè
sicuro sempre, sicuro di soffrire ed ergo di esistere. (L, OII 147)
[Experience will also teach you that pain, though perhaps not the only
information of the senses that can be doubted, is certainly the less dubious.
It’s likely that that French sage whose name escapes me and who declared
that he was certain he existed inasmuch as he was sure he was thinking did
not suffer much in his life, because otherwise he would have constructed
his edifice of certainties on a different foundation. In fact, often those who
think aren’t sure they’re thinking, their thought wavers between awareness
and dream, it slips between their fingers, refuses to be grasped and fixed on
the page in the form of words. But those who suffer, yes, those who suffer
have no doubts, ever, those who suffer, alas, are always certain, certain that
they are suffering and ergo exist; CW, 1488]
Patior ergo sum, Levi seems to maintain in this passage: implicitly sati-
rizing the famous Cartesian formula, he is claiming instead that only
pain can assure the existence of the subject, our “brutale certezza di essere
vivo” [brutal certainty of being alive]. Whoever affirms that solipsistic
thoughts can do the same has probably not suffered much in his life,
because it is only through the interaction of our flesh and feelings with
the world that we can grasp our own thoughts and drive or fix (“config-
gere”) them as nails into paper. Therefore, only pain and suffering can be
taken as the ground for certainty, even in the case we would need a base
for our ethical treatment of every other human or animal “patient.”
Moreover, Levi is saying that the experience of pain, of suffering, is
directly linked to the possibility of writing, of transforming and trans-
mitting the experience through writing, because without the bodily cer-
tainty of suffering our thoughts cannot be properly fixed on page. This
assumption can again be an almost autobiographical confession, whereas
for Levi the suffering he experienced in Auschwitz was the stimulus
behind his own writing. However, the pain-based rejection of the volatile
Cartesian Cogito is surrounded by paragraphs (“dei denti,” “della musica,”

“degli errori,” “del discorso suadente,” and finally “del mentire”) that
have instead a peculiar ironic tone, different from the one in which
Descartes is the object of the parody. In these other paragraphs, the den-
tist gives to his son advice that is the opposite of Levi’s usual comments
of how to write properly. Thus, we have, for example, the suggestion to
lie, because “la menzogna è peccato per gli altri, per noi è virtù” (148)
[lying, a sin for others, is a virtue for us]; or even the advice to be obscure
“perché l’uomo teme la chiarezza” [because man fears clarity]. The latter
advice sounds indeed very paradoxical, because Levi wrote an essay enti-
tled “Dello scrivere oscuro”28 in which he argues precisely against what
he considered a bad, or even dishonest, literary habit, id est obscure writ-
ing. What is at stake here, then, is the knot that tangles together suffer-
ing and testimony, once again seen through the lens of a literary device
whose duplicity shakes the usual moral boundaries we might expect from
Levi.
This complexity or this double tangle seems barely present in “Contro
il dolore,” where we find rather a positive attitude against that “fantasia
puerile” called solipsism and a practical, almost utilitarian, stand against
animal suffering. However, if we read again the already cited paragraph
about not creating pain, or even the end of the article in which Levi reas-
sures his readers with the idea that, of course, he does not believe that the
life of a crow or a cricket is worth as much as a human life, we might
notice something minimal but not so aligned with the objective rational
perspective Levi seems (or wants) to apply. There are in fact few little
signs telling us how Levi does not precisely fit within the utilitarian
detached ethics of Bentham and Singer, exactly because he has gone
through a suffering that has never been experienced before, namely the
upside-down world called Auschwitz. For instance, the whole discussion
about suffering in the works of the two Anglophone philosophers is
viewed from the commendable perspective of the defenseless animals but
with the precise feeling that we, as humans—or, as specific humans with
privileges, as the mention of the black slaves in Bentham makes us
think—cannot really be confused and therefore treated as animals. What
Levi suggests is different. When he feels the need to stress that we should
impose suffering neither “in noi né in alcuna creatura capace di
84 D. Benvegnù
percepirlo” [on ourselves nor on any creature capable of perceiving it], or

when he writes that “è ammissibile soffrire (e far soffrire)”29 [it is accept-
able to suffer and to inflict suffering] only if we avoid in this way a bigger
suffering, such an ambivalent position in terms of internal and external
agency, between passivity and activity, comes from the very experience of
having been seen and therefore treated as animals. It is time to explore the
experience of bestialization Levi underwent and how it involved, in dif-
ferent ways but within a similar frame, victims and persecutors.
Notes
1. First in Levi (1980), 3; then in AM but with the different title “Lo scoiat-
tolo; finally in O II, 716.
2. See, for instance, the otherwise interesting essay written by Massimo
Bucciantini about Levi’s experience as a chemist; Bucciantini (2011),
35–42.
3. For a general overview of present scholarship on animal suffering, see
Aaltola (2012).
4. See the introduction by F. Rosen to Bentham (1996), xxxii.
5. See Bentham (1996), XVII.4. All the following quotations by Bentham
are taken from this fundamental paragraph, unless differently stated.
6. On this very subject another British philosopher, Mary Midgley, has
recently written that the argument according to which animals are things
and therefore it does not matter how we treat them, “simply reverses
itself. Since it does matter how we treat animals—since cruelty it is
vicious in its own right, and not just because it might lead to ill-treating
people—the sharp division into object and fully rational subject cannot
be right” (Midgley, 152).
7. The 2009 edition, from which we are quoting, keeps almost the same
structure of the original 1975 edition but is enriched by some additional
examples, especially in the two chapters devoted to animal experimenta-
tion and animal farming.
8. The idea that animals not only do not suffer but they cannot even feel
pain belongs to a very strong tradition of thought that finds its most
important representative, although controversially, in Descartes and its
famous comment on animals being machines or automata (see for exam-
ple R. Descartes, Discourse on Method, part V). Whoever dealt and deals
with an animal in his or her life does not need Peter Singer’s rejection of
this idea to know that animals not only do feel pain and suffer, but they
have also sometimes a very special way to express it that overcomes
human language. However, strangely enough, there are contemporary
philosophers who still consider animals in general unable to suffer. See,
for instance, Harrison (1991), in which the prominent Oxford professor
of science and religion claims that there is not enough evidence to main-
tain that animals feel pain, therefore they cannot be considered moral
agents. There are many articles, essays, and books that are claiming the
opposite view, but this is not the place to quote them all. I would rather
suggest reading Rollin (2007) for a general but very well-argued and
informed overview of the issue.
9. See, for instance, Regan (1983).
10. Manifestations of Derrida’s “animal turn” can be also found in an inter-
view with Elisabeth Roudinesco, in which Derrida deals with some of
the same issues he discusses in the “Animal Therefore I Am” (Derrida and
Roudinesco, 62–76), and in another interview entitled “Eating Well” in
which he offers a controversial opinion about vegetarianism (Derrida
1991).
11. All the quotations are taken from the 2005 online version: see Ruesch
1976 (translated afterwards in English first as The Slaughter of the
Innocents in 1978 and eventually as The Naked Empress, or The Great
Medical Fraud in 1982). On the general influence of Ruesch on the
development of the animal rights movement in Italy, see Tonutti, 2007,
151–196.
12. The name of Ruesch might have not escaped Levi’s attention, though.
Levi claims in fact to have read Ruesch’s novel Il paese delle ombre lunghe
[original title: Top of the World, 1950] during an unpublished lecture on
the conservation of food. I must thank Marco Belpoliti for kindly alert-
ing me about this reference.
13. This is not the first time in which Ruesch is asked to express his ideas on
medical science on “La Stampa.” In a short interview published on April
4 of the previous year, entitled “Ci ammaliamo di medicine,” Ruesch
had anticipated some of the issues of Imperatrice nuda, without though
mentioning explicitly the book or even vivisection. It is only after the
publication of his major work that “La Stampa” gets really interested in
him and in general in this topic.
14. Few months later, the protest against animal vivisection gained even
more popular attention, when the Italian Parliament was convinced to
86 D. Benvegnù
emit a bill against cruelty to animals. The whole issue was considered so
important by La Stampa that it reached the first page, with an article
entitled “Finiranno le torture in nome della scienza. Il disegno di legge
contro la vivisezione,” published in the newspaper on Wednesday,
October 12, 1977.
15. I would like to immediately stress here the adjective “subumana” because
it is a term we will find in Primo Levi’s article, utilized in a way that does
not fit precisely within the whole system of his other narratives about
animals. My guess, as we will see when we will discuss “Contro il dolore,”
is that Levi actually borrows this specific term—as he sometimes does
even in other essays—from his opponent and adjusts it into his own
vocabulary.
16. See, for instance, RS OII 933 and SeS, OII 1103.
17. These terms are not obvious synonyms. A further investigation about the
relations among these terms and what we might call a topology of sub-
humanity in Levi would be needed and most welcome. Yet, there is here
both a general indication about Levi’s use of the specific term “subu-
mani” and an overlap between a human reference and an animal one that
the same Levi did not feel the need to (theoretically) justify. We might
also stress that Levi has never been interested in building a coherent
philosophical system.
18. Cf. Belpoliti (1997), 159.
19. To investigate further this complex issue of identification with the gaze
of the persecutor, I suggest comparing Levi’s account of his “iniziazione”
in Auschwitz with two very intriguing books. The first one is Sax (2000)
in which the author not only gives us a survey of how animal symbolism
worked in the Nazi regime, but also analyses the complex dynamics of
this double identification. The second one is the already mentioned
Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, in which the reversal identification
between the colonizer and the colonized (and the animal) is investigated
using Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
20. See Agamben (2002).
21. The quotation about cats and dogs is in Calcagno and Poli (1992), 101.
We have already discussed the problematic relationship between Levi
and Lorenz: another interesting reading of Lorenz’s theory in Primo
Levi’s short stories, can be found in Cinquegrani (2010).
22. It should not surprise that Rigoni Stern, who in the same period of
“Contro il dolore” was publishing in La Stampa a series of articles col-
lectively entitled “Storie di bestie,” was not convinced by Levi’s argu-
ments. Moreover, Levi was always very impressed by Rigoni Stern’s

familiarity with animals and with nature as a whole; a characteristic he
probably could not find in himself, at least according to his friend’s
account as reported in the quoted interview. We can see expressions of
this feeling in Levi’s oeuvre too, for example in La chiave a stella, in
which Levi enjoys Faussone’s “zoologia autogestita” [self-managed zool-
ogy] and “confidenza con le piante e con le bestie” (CS, OI 1011) [famil-
iarity with plants and beasts], and, most importantly, in a short story
entitled “Ammutinamento” (VF, OI 718–724) and indeed dedicated to
Marion Rigoni Stern. In this story, the main character is a young girl able
to understand and interact friendly with plants and animals.
23. For a general survey of the relations between Judaism and the Animal
Rights Movement, see Kalechofsky (1988).
24. Sometimes Levi does not acknowledge any fundamental difference
between pain and suffering. Cf., for example, Levi (1997a), 43: “E di che
cosa ha paura? Del dolore fisico, mio e altrui;” and 72: “Ho paura della
sofferenza, ma non della morte. Temo molto la sofferenza, sia la mia che
quella altrui.”
25. First as Levi (1977); then in L; finally in O II, 145–148.
26. OII 114. In La Stampa the short story was originally entitled “Costumi.”
The two mentioned pieces published in between are instead “Il nostro
sigillo” (August 21) and “Lettera a Lattanzio: Dia le dimissioni”
(September 8).
27. G. Leopardi, Ultimo canto di Saffo, vv. 45–46.
28. Levi (1976): then in AM and in OII 676. Although published earlier in
the newspapers, this essay follows in L’altrui mestiere immediately after
“Contro il dolore.”
29. In both cases, emphasis added.
Works Cited
Aaltola, Elisa. Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
Acampora, Ralph. Corporal Compassion. Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
88 D. Benvegnù
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Bucciantini, Massimo. Esperimento Auschwitz. Torino: Einaudi, 2011.
Calcagno, Giorgio, and Gabriella Poli, eds. Echi di una voce perduta. Incontri,
interviste e conversazioni con Primo Levi. Milano: Mursia, 1992.
Cinquegrani, Alessandro. “Utopie di disfilassi nella città del futuro. Ipotesi su
alcuni racconti di Primo Levi.” Unpublished paper delivered at the confer-
ence “La città e l’esperienza del moderno”, Milano, 15–18 giugno 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview
with Jacques Derrida.” In Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. E. Cadava,
P. Connor, and J.-L. Nancy, 96–119. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal Therefore I Am. Translated by D. Wills. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008.
Harrison, Peter. “Do Animals Feel Pain?” Philosophy 66.255 (January 1991):
25–40.
Kalechofsky, Roberta, ed. Judaism and Animal Rights. Classical and Contemporary
Responses. Massachusetts: Micah Publications, 1988.
Lee, Jadran. Bentham on the Moral and Legal Status of Animals, PhD diss.,
University of Chicago, 2003.
Levi, Primo. “Dello scrivere oscuro.” La Stampa, December 11, 1976.
———. “Un testamento.” La Stampa, October 16, 1977.
———. “Nomi e leggende dello scoiattolo. La Stampa, June 2, p. 3, 1980.
———. Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987. Edited by M. Belpoliti. Torino:
Einaudi, 1997a.
Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1983.
Rollin, E. Bernard. “Animal Mind: Science, Philosophy, and Ethics.” The Journal
of Ethics 11.3 (September 2007): 253–274.
Ruesch, Hans. Imperatrice Nuda. La scienza medica attuale sotto accusa. Milano:
Rizzoli, 1976 (2005 edition available online at http://www.hansruesch.net/).
Sax, Boria. Animals in the Third Reich. Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust.
New York: Continuum, 2000.
Tonutti, Sabrina. Diritti animali. Storia e antropologia di un movimento. Udine:
Forum Edizioni, 2007.
3
Suffering II. Muteness and Testimony
We began this section with the suffering of material creatures. We noticed

that there was an ambiguity in Levi’s double treatment of the caged squir-
rels as he writes in “Nomi e leggende dello scoiattolo.” This ambiguity
was forced upon Levi, according to his story, by the vision of the suffering
of the little creature: without any further explanation, he decided to
release the animal from his grueling running on the wheel, ruining there-
fore the scientific experiment, but without setting the squirrel completely
free. We thus questioned the ethical consistency of Levi’s attitude toward
animal suffering and how it fits within his reputation of “austere human-
ist,” contemporary representative of the Enlightenment, and laboratory
scientist. Moreover, the use of the term “prigionieri” for the caged squir-
rels allowed us to ask whether this anthropomorphism is part of a larger
literary strategy, and if so how it connects with the whole of Levi’s oeuvre,
particularly when other prisoners are involved. The first question on ani-
mal suffering led us to Jeremy Bentham and therefore, closer to our time,
to Peter Singer. Their hedonistic-utilitarian approach to animal ethics
helped us to read Levi’s narrative of animal suffering, although Jacques
Derrida’s recent attention toward the human-animal divide gave us a per-
spective based on inability and impossibility that represents better the

90 D. Benvegnù
literary dynamics of the double anecdote of the caged squirrels. Yet, Levi
himself treated directly the issue of how we should respond to the suffer-
ing of another animal in one of his most famous articles, “Contro il
dolore.” To understand the complexity of this short essay, we have recon-
structed the journalistic debate on animal vivisection in which it was
included, analyzing Levi’s position vis-à-vis his opponents. This detailed
analysis revealed how Levi focuses on the material suffering of the crea-
ture, described in his fiction as the foundational trigger not only of the
subject, but also of writing itself. The question then became about the
tangle of suffering and writing that seems to lie at the bottom of Levi’s
witness. We noticed that the term “subumani” (although borrowed), as
well as the previous “prigionieri” for the caged squirrels, can be applied to
both animals and those humans who were in Auschwitz. The analogy
between the Lager and a scientific experiment as it is sketched in Se questo
è un uomo supports this impression.
3.1 Useless Violence, Bare Life, Testimony

Levi makes a fundamental connection between suffering, animals, and
Auschwitz also in I sommersi e i salvati (1986), while discussing the “zona
grigia” [gray area] where the boundaries between who was drowned and
who was saved in the Lager blur. In the chapter entitled “Violenza inutile”
[Useless violence], Levi articulates a series of metaphors and similes fea-
turing an interesting tangle of human and animal characteristics. As
Robert Gordon has pointed out, in this chapter there is “an emphasis on
cruelty as the blackest vice” (Gordon 2001, 100) that is basically grounded
on the same ideas we have seen applied in “Contro il dolore.” Moreover,
if it is true—as Gordon claims—that in these pages Levi is somehow
showing his closeness to Montaigne and to what the French moralist
thought on cruelty (26–31), it might be worth analyzing within what
kind of humanistic frame Levi is thinking. As a matter of fact, Descartes’s
influential description of animals as automata was written as a response to
Montaigne’s claim for animal intelligence and, especially, emotional
capability as it appears, for example, in his famous Apology for Raymond
Sebond.1 Displaying his closeness to Mointagne’s humanistic approach on
one topic, Levi might also be claiming for a different kind of humanism,
Suffering II. Muteness and Testimony 91
non-Cartesian, where the boundaries between animals and humans, as

well as between reason and flesh, are not so clear and well cut. This also
means that, as we have already mentioned in the previous chapter, Levi
cannot simply label as a child of the Enlightenment or as an “austere
humanist,” because his legacies might be distant from the mainstream
philosophical tradition or take several detours. His discussion of what
constitutes “useless violence” could be considered an example of such an
attitude.
In “Violenza inutile” Levi maintains that a particular feature of
Nazism—so peculiar that it allows us to distinguish this historical abomi-
nation from everything else—is “una diffusa violenza inutile, fine a se
stessa, volta unicamente alla creazione di dolore; talora tesa ad uno scopo,
ma sempre ridondante, sempre fuor di proporzione rispetto allo scopo
medesimo” (SeS, OII 1073) [widespread, useless violence, as an end in
itself, with the sole purpose of creating pain; sometimes with an aim, but
always redundant, always out of proportion]. In the following explana-
tion of this statement, Levi adds that this pain could be both psychical
and moral, and it concerns the same offensive and deliberate process of
“bestializzazione” that we have seen depicted above:
Le SS della scorta non nascondevano il loro divertimento al vedere uomini

e donne accovacciarsi dove potevano, sulle banchine, in mezzo ai binari; ed
i passeggeri tedeschi esprimevano apertamente il loro disgusto: gente come
questa merita il suo destino, basta vedere come si comportano. Non sono
Menschen, esseri umani, ma bestie, porci; è evidente come la luce del sole.
(…) Tuttavia, entro poche settimane il disagio si attenuava fino a sparire;
sopravveniva (non per tutti!) l’assuefazione, il che è un modo caritatevole
di dire che la trasformazione da esseri umani in animali era sulla buona
strada. (SeS, OII 1078–1079)
[The SS escort did not hide their amusement at the sight of men and
women squatting wherever they could, on the platforms and in the middle
of the tracks, and the German passengers openly expressed their disgust:
people like this deserve their fate, just look how they behave. These are not
Menschen, human beings, but animals, it’s clear as the light of the day. (…)
Nevertheless, within a few weeks, the discomfort became attenuated, and
then vanished. In its place came (not for everyone) habituation, which is a
charitable way of saying that the transformation from human beings into
animals was well on its way.]
92 D. Benvegnù
The transformation from humans to animals so vividly described by

Levi in this passage was perceived by the prisoners as degradation because
they were forced to incorporate the perspective of those who were look-
ing at them. Therefore, being naked “come un lombrico” [like a worm] or
forced to eat the daily soup “lappandola come fanno i cani”2 (SeS, OII
1080) [lapping as a dog] were understood as parts of the same process,
that, as Levi writes, had no precise practical goals but rather “un preciso
intento di umiliare” (SeS, OII 1080) [a precise intent to humiliate].
This useless humiliation of becoming animal was the everyday rule. It
was violently forced upon the prisoners, and Levi, to understand it,
admits that he must follow “una logica non mia” [a logic that is not
mine], namely, he has to repeat the alienation he has already suffered.
Nevertheless, even in the daily regime of alienation and violence of
Auschwitz he stresses that there were two even more grievous offenses to
consider. The first one relates to “il destino dei più indifesi” (SeS, II,
1085) [the fate of the most defenseless], a category that for Levi fit both
humans and animals.3 Levi expresses again that he must abuse (“fare vio-
lenza”) himself to understand why the Nazis killed even little children
and pregnant women. Maybe this is one of those cases in which—with
regard to what he writes in “Contro il dolore”—it is admissible for him
not only to alienate himself by incorporating the conceptual identity of
his persecutors, but also to self-inflict that pain and suffering which was
otherwise neither useful nor justified. And indeed he does inflict it on
himself: speaking from the perspective of an orthodox Nazi (“un nazista
ortodosso”), he claims that it is obvious that all the Jews had to be killed,
especially pregnant women “perché non nascessero futuri nemici” [so
that no future enemies should be born]. However, even embracing the
most aberrant logic, it remains impossible to comprehend why the Nazis
killed, after a journey of incredible suffering, those who were almost
already dead, those “morenti” [dying beings] who were forced to die far
away from their houses, on the threshold of the gas chambers. The only
answer for Levi is that the best choice for the Nazis was the one requiring
“la massima afflizione, il massico spreco di sofferenza fisica e morale. Il
«nemico» non doveva soltanto morire, ma morire nel tormento” (SeS,
OII 1085) [the greatest amount of affliction, the greater amount of waste,
of physical and moral suffering. The ‘enemy’ must not only die, but must
die in torment]. Levi seems to believe what Bernstein has pointed out
about the experience of another Holocaust survivor, Jean Améry, that for
the Nazis “torture is the ideal practice for asserting sovereignty” (Bernstein
2015, 106).
The second offense somehow follows from the first one. Levi considers
it the most significant example of the whole chapter, or as he writes “[l’]
esempio estremo di violenza ad un tempo stupida e simbolica” (SeS, OII
1088) [extreme example of at once stupid and symbolic violence]. We are
talking about the pitiless utilization (“empio uso”) of the body of the
prisoner as an object, or more precisely as a thing, “una cosa di nessuno
di cui si poteva disporre in modo arbitrario” (SeS, OII 1088) [an anony-
mous thing belonging to no one, which one could dispose of in an arbi-
trary manner]. Levi is referring here specifically to the infamous “scientific”
experiments in the Lager, to the specimens of a peculiar cruelty beyond
logic and without any real reason, given that their results could have been
achieved without harming anybody or even clinically (“da comuni
tabelle”). In his reasoning about the uselessness of those experiments,
Levi seems to mirror what we have seen being Ruesch’s arguments against
animal experimentation. It is not so surprising then that he too feels the
need to introduce the case of animals:
Mi pare significativo ricordare questi abomini in un’epoca in cui, con

ragione, viene messo in discussione entro quali limiti sia lecito condurre
esperimenti scientifici dolorosi sugli animali da laboratorio (SeS, OII
1088).
[It seems significant to me to recall these abominations at a time when,
for good reasons, there are discussions as to within what limits it is permis-
sible to perform painful experiments on laboratory animals.]
Here again we can observe an ambivalence when it comes to the

human/animal divide. Levi applies the same kind of “laboratory” lan-
guage to both humans and animals: he says that when we deal with the
issue of suffering there are reasons (“con ragione”) to argue about the
ethical limits of our power without considering the species of who is suf-
fering. However, in the following sentence Levi seems to imply that this
disrespectful treatment of the body of the prisoner is especially pitiless
because we are indeed talking about humans, and humans have a
94 D. Benvegnù
symbolic understanding of mortal remains. In any case, the bottom line

remains the same: the ultimate utility of useless violence discovered by
Levi is a dreadful truth that can be applied to both humans and animals:
as he writes, “prima di morire, la vittima deve essere degradata, affinché
l’uccisore senta meno il peso della sua colpa” (SeS, OII 1090) [before
dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less bur-
dened by guilt].
From the perspective of the persecutor, the degradation of the victim
means that the body has to be seen and treated like a thing, objectified in
order to avoid exactly that kind of compassion or sense of guilt that the
Nazis—Levi maintains—never experienced. We cannot help but recall
here that this is the same attitude possessed by a follower of Descartes’s
theory of animals as objectified machine: as the story goes, Nicolas de
Malebranche replied to his friend’s protest arguing that the pregnant dog
he had kicked a few minutes earlier could not feel pain and therefore he
did not feel guilty at all.4 From the perspective of the victim, instead, this
process of reification can be compared to the very process of becoming
animal we have already described: as the above-mentioned Gordon
writes, “to be and feel like prey is the very stuff of the moral violence
inflicted, of the moral uses of useless violence” (Gordon 2001, 98).
The reification of the victim, and therefore the only possible truth
behind such a regime of useless violence is also what Levi claims is lying
behind his apparently split literary production as both witness (Se questo
è un uomo, La tregua, ect.) and quasi science fiction writer (particularly
Storie Naturali and Vizio di forma).5 Nevertheless, what Levi describes
coincides, as in the example of Malebranche, on several levels with the
“logic” of degradation that is at work both in the Western philosophical
discourse about animals—from Descartes to Heidegger, according to
Derrida6—and in most of our modern treatment of animals for con-
sumption, entertainment, or experimentation. This is not, of course, to
say that there is a complete overlap between the contemporary industrial-
ized slaughtering of animals and the Holocaust. As we have said in the
first chapter, Primo Levi is not Isaac Bashevis Singer, and we have no
evidence to affirm that even for him “for the animals, it is an eternal
Treblinka” (I.B. Singer, 271). Rather, what he is clearly expressing here is
again a peculiar link between the degradation of the body, pain/suffering,
and the logic of identity that lies behind the “animale-uomo” he had
witnessed in Auschwitz. This link finds its better explanation again in I
sommersi e i salvati.
It is well known in fact that in the same book in which the question
about useless violence is raised, Levi also claims that the real total wit-
nesses (“testimoni integrali”) of the Lager are those prisoners called the
Musulmänner. Although this ambiguous sentence has been variously
interpreted, undoubtedly the Musulmänner were the prisoners in which
the process of degradation reached the bottom, and therefore they were—
according to Levi’s division—the drowned ones, doomed to die. Their
life-in-death, therefore, is scarcely comparable to the destiny of other
prisoners: Levi writes that he would pick their image in order to represent
all the evil of our time, “un uomo scarno, dalla fronte china e dalle spalle
curve, sul cui volto e nei cui occhi non si possa legger traccia di pensiero”
(SQU, OI 186)7 [an emanciated man, with head dropped and shoulders
curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be
seen]. We should keep in mind this lack of any “traccia di pensiero,”
because in this image Levi seems to rely again on a Cartesian understand-
ing of subjectivity and humanity, hence the Musulmänner are somehow
already inhuman or subhuman. Yet, according to him they are also “il
vero nerbo del campo” (SQU, OI 186) [the backbone of the camp] and,
as we have already said, the total witness of what happened in Auschwitz,
“coloro la cui deposizione avrebbe avuto significato generale” (SeS, OII
1056) [the ones whose testimony would have a general significance].
They represent in fact the extreme condition of suffering when the pro-
cess toward what we might call the pure zoé, the bare life, has been
completed.8
The problem, for Levi as well as for all of those who survived Auschwitz,
is that such a witness “non è tornato per raccontarlo o è tornato muto”
(SeS, II, 1056) [have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute],
therefore no testimony should be, strictly speaking, not just allowed but
even ethically possible. The responsibility of the actual witness, the w
itness
who survived, then lies for Levi in creating “un discorso «conto terzi», il
racconto di cose viste da vicino, non sperimentate in proprio” (SeS, II,
1056) [a discourse on “behalf of third parties,” the story of things seen
from close, not experienced personally]. This discourse must overcome
96 D. Benvegnù
the fundamental muteness of the victim and tell what the real “testimoni
integrali” did not say because they could not speak, too “drowned” in
their own bodies. Levi does not know why and from where the “obbligo
morale” (moral obligation) of witnessing for the drowned comes, whether
it comes from the need to free oneself from their memory. It is clear,
though, that it is the expression of “un impulso forte e durevole” [a strong
and lasting impulse], partially due to the impossibility of closing one’s
eyes before the evidence that “l’uomo, il genere umano, noi insomma,
eravamo potenzialmente capaci di costruire una mole infinita di dolore; e
che il dolore è la sola forza che si crea dal nulla, senza spesa e senza fatica”
(SeS, II, 1058) [man, the human species—we, in short—were potentially
able to construct an infinite enormity of pain; and that pain is the only
force that is created from nothing, without cost and without effort].
What is at stake here is the problem of testimony and pain, how one
can express a suffering that has not been expressed, and it could and can-
not be expressed otherwise. If it is obvious that nobody can replace what
the Musulmänner would have said, it seems also paradoxically clear that
for Levi it was precisely their muteness, the impossibility to express their
suffering, which made them total witnesses. The impossibility to speak
the suffering, the inability of the bare life to voice itself through an articu-
lated discourse, is thus the paradoxical expression of an infinite enormity
of pain that might otherwise overwhelm. Yet, this paradoxical condition
prevents neither a proper manifestation nor us to experience compassion.
Quite the opposite: as in Latin the Greek verb phemi, to speak, was
divided into loquor (to say, to tell) and declaro (to declare, to show some-
thing, to make manifest), the impossibility to express suffering verbally
does not lead necessarily to the impossibility to make it manifest. Instead,
if such a suffering has been actually manifested but not said, as in the case
of the Musulmänner, Levi’s “discorso conto terzi” must transform a declaro
back into a loquor able to keep intact that impossibility-to-be-said that
made the testimony so significant. Any other narration, any other
testimony, would be in fact, on the one hand, a betrayal of that suffering
without voice, or, on the other hand, a discourse lacking that bare life
which lies at the bottom of its very importance. Only this double tangle
produces a testimony able to put who is reading, as in our case, in an
equivalent condition of double impossibility: the incapacity to identify
oneself with that unexpressed suffering as well as the inability to not share
that extreme vulnerability that goes precisely with it. In other words, only
a testimony capable of preserving the voiceless, paradoxical manifestation
of the amount of suffering Levi saw in Auschwitz can capture successfully
what Bernstein has called “the depth of pain’s dual character—its power
of connecting (consider emphatic identification with another’s pain) and
separating” (Bernstein 2015, 81).
This comprehension of testimony is apparent especially when Levi
applies a perspective that implies the point-of-view of those creatures that
are lacking language par excellence: animals and little children.
Particularly, Levi often uses animal analogies to describe young human
beings in his works. The small children in La tregua, for example, are
described as “animaletti selvaggi e giudiziosi” (LT, OI 218) [wild and wise
little animals], while the children in Se non ora, quando? are instead “ani-
maletti timidi e selvaggi, dagli occhi senza quiete” (SNOQ, OII 258)
[wild and shy little animals, with restless eyes]. Such a comparison
between children and animals was obviously not invented by Levi, just as
it goes beyond him. In the contemporary debate on animal suffering, for
instance, this analogy is often utilized, sometimes to underline that if
reasoning and speaking are the only counting features when it comes to
our ethical treatment of other beings, neither animals nor infants can
therefore be considered moral agents. It is also worth noticing that several
of what are now known as humane societies against human exploitation,
such as the American Humane Association, have been created on these
premises to prevent cruelty to both children and animals. Other thinkers,
as the above-mentioned Andrew Linsey, take a different, more suffering-
focused, approach. Linzey maintains, in fact, that “when it comes to suf-
fering, (…) animals and children who cannot fully vocalize or comprehend
their misery, and who—in the case of animals at least—frequently suffer
the deprivation of their natural instincts, are the victims of greater cru-
elty” (Linzey, 38). Levi seems to embrace a similar concern. He delegates
animals and children to be the bearers of a specific testimony, through
which the writer witnesses that tangle of suffering and double impossibil-
ity we have already discussed.
This delegation becomes even more striking if we consider again that
there is a Primo Levi who, in the good company of nearly the whole of
98 D. Benvegnù
Western thought, acknowledges the faculty of language as the divide

between humans and animals. It is not a coincidence, however, that this
position can be found in a non-fiction essay such as “I padroni del des-
tino.” In this 1982 article on the nuclear menace, he writes in fact that “la
parola ci differenzia dagli animali” and therefore “dobbiamo imparare a
far buon uso della parola” (OII 785) [speech is what distinguishes us
from animals; we must learn how to properly use speech]. Paradoxically,
when it came to his fiction, a proper use of speech for him often meant
speaking precisely for those mute creatures that could not speak for them-
selves, as it happens in a very ironic way in “Le sorelle della palude,” in
which a leech (or a mosquito) seems to speak like a human being, calling
its species “coronamento e vertice della creazione” (L, OII 143) [comple-
tion and peak of creation]. We can then overall agree once again with
Baldini when she writes that Levi gives words to those creatures to whom
we usually do not allow voice, thus once again dethroning humanity
from its alleged cosmic unicity (Baldini, 181–182). To achieve this anti-
anthropocentric goal Levi often turns to his own peculiar development of
what Viktor Shklovsky has called “estrangement,” that is to say, an artistic
technique able “to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to
increase the difficulty and length of perception” (Shklovskij, 16). In other
words, Levi presents things in a new, unfamiliar light usually by way of
inverting the point-of-view, as one finds, for instance, in Shklovsky’s
famous example from Tolstoy’s Kholstomer, a short story in which some
of the events are narrated from the perspective of an old horse. This is the
case in several of Levi’s short stories as well, “Le sorelle della palude”
being just one example. Yet, there is one instance in which this animal
upside-down perspective is explicitly tied to suffering and testimony.
Although this instance does not belong properly to Levi’s literary corpus,
but it is rather part of his literary heritage, what interests us is what he
writes in his interpretation of the text.
3.2 Belli’s Donkey and Hurbinek’s Muteness

One chapter of Levi’s personal anthology, La ricerca delle radici, is devoted
to “la pietà nascosta sotto il riso” (OII 1481) [pity hidden beneath laugh-
ter9]. In this chapter Levi presents some sonnets written by one of his
favorite authors, the nineteenth century Romanesque poet Giuseppe

Gioachino Belli. Levi inserts Belli in one of the paths that lead from Job,
with which he begins his anthology, to the end of his work, an article on
the Black Holes. In this path, called “la salvazione del riso” [salvation
through laughter], Belli is in the good company of other favorites of Levi:
Rabelais, the Milanese dialect poet Carlo Porta, and Schalòm Alechém,
that is, Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, a leading Yiddish author and
playwright whose lifetime spanned the end of the nineteenth century and
the beginning of the twentieth. In the works of all these authors—whose
styles are apparently so distant from the calm rational prose of Levi—he
feels a “tension” between a realistic, often hyperbolic if not demonic,
description of the world and the eschatological value of laughing and com-
edy. In the case of Belli this tension takes the form, Levi writes, of an
incredibly sensitive attention toward the almost infinite nuances of the
human soul, expressed though by the means of a caustic satirical
Romanesque (poly-) voice. This mention of the expression of the human
soul as the main poetical aim of Belli seems, however, to grind against what
Levi calls in the same introduction the most “indimenticabile” [unforget-
table] sonnet of his own selection. Entitled Se more, this sonnet is in fact
the simple anecdote of a donkey killed by its hard work, imposed, of
course, by its human owner who tells the story apparently without recog-
nizing his own responsibility. In his brief comment, Levi quotes the editor
of the first critical edition of Belli’s Romanesque sonnets, Giorgio Vigolo,
maintaining that in this sonnet we have “un motivo caro ai romantici, e al
Belli in specie: «la pietà, nascosta sotto il riso, per gli esseri inferiori, avvil-
iti, degradati»” [a theme dear to romantics and above all to Belli, ‘pity,
hidden beneath laughter, for humble, humiliated and degraded creatures’].
Actually, in his own comment in the 1952 critical edition, Vigolo says
something more, claiming that in the work of Belli compassion is explic-
itly extended to animals. Therefore, there is in this sonnet “una grande
pietà e simpatia per la sofferenza di tutti gli esseri” (Belli 1978) [a great pity
and sympathy for the suffering of all beings] and for our common destiny,
as the impersonal construction of the title, Se more, reminds us.
This concept is extended in the long introduction to the sonnets, in
which Vigolo comments on Belli with words that surely evoke Levi’s own
literary understanding and practice. For instance, in commenting on a
sonnet not present in Levi’s anthology, La mmaledizzione, Vigolo notices
100 D. Benvegnù
that Belli’s satirical perspective displays all the possible contradictions

and reunifies them into a general sense of compassion toward the “cra-
ture” [creatures], a Romanesque term that in this case provides the iden-
tification “degli animaletti con dei piccoli esseri fanciulleschi” (CXLIV)
[of little animals with little childish beings]. Such identification of ani-
mals and children is not, however, the only motif in common between
Levi and Belli. The above-mentioned satirical gaze is in fact also part of a
literary strategy that describes the world as if it were upside down.
Specifically, Vigolo and other scholars have been noticing how the world
as it is in Belli’s Romansque sonnets can be named as an upside-down
world (“mondo alla rovescia;” Garvin, 33), where literary devices as ady-
nata and coincidentia oppositorum are utilized to describe a reality that
can be explored only through upside-down glasses. For such a good
reader of Rabelais and Teofilo Folengo as Primo Levi was, this idea of
representing a mondo alla rovescia to say something decisive on the
“straight” world was not strange at all. Especially if we consider again that
Levi went through such an upside-down world during his time in
Auschwitz, where all the rules and habits of the normal world were dis-
torted to create what he indeed calls a “mondo capovolto” [overturned
world]. We will explore how this concept has influenced Levi’s idea of
creation and counter-creation in one of the following chapters. At pres-
ent, we must instead underline that Levi was fully aware of how Belli’s
upside-down vision works in the sonnets. In the last sentence of his short
comment in La ricerca delle radici, after having reported Vigolo’s state-
ment on compassion we mentioned above, he adds in fact that even
(“anche”) in Se more
si ricava una severa lezione morale da un capovolgimento: l’uomo, qui, è

crudele e stupido «come le bestie», è un balbuziente mentale, incoerente e
feroce; l’asino muore una morte da martire (RdR, OII 1481).
[we elicit a strict moral lesson from a reversal of roles: here the man is
cruel and stupid ‘like the beasts’, a mental stammerer, incoherent and
fierce; the ass dies the death of a martyr.]
It is possible that in this passage Levi is also talking about his own
experience in Auschwitz and what kind of moral lesson he got from that
“capovolgimento.” Even though Levi has never explicitly made the ety-
mological connection between “testimony, witness” and “martyr,”10 we
may in fact say that his comment on the death of the donkey is clearly a
kind of witness. Unsurprisingly, it corresponds to the language of testi-
mony he articulates in the 1976 appendix of the scholastic edition of Se
questo è un uomo:
(…) nello scrivere questo libro, ho assunto deliberatamente il linguaggio

pacato e sobrio del testimone, non quello lamentevole della vittima né
quello irato del vendicatore. (SQU, OI 175)
[in writing this book, I adopted deliberately the quiet and sober lan-
guage of the witness; neither the pitiful language of the victim, nor the
enraged one of the revenger.]
The kind of witness expressed by the sonnet and testified by Levi’s calm
and sober comment, with his combination of upside-down vision, ani-
mal suffering, and impossibility to identify oneself with the brutality of
the donkey’s owner, is too tragically ironic to be the language “irato del
vendicatore.” At the same time, though, it is not even the language
“lamentevole della vittima.” Levi agrees in fact with Vigolo that Belli
describes the donkey as being degraded by the cruel reification imposed
by his owner. Yet, the use of the term “martire” implies no victimization,
but rather incomprehensible sacrifice. Levi’s animal imagery, despite the
focus on suffering, refuses victimization altogether: rather, we might say
with Marian Scholtmeijer that Levi’s animals “fight back by creating
dilemmas that surpass human control” (Scholtmeijer 1993, 8).
This is the case of one of the animals in his poetry where the refusal of
victimization is underlined as a specific literary “capovolgimento.” In the
poem entitled Pio and published in Ad ora incerta, Levi utilizes the tech-
nique of estrangement to express the point of view of an ox that feels
misrepresented by Carducci’s famous Il bove. Levi entitles his poem with
the adjective that instead characterized the animal in the original sonnet
to underline how, from the perspective of the ox, being called “pio”
[pious; but in this instance more ‘tender-hearted’] is a violence, an
attempt to transform the animal into a passive victim, somehow resigned
to its destiny. This is the kind of charge—not to have rebelled, to have
102 D. Benvegnù
been too compliant—that was also applied to the Jews under Nazism, as
Levi stresses with the ironic use of the Yiddish expression “Oy gevàlt,”
that means ‘Oh violence!” and it is used mainly as interjection, to express
an extreme and desperate protest (AOI, OII 581). The ox indeed protests
Carducci’s portrait, and although the tone of the poem is quite ironic,
still Levi gives voice to an animal suffering that otherwise would have
remained mute, or, as he writes “inaudita” [unheard].
The double situation of muteness and impossibility to hear what
another author in Levi’s personal anthology, Paul Celan, has called “the
coming word”11 is also what marks another unforgettable story. This time
we deal with a second type of muteness, the one that comes from those
who cannot yet speak or have never learned how to: that is, children.
As Levi readers would agree, one of the most impressive episodes of La
Tregua is the story of Hurbinek. The Russians have freed Auschwitz, Levi
is sick and feverish, and to recover he is put in a shack with other
“patients.” After a few days he feels better, and his recovery seems to cor-
respond with a general understanding that the terrible experience called
Auschwitz is finally over: “i moribondi erano morti, in tutti gli altri la vita
ricominciava a scorrere tumultuosamente” (LT, OI 215) [the dying were
dead, in all the others life was beginning to flow again tumultuously]. Yet,
everybody’s attention is obsessively focused on a toddler, a circa three-
year-old child, the smallest and most helpless among the prisoners. Levi
writes that he was “un nulla, un figlio della morte, un figlio di Auschwitz”
(LT, OI 215) [a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz]. Nobody
knew anything about him, because he was unable to speak and therefore
he had not even a name, Hurbinek being what he was called by a woman
who had deduced this name from the few syllables he sometimes uttered.
Paralyzed from his hips down, he was therefore the embodiment of one
of the most fearful, unheimlich, representations of a creature reduced to
his bare life, the image of how Auschwitz could degrade a being into the
almost silent and motionless suffering of his body. Despite all of this, Levi
writes that
i suoi occhi, persi nel viso triangolare e smunto saettavano terribilmente

vivi, pieni di richiesta, di asserzione, della volontà di scatenarsi, di rompere
la tomba del mutismo. La parola che gli mancava, che nessuno si era curato
di insegnargli, il bisogno della parola, premeva nel suo sguardo con urgenza
esplosiva: era uno sguardo selvaggio e umano ad un tempo, anzi maturo e
giudice, che nessuno fra noi sapeva sostenere, tanto era carico di forza e di
pena (LT, OI 215).
[his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full
of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his
dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him,
the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare
both savage and human, even mature, a judgment, which none of us could
support, so heavy was it with force and anguish.]
Hurbinek’s gaze comprises a double nature: as an infant12 without lan-

guage, his gaze belongs to the wild animal world (“selvaggio”) as well as
to the adult human dimension (‘umano”). Levi seems to suggest that
Hurbinek was the incarnation of a creature somehow in between, a dog
for instance, when he refers to his bed as “la cuccia di Hurbinek” (LT, OI
215) [Hurbinek’s dog bed]. In any case, the ambivalent duplicity of his
gaze is also responsible for the impression of maturity that comes from it:
this impression is so strong, so severe, and so suffering that it engenders a
feeling of shame in the adults around him. Maybe it is the same shame
that, as Levi had written a few pages earlier, “i Tedeschi non conobbero”
(LT, OI 206) [Germans did not know] and that is instead a quite com-
mon experience among Holocaust survivors, including Levi himself.13
This shame might also recall the original motif of Derrida’s The Animal
Therefore I Am lecture, that is to say the gaze of his female cat which is
responsible for Derrida’s (double) shame and the consequent interrogation
of the human/animal divide we have previously discussed. Being under
the gaze of the cat, the powerful nudity of that gaze, makes him ashamed
of being ashamed,14 and therefore able to experience a double alienation
in which what is at stake is the very (self ) identity of the human subject.
With Hurbinek we are only deceptively in a regime of different alien-
ation. In fact, although his gaze makes the adults uncomfortable, it does
not stop another young prisoner, the fourteen-year-old Henek, to try to
teach him his own language to introduce Hurbinek into the proper
human world. The struggle between Hurbinek and the human language
is followed with trepidation by the adults in the shack, as if the outcome
could determine the destiny of humanity after Auschwitz. The anxious
104 D. Benvegnù
excitement grows even more when the young child seems finally to start
articulating a word. Unfortunately, this word never reaches full articula-
tion and therefore remains a mystery. Levi himself reveals a kind of disap-
pointment when he writes that this never-spoken word “no, non era certo
un messaggio, non una rivelazione” (LT, OI 216) [no, it was not certainly
a message, it was not a revelation], but perhaps something very banal as
“to eat,” or “meat,” or even “bread.” Yet, even if Hurbinek does not deliver
any word or message, there is something fundamental in his story, as the
term bread seems also to suggest.15 Levi in fact concludes the whole epi-
sode in a very moving way, mixing together a certain amount of lyricism,
unusual for him, and a stammering construction of the paragraph, char-
acterized by an insistent use of repetitions and semicolons:
Hurbinek, che aveva tre anni e forse era nato ad Auschwitz e non aveva mai
visto un albero; Hurbinek che aveva combattuto come un uomo, fino
all’ultimo respiro, per conquistarsi l’entrata nel mondo degli uomini, da
cui una potenza bestiale lo aveva bandito; Hurbinek, il senzanome, il cui
minuscolo avambraccio era stato pure segnato col tatuaggio di Auschwitz;
Hurbinek morì ai primi giorni di marzo 1945, libero ma non redento.
Nulla resta di lui: egli testimonia attraverso queste mie parole (LT, OI 216).
[Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in
Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a
man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which
a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny
forearm—even his—bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the
first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him:
he bears witness through these words of mine.]
The anaphoric composition of this final paragraph, with its insistent

use of relative clauses, seems almost to delay the inevitable conclusion:
Hurbinek died, drowned like millions of others. However, this very
structure, with the term “Hurbinek” opening the clause four times,
stresses also that being without a name (“il senzanome”) does stop nei-
ther repetition nor its consequence, memorization. Although it belongs
to a regime of passivity, being named with the fictitious term Hurbinek
becomes not necessarily negative; just as being unable to speak, an inabil-
ity per se, is not necessarily a flaw. The combination of animal and human
features in such a bare embodiment, in fact, does not make the young
creature less memorable: Hurbinek is at least as “indimenticabile” [unfor-
gettable] as the donkey in Se more. We can thus repeat for both the don-
key described by Belli and Levi’s Hurbinek what Derrida has written for
the animals: “the absence of the name and of the word otherwise” might
be seen as “something other than a privation” (Derrida 2008, 48). And
yet, even such an understanding of Hurbinek and his muteness is possi-
ble only because of Levi’s testimony, only because Hurbinek witnesses
through Levi’s word. Just as the millions of Muselmänner who died name-
less, so even Hurbinek would not have been remembered without Levi’s
account by proxy.
What is relevant here, though, is that this testimony is not an attempt
to attribute a normative set of human characteristics to Hurbinek.
Instead, Hurbinek’s porosity toward different worlds, species, and (dis)
abilities—his indeed being an “animale-uomo”—it is first and foremost
meant to question the identity of what supposedly we call human, our
preconceived ideas about our own independence, nature, and nor-
malcy.16 The testimony then receives its power from the impossibility for
both the writer and the reader to recognize an autonomous moment of
agency, because neither one—nor even any other prisoner there in the
shack—can fully identify himself with a speechless creature at once wild
and civil, animal and human. At the same time, Hurbinek’s bodily suf-
fering is the ground of a recognition that is possible because of a shared
vulnerability that has not been expressed by words. If Hurbinek had
survived and, most importantly, had said the word everybody was
expecting, then his episode would probably not make such an impres-
sion on the reader. It is because of his inability to enter the world of
human adults—the same human bestial world that had banned him—
that his story challenges our own ability to recognize his suffering and
respond to it.
Yet, everything appears to be double in Levi, grounded on a double
impossibility, and therefore even the gaze he lays on Hurbinek’s gaze has
been doubled before, when the “senza-nome,” the “animale-uomo,” was
Levi himself. As Giuseppina Santagostino has pointed out, in fact,
Hurbinek has been called a “little sphinx”: as such, he recalls another
sphinx, Pannwitz (Santagostino, 173). In front of the Nazi doktor, just
106 D. Benvegnù
before the famous chemistry exam described in Se questo è un uomo, Levi

feels “come Edipo davanti alla Sfinge” [like Aedipus before the Sphinx]:
he does not have a name, he is only the Häftling 174517, just “qualcosa
[che] appartiene a un genere che è ovviamente opportuno sopprimere”
[something that belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to
suppress], as he interprets Pannwitz’s thoughts for us. The gaze that runs
between them, then, is not between two men, but it is “scambiato come
attraverso la parete di vetro di un acquario tra due esseri che abitano
mezzi diversi” (SQU, OI 101–102) [came as if across the glass window of
an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds]. Both Levi
and Pannwitz are in fact no more than an “esemplare zoologico” (SQU,
OI 102) [a zoological specimen], they belong to different species as much
as Alex, the Kapo, who, after the examination, cleans his dirty hand on
Levi’s shoulder. Levi the prisoner seems to be unresolved on whether or
not Alex knew in that moment what he was doing, his responsibility in
what was happening, and calls him an “innocente bruto” (SQU, OI
103–104) [innocent brute]. According to Levi the moral theorist, such
an animal definition should put Alex below or above human moral crite-
ria, he cannot be judged. And yet, Levi the writer has the need to tell us
that in the moment of narrating the story, in the twofold present of writ-
ing, he judges him (“io oggi lo giudico” (SQU, OI 104).
Although the roles seem to be inverted, in both episodes in Se questo è
un uomo and in La tregua, Levi is displaying a set of mirror figures. As in
the myth of the Sphinx, these figures are facing us with a riddle about
what the “animale-uomo” they are mirroring is, what difference in
humankind separates them from Levi and from each other. In both cases
the answer is not so immediate: human seems to be Hurbinek, human is
doktor Pannwitz, human is the same Levi in front of the doktor then and
now telling us both the story of his exam and the story of Hurbinek “per
conto terzi.” If we also consider what Levi writes about “Se more” in La
ricerca delle radici, humans are somehow both the donkey and its cruel
owner who sounds as much an innocent brute as the Kapo Alex. Or
rather all of them are something in between; literary creatures embodying
a challenge towards any normative theory of human nature; testimonial
beings representing a complex system of differences calling not for gen-
eral statements but for compassion and, possibly, singular, individual,
contingent, judgments. There is in fact only one aspect very clear: they all
testify to the ambivalence of their natures, of their different humanimality

through Levi’s words. These words are shaped to puzzle the readers, their
certain identities as much as the possibility of identification itself. If in
fact in Levi’s oeuvre we witness the Copernican revolution of the gaze
upon the material creature (Santagostino, 174), this revolution is meant
to teach us that any time we deal with suffering, we are first and foremost
challenged to recognize our own vulnerability in other creatures, whether
they are humans or not, and to respond accordingly.
We will explore more of the ambivalences of Levi’s “Copernican” gaze,
especially when the scientific, objective gaze and the position of the liter-
ary subject are at stake, in the next chapter. It was instead the way Levi
addresses the suffering humanity in Auschwitz with the hyphenated term
“animale-uomo” from whence we began in this chapter. We noticed, for
instance, that this term already compromises the supposed abyssal divide
between humans and animals. Furthermore, the discussion about the
nature of “useless violence” Levi carries in I sommersi e i salvati revealed
how, for him, the truth behind the violence characterizing the Holocaust
might apply to both the animal and the human cases. The extreme out-
come of this regime of useless violence, the Musulmänner, are thus not
only the total witnesses, as Levi writes, but also the embodiment of that
bare life that we share with all creatures and that the Nazis wanted to
transform into a mere thing. The nudity of the creature, between unbear-
able embarrassment and suffering, that humans and non-human animals
have in common, became clear in observing how Levi had to overcome
the shared muteness of animals and infantes to create his testimony by
proxy. Whether for Belli’s donkey or for Hurbinek, Levi’s testimony
speaks for an impossibility that paradoxically could not be expressed oth-
erwise. It is in fact based upon a duplicity (or doubleness) and a reversal
of the gaze that make impossible for the readers to rest on an immediate
identification with the characters, because such identification would
instead make accessible something that is, in Levi’s words, below or above
human experience and understanding. Meanwhile, though, this some-
how uncomfortable double impossibility rises upon the recognition of a
shared vulnerability. A clear divide between what is human and what is
not cannot be applied anymore to such a complexity and therefore, as in
the case of “Se more” and Hurbinek, a system of limitrophy and multiple
tensions casts doubts on what we are (reading). Only through such a
108 D. Benvegnù
process, can witnessing the material suffering of the bare creature lead to
that feeling-together-without-being-the-same that is, properly speaking,
compassion.
Notes
1. On this topic see also Melehy (2005).
2. For the many images of dogs in Levi’s works, see Belpoliti (1997), 166–
169; and Belpoliti and Gordon, 54–55. For a more specific investigation
of the episode of “Gedeone” from which the quotation is taken, see
Cavaglion (1996).
3. Every time Levi considers the destiny of women during the Holocaust, he
utilizes a peculiar analogy, comparing them usually to defenseless animals.
See, for example, in La tregua, when Flora is described being scared by
everything, “come un animale indifeso” (LT, OI 352); or a passage in the
short essay “Film e svastiche,” where he writes that the female prisoners in
the Lager “suscitavano invece una compassione infinita, come fanno gli
animali indifesi” (OI 1218) [inspired instead an infinite compassion, as
defenseless animals do]; or even when he takes a different point of view,
writing that for women “la similitudine degli animali domestici non è
casuale, né è casuale che le deportate fossero deliberatamente trattate peg-
gio che non gli uomini” (OI 1228).
4. The story is told by Malebranche’s friend, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,
in his diary, but it might be most commonly found in Coren (1994), 66
and ffll.
5. Cf. the passage in the interview about the pseudonym adopted for SN
when Levi maintains that there is an intimate connection between his
testimony and his science fiction because in both humanity has been
reduced to a “thing” (OI 1437).
6. See Derrida (2008), 87 and ffll.
7. On this topic, cf. Consonni (2009).
8. It has been said that Levi made the statement about the Musulmänner as
the total witnesses out of his survivor guilt. At the same time, other schol-
ars have explored the ethical and philosophical consequences of such a
definition, concluding that Levi was offering through that sentence a very
significant, although controversial, understanding of human life and tes-
timony. This latter position has been proposed mainly by the Italian phi-
losopher Giorgio Agamben, in Agamben (1998). The former reading can

be instead found in Bernstein (2006).
9. English translations of La ricerca delle radici are taken from Levi (2007).
10. The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word μάρτυς, mártys, which
means “witness.” Levi, however, never accepted any “religious” or “teleo-
logical” description of the prisoners in the Lager or, for what that matters,
of himself as a survivor. Therefore, it is improbable that he would have
agreed to see himself and the other prisoners in Auschwitz as “martyrs.”
11. As it is well known, Celan expressed the hope for such “redeeming word”
during his visit to Heidegger’s country retreat in 1967. Three years later,
he responded to Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust in his poem
“Todtnauberg” in which he reflects upon his own “hope, today, for the
coming word of a thinking human being” [einer Hoffnung, heute, / auf
eines Denkenden / kommendes / Wort]—a word that never occurred.
12. Infant: from in—“not, opposite of ” + fans, prp. of fari “speak”.
13. On the concept of shame and guilt in Holocaust testimonies, see at least
Leys (2009).
14. Cf. Derrida 4: “It is as if I were ashamed, therefore, naked in front of this
cat, but also ashamed of being ashamed.”
15. See Biasin (1993). In the chapter entitled “Our Daily Bread -Pane -Brot
-Broid -Chleb -Pain -Lechem -Kenyér: Primo Levi, Se questo è un
uomo” (128–142), Biasin proposes a very interesting analysis of the use
of the term “bread” in Levi’s testimonial accounts, underlining how it is
often utilized in fundamental moments. He also stresses the connection
between eating and speaking as a recurrent feature of Levi’s oeuvre.
16. Hurbinek’s episode can be also read at the intersection of animal and
disability studies. On this intersection, see at least Taylor (2011).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone. (Homo
sacer III). Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998 [English: Remnants of Auschwitz:
The Witness and the Archive. Translated by D. Heller-Roazen. Zone Books:
New York, 1999].
Belli, G. Giuseppe. I Sonetti. Milano: Mondadori, 1952 (1978).
Bernstein, M. Jay. “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘After
Auschwitz’.” New German Critique 97 (Winter, 2006): 31–52.
110 D. Benvegnù
Bernstein, M. Jay. Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Biasin, Gian Paolo. The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993.
Cavaglion, Alberto. “La scelta di Gedeone: appunti su Primo Levi, la memoria e
l’ebraismo.” In Storia e memoria della deportazione: modelli di ricerca e di
comunicazione in Italia e in Francia, ed. P. Momigliano Levi, 101–102.
Firenze: Giuntina, 1996.
Consonni, Manuela. “Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the
Muselman.” Partial Answers 7 (2009): 243–259.
Coren, Stanley. The Intelligence of Dogs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Levi, Primo. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi, 1986.
Levi, Primo. The Search for Roots. Translated by P. Forbes. Chicago: Dee, 2007.
Leys, Ruth. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton: Princeton
Melehy, Hassan. “Silencing the Animals: Montaigne, Descartes, and the
Hyperbole of Reason.” Symplokē 13.1/2 (2005): 263–282.
Taylor, Sunaura. “Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights.” Qui
Parle 19.2 (2011): 191–222.
4
Techne I. Animal Hands
As many other Italian writers of his generation (Elsa Morante, Italo

Calvino, and Paolo Volponi, to name a few), Primo Levi was deeply con-
cerned with the rapidly developing pace of science and technology in his
time.1 His concerns were both justified and amplified by being a techni-
cian himself, a professional chemist who worked in a paint factory for
almost the whole of his life. From his modest but privileged point of
observation, he had, therefore, first-hand knowledge not only of everyday
practices of technology but also of the risks involved in a technological
and scientific progress beyond boundaries or control. He thus dedicated
many pages to reflect upon this issue in his journalistic and literary career,
and technology and science have been generally recognized as two of the
primary themes of his whole oeuvre.2 For instance, one of his last articles
for La Stampa, entitled “Covare il cobra” [Hatching the Cobra], directly
addresses the scientists and technicians of the future against what he calls
the “ipocrisia della scienza neutrale” [hypocrisy of science being neutral],
that is to say the disengagement of scientists from any social and political
concern because science is, supposedly, beyond good and evil. Instead,
Levi claims that it is their responsibility to know if they are actually
“hatching the cobra,” namely, creating under the guise of scientific

112 D. Benvegnù
advancement instruments of death and suffering instead of peace and

health.3 Needless to say, this very concern cannot be completely detached
from his own experience during the Second World War, in which tech-
nology and science were indeed used against defenseless human beings,
in Auschwitz and elsewhere.
If in “Covare il cobra” the animal (the cobra of the title) is purely meta-
phorical and perhaps not so relevant,4 nonetheless Levi frequently links
this concern about technology and science to the human-animal divide. In
another article published just over a year prior in La Stampa, he makes this
connection explicit. “Una bottiglia di sole” [a bottle of sunshine]—this is
the title of the 1985 article5—ends in fact with almost the same warning
against thoughtless technological progress described in “Covare il cobra.”
As revealed by the metaphor of the title, here Levi is puzzled by the ability
to capture and store hydrogen power, and therefore the opportunity to
create unlimited energy—but also the bomb that goes by the same name.
As Levi writes, the impossibility both for us, normal people, and for scien-
tists to know if such technological progress will eventually lead to disas-
trous consequences is the trademark of our century (RS, OII 961). As well
as science, technology is, in fact, not neutral and requires ethical decisions.
In our role as constructors of containers (“costruttori di recipienti”), Levi
concludes, we hold in our hand the key to maximum benefit and maxi-
mum harm: two contiguous doors, two locks, but only one key (961).
The connection Levi makes here between the history of the twentieth
century, the ambivalence of science and technology, and the ethical
implications of our human “handiness” (both figuratively and literally),
forms part of the framework of this chapter. We must first, however,
explore the path that leads Levi to this conclusion, going back to the very
beginning of the article, where he works out the otherwise obscure refer-
ence to the “costruttori di recipienti.” Not surprising anymore, Levi
begins “Una bottiglia di sole” by engaging a topic that would be hardly
considered linked to the title of the article and even less to the hydrogen
bomb of its conclusion; he begins, namely, by defining what a human
being is.
Levi maintains that from a synchronic point of view (“se ci si limita alle
creature oggi esistenti sulla Terra”) this is quite an easy task. However, if
we would track back in history to the moment in which, from an
Techne I. Animal Hands 113
evolutionary perspective, human beings became as such—that is, the

moment in which humans allegedly detached themselves from animal-
ity—problems arise everywhere. In order to give to our ancestors the
label “Homo,” Levi writes, we might actually pick several moments:
when they began to walk erectly, or when they spoke for the first time, or
perhaps the discovery of fire is the real watershed, and so on. Given the
wide spectrum of possibilities, he instead suggests a further alternative
approach, apparently applicable diachronically:
L’uomo è costruttore di recipienti; una specie che non ne costruisce, per

definizione non è umana. (RS, OII 958)
[Man is a constructor of containers. A species that does not construct
containers is by definition not human; CW, 2367]
As we have seen in the previous chapter, this is not the first time Levi
attempts to distinguish humans from other animals on the ground of
some ability or agency. Yet, in this case Levi does not simply takes his
own definition for granted, but he is keen on explaining his perhaps
ironic reasons.6 He sees the capacity to construct or make containers or
receptacles (“fabbricare recipienti”) as the manifestation of two qualities
that are “nel bene e nel male, (…) squisitamente umane” [for better or
worse (…) exquisitely human]. The first exclusively human quality is the
ability to think cautiously about tomorrow (“la capacità di pensare al
domani”). To be fair, Levi recognizes that certainly there are animals “not
imprudent concerning the future”—as he writes within quotation marks,
probably citing a line in Horace’s Sermones about an ant non incauta
futuri7—and therefore able to produce receptacles. However, even the
more advanced of them, that is, the bees, can produce just one shape,
only one kind of container, while human civilization “in pochi millenni,
ha dato origine a una miriade di oggetti” [in few millennia, has given rise
to a myriad of objects]. The second quality is instead the capacity to
“antivedere il comportamento della materia” [predict the behavior of
materials]. Specifically, Levi claims that if we keep to the subject of recep-
tacles, humans are able to foresee the possible reactions between con-
tainer and content (“contenente e contenuto”) both in the moment of
their first contact and then in time.
114 D. Benvegnù
Although these two qualities are offered to us as almost self-evident,

they are not as such at all. Before turning to the long, heterogeneous list
of examples of containers Levi amusedly displays for his readers, we
should say something about both the variety of receptacles and our ability
to foresee the future. We might start by noticing, for instance, that both
qualities have in common the idea that animals cannot think about
tomorrow, and therefore they can foresee absolutely nothing. As
Benchouiha writes, Levi seems to be “emphasizing the degradation and
inhumanity of those deprived of the ability to conceive a future time”
(Benchouiha, 103). Readers know, however, that this very state of tempo-
ral deficiency was also characteristic of most prisoners in Auschwitz, who
were forced “to wipe out the past and the future” and to live in the con-
stant present pressure of just one—very contingent—feeling, the “chronic
hunger unknown to free men” (SQU, OI 137). Should we conclude,
therefore, that those prisoners in Auschwitz unable to conceive of a future
were very much like animals and thus not humans, therefore confirming
what the Nazis actually believed and stated? Once again, Levi’s attempt to
create a sharp boundary between humans and animals is haunted by his
own experience in the German annihilation camp. It is not surprising,
then, that he cannot hold this thought for long, and, in fact, he partially
retracts his own words, claiming that there are animals who can think
about the future, as “le formiche, le api, gli scoiattoli, certi uccelli” (RS,
OII 958) [ants, bees, squirrels, certain birds]. Thus, what differentiates
humans from all these animals is not really an inward feeling and a psy-
chological attitude or “ability” about time, but rather the proliferation of
different shapes we, as humans, have given to our receptacles. Or, as we
have already mentioned, the fact that non-human “arte (…) è rimasta
quella che era, mentre la nostra, in pochi millenni, ha dato origine a una
miriade di oggetti” (958) [art (…) has remained what it was, while ours,
in a few millennia, has given rise to a myriad of objects; CW, 2368].
Even beyond the evolutionary uncertainty of such a statement, it is
worth noticing that Levi introduces the term “arte” [art] for both humans
and animals, implicitly claiming a certain amount of shared technical skill,
necessary to produce containers. Although it is arguable that for Levi
“technology is as natural as a beehive or a nest” (Antonello 2007, 93) as
Pierpaolo Antonello maintained, it is true that “Una bottiglia di sole”
establishes at least a technical overlap: animals are, for Levi, makers too,
but they somehow have been satisfied by one model, one solution to the
problem, while humans have restlessly produced a myriad of objects. Yet, a
set of questions arise: is this a good quality per se? Is this plethora of objects
produced by human society a distinguished achievement? Or must we
rather distinguish somehow between objects “fatti a regola d’arte” [prop-
erly done] and bad ones? And what are the features of this “proper” art?
The second quality sketched out by Levi is no less problematic. As
mentioned above, he explains that humans have the ability to foresee the
behavior of materials, and, in the case of containers, they can foresee the
relation between container and content, that is to say the specific quali-
ties of their (sometimes different) matters. This is a theme that obsessed
the professional chemist Primo Levi, as exemplified by the famous two
chapters of La chiave a stella devoted to the “acciughe” [anchovies] in
which what is (chemically) at stake is precisely the resistance of the con-
tainer to the specific features of the content. Interestingly, this story ends
the whole book and Levi’s career as professional chemist,8 but it also
begins with a comparison in which the relation between “contenente e
contenuto,” container and content, is connected to the activity of writ-
ing, “cucire insieme parole e idee” [saw together words and ideas]. We
will return shortly to the issue of writing as a specific technology. Here it
is important to underline that even this ability to foresee, taken for
granted in “Una bottiglia di sole,” is instead contested in La chiave a
stella, where Levi claims that to make veritable predictions is, most of the
time, “hazardous and intellectually dishonest” (Antonello 2007, 97):
Io ho degli amici ingegneri che mi hanno spiegato che è già difficile esseri
sicuri di quello che farà alla lunga un mattone o una molla a spirale: bene,
creda a me che ne ho fatto l’esperimento per tanti anni, le vernici assomi-
gliano più a noi altri che ai mattoni. (…) Si fa presto a dire che dalle stesse
cause devono venire fuori gli stessi effetti: questa è una invenzione di tutti
quelli che le cose non le fanno ma le fanno fare. Provi un po’ a parlarne con
un contadino, o con un maestro di scuola, o con un medico, o peggio che
tutto con un politico: se sono onesti e intelligenti, si metteranno a ridere.
(CaS, OI 1096)
[Some engineer friends of mine have told me it’s difficult even to be sure
what a brick or a coil spring will do over a period of time. Well, believe me,
116 D. Benvegnù
I’ve had many years of experience, and paints resemble us more than they
do bricks. (…) It’s easy to say the same causes should produce the same
effects: this is an invention of people who have things done, instead of
doing things themselves. Try talking about it with a farmer, or a school-
teacher, or a doctor, or, most of all, a politician. If they’re honest and intel-
ligent, they’ll burst out laughing. (TW 162–163)]
This straightforward rejection of strict causality troubles Levi’s claim

about the second quality capable of dividing ourselves from the other
animals. We can indeed try to foresee the future and the respective behav-
iors of different matters, but our predictions are destined to fail once they
face the experiences of those who do produce things, those who “fanno.”
Isn’t then Levi proposing less a deterministic and deductive approach
than a continuous struggle with matter, a hand-to-hand experience of
transformation and production rather than pure rational thinking? What
is at stake in the human-animal divide proposed by Levi in “Una bottiglia
di sole” is in fact not only the features of the objects the constructors
make, but also a question about who are these “costruttori” and what
kind of technique or technology or—to use a term we will properly intro-
duce shortly—what techne characterizes them.
This is not to say, of course, that the objects, the “recipienti,” become a
factor without specific relevance. I do rather believe that Charlotte Ross’s
reading of Levi’s essay as focused exclusively on the “recipienti” reveals
important aspects of Levi’s thought on issues such as narration and
embodiment (Ross 2011, 24–25). In particular, she makes a very good
point in noticing that “it is possible to trace the container metaphor
through Levi’s writing, revealing sustained discourses on embodiment
and human existence as negotiated containment” (27). However, Ross’s
compelling reading overlooks the fact that the cause of the whole article—
that is to say, the human-animal divide that Levi offers as justification of
his own definition of human beings—revolves around the term “costrut-
tore.” This is a key term found throughout his work, the ambivalence of
which prevents him from carrying that sharp distinction between humans
and animals on which “Una bottiglia di sole” is instead based.
That “costruttore” is the term that troubles Levi is expressed not only by
the inconsistency of the two qualities he alleges, as we have shown above,
but also by the list of objects he then brings forward. Regardless of whether
this list “shares qualities with Jorge Luis Borges’s discussion of an entry in
a Chinese encyclopedia” (Ross, 25), what the long catalog of receptacles
does reveal is an ironic confusion about, for instance, the different kinds
of labor/work/technique necessary to produce some of these objects.
Although the whole “zoological” or “taxonomical” classification of recep-
tacles is based on differences in terms of shapes and materials, there is
clearly an abyss between “le anfore e le bottiglie” [amphoras and bottles]
of the first example, and the “bottiglia di sole” of the title, which will be
“certamente incorporea” (RS, OII 961) [surely incorporeal]. The drastic
change in technology which occurred in the last century is in fact acknowl-
edged by Levi only in a very short passage in which he mentions “il decollo
della civiltà industriale” [the takeoff of industrial civilization]; most of his
examples belong instead to a world in which producing an object, a con-
tainer for instance, is still a matter of handicraft and the maker is therefore
a craftsman. For instance, even when he describes the funny experience of
a friend of his who was the manager of a factory, the story implicitly gives
us the idea that such an entrepreneur was in fact making the prototype of
a new coffeepot out of his hands—while probably the object was pro-
duced, in the classical post-Fordism division of labor, by his workers.
The constructor Levi describes in “Una bottiglia di sole” is thus implic-
itly bracketed between two different ways in which human beings might
relate to their technical work. On the lower level, there is an experience
closest to what we see as animal labor, as tragically exemplified by Levi’s
own initial work in Auschwitz (before being reassigned to the chemistry
laboratory). In her book entitled The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
called the subjects involved in such activities animal laborans, those who
“like slaves and tame animals with their bodies minister to the necessities
of life” (Arendt 2008, 80).9 As André Duarte pointed out, “if we link
Arendt’s thesis from The Human Condition to those of The Origins of
Totalitarianism, we can see the Nazi and Stalinist extermination camps as
the most refined experiments in annihilating the ‘bare life’ of animal lab-
orans” (Duarte, 198).10 Therefore, this lower level is characteristic for
both Arendt and Levi not only of tame animals but also of the condition
of the prisoners in Auschwitz. At the opposite extreme lies instead what
Levi depicts at the end of his essay: an ambivalent technology that does
118 D. Benvegnù
not necessarily need the human hand to perform, that is incorporeal,

and, as such, based on processes rather than on shapes and materials.11
This technology can be used for good, but it might be also extremely
dangerous and lead to a world of technicians unable to grasp the ethical
implications of their “containers.” If such a society does not destroy itself
first, the best scenario is a Huxleian dystopia: “un mondo che allora
poteva apparire fantasia delirante ed arbitraria, ma verso il quale oggi ci
stiamo avvicinando. È il migliore dei mondi possibili, quale sarà se i tec-
nici avranno mano libera” (“Aldous Huxley;” AM, OII 639) [a world that
might then have seemed a delirious and arbitrary fantasy, but that seems
to be looming larger on the horizon we are heading toward today. It is the
best of all possible worlds, such as will exist if the technicians are given
free rein; CW, 2021]. Levi compares this future dystopian world again to
animal life, and specifically to some of the animals he quotes in “Una
bottiglia di sole,” that is, ants (640). Although Levi perhaps ironically
supports the rationality of such a “formicaio” [anthill], the imaginary
identification with ants scares him so much that he is reduced to with-
drawal and muteness, as it happens in the short poem Una schiera bruna
(ADI, OII 557). This short poem describes in fact life in an anthill Levi
saw in the middle of the street, but it strangely ends with the thrice-
repeated “Non voglio scrivere di nessuna schiera bruna” [I do not want to
write about any brown formation]. Although Levi does not offer a straight
explanation for such abrupt interruption, we may infer that it is due to
the overlap between the world of ants and, probably, what in Levi’s expe-
rience most looks like it, that is, the infernal anthill called Auschwitz.12
If, then, both the upper and lower levels are occupied by animality,
what is in the middle is, allegedly, the only proper kingdom of the Levian
“costruttore di recipienti.” This in-between creature seems to be the only
one who can be identified, still only by what limits him, as homo faber.
4.1 From Homo Faber to Techne

Whether Hume or Marx was the first thinker who insisted that
labor distinguishes humans from the other animals, it is clear that—as
Arendt writes—this was “the most radical and consistent formulation
of something upon which the whole modern age was agreed” (Arendt
2008, 86). We have seen, though, that in “Una bottiglia di sole” Levi
does not simply try to give us his own formulation of such paradigm,
but also links the idea of work to a peculiar use of technology. Yet, we
have also noticed that his definition of “costruttore di recipienti” is
troubled from above and below: his homo faber wavers in a middle space
whose boundaries are continuously threatened by ethical but also aes-
thetic (the art of both humans and bees, for instance) issues.
Before investigating in detail how those issues are brought into Levi’s
fiction and how work and technology define the human-animal divide
there, we must briefly explore two more facets. First, we must say some-
thing about the very term homo faber and the general cultural environ-
ment from which Levi might have taken inspiration for his eulogy of
human work. Secondly, we will deal with the possible, and uncanny,
relations between Levi’s thought and the controversial twentieth-cen-
tury philosopher who probably spent the most time pondering the
relationship between technology and human essence, that is, Martin
Heidegger.
Properly speaking, Primo Levi uses the term homo faber nowhere in his
oeuvre. Nevertheless, his whole literary production has been seen by sev-
eral scholars as the modern eulogy of the Greek cheirotechnēs, the handi-
craftsman, or, even closer to the original Greek in German: the
Handwerker, who works with his hands. He devoted in fact several pages
to different avatars of this figure, such as, for example, “Batter la lastra” in
La chiave a stella, or “Piombo” in Il sistema periodico. Although we have
no direct evidence, the general atmosphere of 1920s and 30s Turin in
which Levi grew up might have provided him with such strong apprecia-
tion of the homo faber.
In an article devoted to Levi’s scientific literature, Antonello notices that
fifty years separate what is the first modern coinage probably due to
Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907)13 and the popularity this term gained
after the publication of the homonymous book by Max Frisch in 1957
(Antonello 2005, 106–107).14 However, Levi might have read a book writ-
ten by an earlier contributor of La Stampa, Adriano Tilgher, whose Homo
faber: storia del concetto di lavoro nella civiltà occidentale had been published
in 1929. During the twenties, Tilgher was not only a well-known literary
120 D. Benvegnù
critic for La Stampa, but also in touch with what would become the anti-
fascist nucleus of Turinese intellectuals gravitating around, among others,
Luigi Salvatorelli, who was the director of La Stampa from 1921 to 1925
and wrote extensively on Tilgher’s thought in the same newspaper even
after the war (1949–1965).15 Salvatorelli, collaborator and friend with
Piero Gobetti, was forced to resign the direction of La Stampa in 1925 due
to his anti-fascism, and he later became a leader of the Partito d’Azione,
the liberal socialist party in which Levi, too, was involved during and after
the Second World War. Although Levi must have been influenced by the
“illuminismo” [Enlightenment] of the intellectual group in which
Salvatorelli was engaged,16 there is no apparent evidence of any specific
relationship between Levi and Salvatorelli. Nor is there proof of direct
contact between Levi and Tilgher (who died in 1941). However, the seed
planted by the latter in and by his book found in an industrial and intel-
lectually flourishing city such as Torino, and particularly in La Stampa,
fertile ground in which to develop. Therefore, the concept of homo faber,
in all its philosophical, sociological, and even practical, implications was
the subject of (almost) daily debates, both before and after the war.17
Whether or not Levi had a direct knowledge of Tilgher’s book is uncertain,
but there are at least some features their homini fabri share. First of all,
there is in both of them an idea of humanity in which—as Tilgher points
out—there is no distinction of order between “Lavoro” (manual work) and
“Cultura” (i.e., intellectual activity), but rather simply of grades, and there-
fore there is not such a great difference between the factory worker and the
university professor, between the peasant, the poet, and the scientist
(Tilgher 1983, 141).18 Secondly, they both seem to agree with Bergson
that there is a certain kind of action that distinguishes humans from ani-
mals—and fabrication is the defining mark of that action. Finally, for both
Tilgher and Levi, this fabrication is not the imposition of an idea or con-
cept upon inert matter, not the mere application of a theory, but rather a
transformative action in which the two moments, idea and matter, content
and shape, theory and praxis, coincide. This understanding has some con-
sequences, as we will see, for aesthetics.
Tilgher, of course, wrote before the third industrial revolution and his
vision of action, fabrication, and technology is partially optimistic. In his
work, he acknowledges in quite idealistic terms Bergons’s élan vital as the
equivalent human and humanistic impulse toward technical production.

Therefore, technology is the highest point of intelligent human action
and the homo faber is a Promethean creator who reproduces the act of
genesis and initiates humanity proper:
Nel pensiero di Bergson, dunque la tecnica industriale dell’uomo è la con-

tinuazione, nel senso più rigoroso della parola, dello slancio vitale che ha
creato i mondi. In essa si prolunga la creazione divina. Bergson raggiunge
qui le profonde intuizioni dei grandi maestri della Rinascenza italiana:
Marsilio Ficino e Giordano Bruno e dei mistici ebraici (…) Nessun filosofo
ha mai posto più in alto, ha più degnamente celebrato il lavoro produttivo
dell’uomo. Nessuno prima di lui aveva detto con tanta chiarezza che è in
quanto fabbro che l’uomo celebra la sua divinità. È grazie a Bergson che
homo faber diventa Homo sapiens. (Tilgher 1983, 89–91)
[In the thought of Bergson, therefore, the industrial technology of man
is the continuation, in the most literal sense of the world, of the élan vital
which created the universe. Here Bergson is in harmony with the deep
intuitions of the great masters of Italian Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino, and
Giordano Bruno, and with the Hebrew mystics (…) No philosopher has
placed higher, has more worthily celebrated, the productive labor of man.
No one stated clearly that it is as an artisan that man celebrates his divinity.
It is thanks to Bergson that homo faber becomes synonymous with Homo
sapiens. (Tilgher 1958, 99–100)]
Primo Levi the writer comes, of course, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima:
he is definitely less optimistic about the magnificent progress of technol-
ogy and the ability of humans to control their fabrications. The afore-
mentioned “Covare il cobra” states clearly what was Levi’s concern about
the future of the world if left in the hands of unethical technicians, but
his anxiety expresses itself even in his fiction. For instance, the very
suggestion of Hebrew mysticism present in the above passage from
Tilgher’s book, finds an ambivalent representation in one of the few sto-
ries with a “Jewish” topic Levi has ever written, “Il servo.” Set in the
Jewish ghetto of Prague and filled with animal references (from the
emblematic name of the protagonist, Arié “the Lion,” to the issue of icon-
oclastic animal representations long debated at the beginning) this short
story tells of how Rabbi Arié made the mythical golem of Hebrew
122 D. Benvegnù
mysticism to protect his own community. Unfortunately, the incredibly

powerful creature, half human half lion but also with a bit of both
Frankenstein and Asimov’s cyber-robots in itself, escapes from its creator’s
control and ends up causing more damage than expected (VF, OI
710–717). This outcome cannot but remind us of the ambiguous exhor-
tation at the end of “Una bottiglia di sole,” and indeed, “Il servo” serves
as a warning against superficiality in managing the power that comes
from a technological (and spiritual) capability.
Despite this warning, though, we can say without doubt that Levi, like
Tilgher, defines labor (that is, action as fabrication) as the highest mani-
festation and the proper accomplishment of humanity. The two extreme
attitudes toward technology, that is, total rejection or blanket support—
he writes in an article in 1984—instead “ci spingono all’inazione” (AM,
OII 855)19 [lead us to inaction], for him the worst evil of all and the
source of every catastrophe in human history, as we read immediately
afterwards. The homo faber expressed by both Levi and Tilgher, then,
resists inaction and through his productivity and fabrication gives sense
to a world otherwise meaningless, as it might be exemplified—for Levi—
by the figure of Lorenzo in Se questo é un uomo, a man unable to work
poorly even in despair. The ethical dimension of action of the homo faber
is thus a fundamental trait that we can locate in several Italian intellectu-
als who were linked to Torino during the twentieth century, from Gramsci
and Gobetti to, indeed, Tilgher, Salvatorelli, and Levi, and this should
not be overlooked.
There is, however, a second trait that Tilgher and Levi share. Both the
homo faber and Tilgher’s praise of fabrication find an aesthetical develop-
ment in Tilgher’s Estetica (1931). Published only two years after Homo
faber, this book includes a chapter devoted to “aesthetic activity as an
object-making activity” [L’attività artistica come attività fabbricatrice di
oggetti] in which Tilgher not only harshly criticizes Croce’s aesthetics, but
also develops his previous work into a reflection upon art. Recalling that
the Greek root of the term “poeta” is the verb poiein, “che vuol dire fare”
(Tilgher 1931, 109; emphasis in the original) [that means to make], he
claims that the artistic disposition does not solitarily burn in the artist’s
mind, “ma con impeto incoercibile urge verso la sua obbiettivazione fisica,
verso la sua estrisecanzione sensibile” (109–110) [but with incoercible
impetus presses toward its physical objectification, toward its tangible

manifestation]. These quite pompous words mean simply that the artistic
phenomenon cannot be interpreted as pure intuition that might even
remain in the artist’s mind, as Croce claimed, but rather it is necessarily
linked to the act of fabrication, it is the fabrication in itself, halfway
between the too pure intuition of the inspired Crocean artist, for whom
only the idea matters, and the skills of the common artisan, who allegedly
works only with matter. As Tilgher writes, instead, the real thinker thinks
writing at his desk or speaking to himself or to others (115). Such a
description fits surprisingly well within Levi’s unsystematic poetics, and
his homo faber indeed stands in opposition to every theorization in which
the idea or message is preferred to its practical realization, or vice versa.
Against Croce, the writer Primo Levi seems in fact very skeptical of privi-
leging content over structure and form. Instead, his whole oeuvre is
shaped to tie these two elements as organically as possible to avoid any
“fascist” pureness, as Levi himself maintained. Furthermore, as Porro has
pointed out, Levi’s idea of literary production is grounded on the man-
ners of craftmade production, and thus the continuity between theory
and praxis, as well as between humanistic and scientific knowledge, must
go through the pragmatic horizon of techne (Porro, 11).
This term, techne, and its importance for the homo faber as he separates
himself from the other animals, leads us to Martin Heidegger. Given the
differences between the two, it is surprising that Heidegger handles the
relations between the question of technology and the human-animal
divide in ways that can recall Primo Levi’s treatment of the same subject.
Before outlining his arguments, though, we must briefly reflect on both
Heidegger’s controversial interactions with Nazism, and his almost com-
plete silence on the Holocaust.20 Particularly, in a famous series of lec-
tures delivered in Bremen in 1949, Heidegger made two notorious
statements that uncannily link together technology, the death of prison-
ers in concentration camps, and, as we shall see, the human-animal
divide. The first one does not directly deal with the Holocaust, but with
technology’s invasion of agriculture:
Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the

same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the
124 D. Benvegnù
death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to
famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. (Quoted in
Neske and Kettering 1990, xxx)
As the two editors of Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, Neske

and Kettering, pointed out, this comment is cited by Wolfgang
Schirmacher “from a typescript on the second of the Bremen lectures,
‘Das Gestell,’ which was later revised, enlarged, and published as ‘Die
Frage nach der Technik’ (‘The Question of Technology’). All but the
statement about agriculture were deleted from the published version”
(Neske and Kettering, 263).21 We will return shortly to this published
essay.
The second statement belongs instead to the third of the four Bremen
lectures, “Die Gefahr” (“The Danger”), the only one Heidegger chose to
leave unpublished:
Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They perish. They

become items of the standing reserve for the manufacture of corpses. Do
they die? Hardly noticed they are liquidated in extermination camps. (…)
Dying, however, means bearing death in its essence. To be capable of dying
means to be capable of bearing this death. But we are able to do so only
when the essence of death has an affinity to our essence. (xxix)22
In a certain way, these two sole references of the death camps in the
whole of Heidegger’s public career are too outrageous to merit a proper
comment: as Emmanuel Levinas—at once one of Heidegger’s most
important students and critics—wrote, “they are beyond commentary”
(Levinas 1989, 487).23 However, both seem almost lugubriously to
resemble some of Levi’s remarks on technology. For instance, the refer-
ence to the hydrogen bomb in the first passage resembles the end of “Una
bottiglia di sole,” in which Levi indeed alerts us on how technology might
lead from producing/making a simple receptacle to the bomb. It is none-
theless the second of Heidegger’s statements, on those who died in the
German concentration camps, that has uncannily reminded several schol-
ars of Levi’s description of the victims. Precisely, Heidegger’s comment
uncannily echoes Levi’s famous portrayal of the Muselmänner, where the
latter writes that “si esita a chiamarli vivi: si esita a chiamar morte la loro
morte, davanti a cui essi non temono perché sono troppo stanchi per
comprenderla” (SQU, OI 86) [one hesitates to call them living: one hesi-
tates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as
they are too tired to understand]. Commenting on Heidegger’s vision of
masses of humans robbed of their possibility of mortality by the smooth,
technological functioning of the factories of death, Milchman and
Rosenberg actually link both Levi and Hannah Arendt to Heidegger, on
the basis of their respective understanding of death in Auschwitz
(Milchman and Rosenberg, 219). And indeed there are reasons to be
“struck by the similarity” (219) between the three different depictions of
those who died offered by these three, otherwise very different, intellectu-
als. What Milchman and Rosenberg do not recognize, though, is that the
possible nexus between all of them lies in the idea of the prisoners as
animal laborans, as mere working animals—or to stick with a term we
have already used in the previous chapter, as bare animal life.
The distinction between those who (can) die and those who (only) per-
ish is in fact not completely new in Heidegger’s thought. There is instead
a red thread that ties Heidegger’s first famous work, Being and Time, to
his latter reflection on language: only humans properly die, animals only
perish, because they, as, apparently, the prisoners in Auschwitz, cannot
experience death as such.
Mortals are they who can experience death as such. Animals cannot do so.
But animals cannot speak either. (Heidegger 1971a, b, 107)
Because captivation belongs to the essence of the animal, the animal
cannot die in the sense in which dying is ascribed to human beings but can
only come to an end. (Heidegger 1995, 267)24
The human-animal divide and the issue of animality have been a con-
stant source of trouble for Heidegger’s ontology. Although several schol-
ars have pointed out his attempts to avoid anthropocentrism in his
philosophical enterprise, he still “shares the classical humanist’s idealizing
tendency to conceive humanity by way of essential contrast to animality”
(Glendinning, 70).25 Moreover, as we have seen in the above-quoted pas-
sage, the distinction between humans and animals seems to be tied to the
126 D. Benvegnù
question of technology, as though the capacity of technology to abolish

proper death also reduces those who are under its power to bare animals
who can only “perish.” But what is the essence of this technology and
what does technology mean for Heidegger?
To understand Heidegger’s thought on technology and how it affects
the human-animal divide, we must turn to both the published version of
the previously quoted lecture entitled “The Question of Technology” and
a slightly later lecture, originally delivered to the Bayerischen Akademie
der Schönen Kunste [Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts] in 1950, and enti-
tled Das Ding [The Thing]. Let’s begin with the latter.
The Das Ding lecture is particularly interesting because Heidegger pos-
its an argument about the difference between an object and a thing, and
he picks as his main example a jug, a receptacle. Curiously, this is not the
only aspect that might remind us of Levi’s “Una bottiglia di sole,” since
Heidegger begins his discussion by pointing out how technology has
markedly increased our anxiety, because, he says, “the single hydrogen
bomb, whose triggering, thought through to its utmost potential, might
be enough to snuff out all life on earth” (Heidegger 1971, 166). This
anxiety, as well as the false nearness induced by our modern technological
world, obscures the real nature of things, and so Heidegger queries what
a thing actually is. A thing is, for instance, a jug, and a jug is “a vessel,
something of the kind that holds something else within it” (166). A jug
is, then, a receptacle, Levi’s “recipiente,” and Heidegger stresses that it is
as such, in its self-supporting or independent essence, that it stands like a
thing and not simply like an object. Yet, if it is granted that “the jug is a
thing as a vessel—it can hold something,” nevertheless “this container has
to be made” and this making is authentic only when it “lets the jug come
into its own” (168). Heidegger then goes on explaining that whether we
pour any liquid into our jug or not, it is the emptiness surrounded by the
jug that really matters, because “the empty space, this nothing of the jug,
is what the jug is as the holding vessel” (169). Although interesting for
the connection between container and content in a receptacle, for our
discourse it is more important to stick with the making and then ask what
kind of technology our “costruttore” has to use in order to let the jug
come “into its own.” This is the central focus of the “The Question of
Technology.”
In this essay, Heidegger investigates what he calls the “essence of tech-

nology.” He claims that there is an “instrumental and anthropological defi-
nition of technology” (Heidegger 1977, 288) that says that technology is
a specifically human activity to which belongs the manufacture and utili-
zation of equipment, tools, and machines, as well as the manufactured and
used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve. Although
correct, for Heidegger this definition does not grasp the real essence of
technology. Rather, if we consider how another receptacle, a silver chalice,
is made, we might notice that “technology is a way of revealing” (294) [das
Entbergen, ἀλήθεια (aletheia)]. The Greek term for technology, τέχνη
(techne), explicitly pointed toward this essence, because—Heidegger
writes—“techne belongs to bringing-forth, to ποίησις [poeisis: literally “to
make”]; it is something poietic” (294). The difference between techne and
modern technology, both instances of revealing, lies in the fact that the
latter “does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis” (296).
The most important feature of modern technology, in fact, is the industrial
circle according to which “the energy concealed in nature is unlocked,
what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is
stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about
ever anew” (296–297). Modern technology, then, is characterized by what
Heidegger calls the “standing-reserve (der Bestand),” or, in other words, the
disposability and the substitutability of its products. This “standing-
reserve” is responsible for the anxiety Heidegger mentions in Das Ding; it
is the industrial circle we described above that according to him creates the
very possibility of the hydrogen bomb.
The task of the authentic or proper maker is to bring his making back
to its original essence, in which techne and poeisis were not separated, and
therefore to produce things that can stand independently, not as part of
such “standing-reserve.” In so doing, the maker also accomplishes his
own humanity, at least according to what Heidegger calls das Gestell, in
its normal use a term meaning “rack” or “framework,” but in Heidegger’s
thought the “enframing,” that is, the particularly human orientation to
the world that constitutes the essence of technology and manifests the
nature of humanity. As we already noticed, the positive specimens
Heidegger offers in the lectures we examined above are both receptacles
(the jug and the silver chalice) and therefore their maker is indeed a
128 D. Benvegnù
receptacles maker, or again in Levi’s words, a “costruttore di recipienti.”

Yet, there is a third famous example Heidegger brought forward in a lec-
ture delivered in 1951 and then published with the English title of
Building Dwelling Thinking.26 In this lecture Heidegger claims that a
bridge too can be a good illustration of a thing that gathers the three ways
in which humans, and humans only, inhabit the earth (the building,
dwelling, and thinking of the title). The good maker, then, is not only
able to make receptacles, but he is also a bridge maker. This is important,
not only for its meaning within Heidegger’s philosophical system, but
also because “I costruttori di ponti” [Bridge Makers] is the title of a short
story written by Primo Levi which will receive comment at the end of this
section. For now, we must remark that all of Heidegger’s examples, here
and in other essays, share the main idea that building and making are
authentically human only when they join a dwelling that is also thinking.
Or, put differently, there is a way of thinking that lies at the very core of
the essence of humans as builders/makers, and that belongs to the same
kind of activity or work to which making and building belong. But what,
then, is called thinking?
This question happens to be the title of a series of university lectures
Heidegger delivered to his students at the University of Freiburg during
the winter and summer semesters of 1951 and 1952. For what we are
investigating here, the most important statement is in the first lecture,
where Heidegger claims that
all the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is
man’s simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be
accomplished at its proper time. (Heidegger 1968, 16–17)
As this passage shows, Heidegger privileges the hand as the emblem of

proper work. For Jacques Derrida this privilege is perfectly revealed, for
instance, “when, speaking of the relationship between thinking and the
craft of teaching, he [Heidegger] distinguishes between the everyday pro-
fession (an activity, Beschäftigung, oriented by useful service and the pur-
suit of profit, Geschäft), and, on the other hand, the authentic Hand-Werk”
(Derrida 2007, 39). What distinguishes authentically human making/
thinking as original techne from modern technology is this specific work
of the hand; techne can thereby be considered a handicraft, and the hand-
icraftsman is he who literally handles the mysterious hyle (matter) to pro-
duce a thing. As Derrida puts it, “one cannot talk about the hand without
talking about technology” (36), and this is particularly true for Heidegger,
whose exemplary makers are craftsmen who both think and express that
thinking with their hands. Hand-work is then that which can reveal
humanity proper, as such, and therefore distinguishes humans from ani-
mals. Although Heidegger commented upon what he thinks is the abyss
between humans and the other animals also in other ways,27 this empha-
sis on the work of the hand is what forces him to declare that
apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The
hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or
fangs—different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that
is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handi-
craft. (Heidegger 1968, 16)
Reiterating the usual distinction based on speaking, Heidegger adds

that animals have no hands and thus they cannot think and do not have
proper access to the essence of technology, to that original techne that
belongs only to human beings. Non-human animals are thus deprived of
any kind of hand-work, they are just animal laborans, and quod erat
demonstrandum they cannot even properly die, because of the very tech-
nology to which they have no access. Most importantly, they cannot per-
form what is the poietic techne par excellence: writing.
Both in Heidegger and in Levi, action-as-fabrication and the fond-
ness for the hand-work converge toward writing, probably because this
is the kind of work that they perform in the act of thinking. In Levi’s
case, this convergence might be exemplified by the famous last chapter
of Il sistema periodico entitled “Carbonio.” The biotechnological adven-
ture of the atom of carbon ends, in a meta-poetic fashion that it is not
unusual in Primo Levi, with the hand that is writing what it is writing
(“questa mia mano ad imprimere sulla carta questo punto: questo.”
(SP, OI 942). We can therefore apply to him, too, what Derrida notices
about Heidegger and his obsession with the hand. In his critical
reading of Heidegger’s concept of Geschlecht, Derrida writes that

130 D. Benvegnù
“if man’s hand is what it is only from out of speech or the word (das
Wort), the most immediate, the most originary manifestation of this
origin will be the hand’s gesture for making the word manifest, namely,
handwriting, manuscripture (Hand-schrift), which shows—and inscribes
the word for the gaze” (Derrida 2007, 47). In other words, if the hand
is the original organ that mediates one’s experience of the world, then
writing must be the most original manifestation of what separates
humans from animals. But doesn’t this mean that any writing is inevita-
bly anthropocentric? Is this what Primo Levi is writing about?
4.2 T
he Hand that Writes: Writing as Techne
and the Orangutan
Defining writing as the original poietic techne of and for the gaze does
indeed bring us back to Primo Levi’s literature. As we have said just above,
Levi, too, endows the hand with a special privilege. In her essay entitled
Mano/Cervello, Valabrega maintains that Levi stresses his interest for this
privileged organ because, in the evolutionary chain, the hand allegedly
determines a deep gap that cannot be filled between the primates and
humanity (Valabrega 1997a, b, 380). Levi seems indeed to agree with
Darwin’s theory to a point that he too believes that “Man could not have
attained his present dominant position in the world without the use of
his hands, which are so admirably adapted to act in obedience to his will”
(Darwin, 46). Although without such an emphasis on human dominion
over the earth, this Darwinian perspective is exemplified in a short story
entitled Il fabbro di se stesso. In this short narrative Levi imaginarily
reconstructs the whole evolution of humanity from a subjective point of
view. Needless to say, the peak of evolution, for better or worse (Levi
alludes to the possibility to use tools in order to smash the head of some
other “egos”), is the human ability to use hands, because, as the protago-
nist says, “spesso ho l’impressione di pensare più con le mani che col
cervello” (VF, OI 709) [often I have the impression that I think more
with my hands than with my brain]. The homo faber of this story—the
Italian “fabbro” coming directly from the Latin “faber”—indeed makes
himself out of his hands.
It is in his dialogue with the fellow-citizen and theoretical physicist

Tullio Regge, though, that Levi makes his admiration for the hand
explicit. He states that the time he spent in the chemist laboratory was for
him so fundamental “perché toccavi con mano” (Levi and Regge 1984,
17–18) [you see for yourself; but the Italian expression holds the figura-
tive value of “handling” or “touching with your own hands”)]. As he
explains to Regge, working with his hands was for him “un ritorno alle
origini” [a return to origins] in which one gives back to this “organo nob-
ile” [noble organ] its priority, often ignored to raise the brain/mind sys-
tem. Of course, we can read this eulogy of the hand as part of the same
Bildungsroman Levi narrates in Il sistema periodico,28 namely, as another
manifestation of the same objection against the combination of post-
Cartesian idealism and fascism ruling Italian education that brought Levi
to chemistry in the first place. Nevertheless, Levi truly believes in the
pedagogical value of hand-work, where the hand responds and reacts even
before the brain. This is the reason why Libertino Faussone, co-protagonist
of La chiave a stella, prototypical homo faber and, as we will see, mirror
image of the same narrator/author, is remembered especially for his hands:
Le avevo davanti agli occhi, le mani di Faussone: lunghe, solide e veloci,

molto più espressive del suo viso. Avevano illustrato e chiarito i suoi rac-
conti imitando di volta in volta la pala, la chiave inglese, il martello;
avevano disegnato nell’aria stantia della mensa aziendale le catenarie ele-
ganti del ponte sospeso e le guglie del derrick, venendo a soccorso della
parola quando questa andava in stallo. Mi avevano richiamato alla mente
lontane letture darwiniane, sulla mano artefice che, fabbricando strumenti
e curvando la materia, ha tratto dal torpore il cervello umano, e che ancora
lo guida e stimola e tira come fa il cane col padrone cieco. (CaS, OI 1089)
[I could see them with my mind’s eye, Faussone’s hands: long, solid, and
quick, much more expressive than his face. They illustrated and glossed his
tales, imitating, as required, a shovel, a monkey wrench, a hammer. In the
stagnant air of the mess hall they designed the legant catenaries of the sus-
pension bridge and the spires of the derricks, coming to the rescue of
speech when it stalled. They had reminded me of distant readings of
Darwin, of the artificer’s hand that, making tools and bending matter,
stirred the human brain from its torpor and still guides and stimulates and
draws it ahead, as a dog does with a blind master.]
132 D. Benvegnù
In the final comparison of this passage, Levi interestingly reverses what

is the usual simile in which is the brain that leads the dumb body. Even
beyond the corporeal consideration we have already recognized as a pecu-
liar trait of Levi’s literature, the use of the animal comparison here—in
which the animal has the leadership—it is not so surprising for the read-
ers of La chiave a stella. An interpretation of Levi’s admiration for the
hand as pure anthropocentrism, and therefore equivalent of the
Heideggerian abyss between humans and animals, has in fact to deal with
what is staged in another chapter of this book, in which a complex system
of limitrophy is at stake. I am referring to “L’aiutante” [The Helper].
In this chapter Faussone tells the character Primo Levi (or, at least the
diegetic narrator who can be recognized as him) one of his work-related
adventures. This time he was in an unidentified country in Asia building
a derrick, and the story begins ex abrupto with Faussone explaining that,
given the difficulty of making stable connections in his job, the best
friend he had ever had “non era neppure un Cristiano: appunto, era una
scimmia” (968) [he wasn’t even a Christian. That’s the truth. He was a
monkey]. Levi seems not so surprised by this communication, both for
Faussone’s inability to tell a story properly without leaking information
all along his narrative and because who doesn’t know that “i più grandi
amici degli animali, i più bravi a comprenderli e ad esserne compresi,
sono proprio i solitari?” (968) [the best friends of animals, the best at
understanding them and being understood, are the lonely?]. Levi leaves
this rhetorical question unanswered, but we might imply that here he is
labeling as “solitario” not only Faussone but himself as well, whose love
for animals is attested in the same La chiave a stella by, among others, a
short reference to a book on dolphins the narrator was reading.29 In any
case, Faussone’s story moves on, and he finally describes “il solo amico
che sono riuscito a farmi:” “uno scimmiotto” (CaS, OI 970) [the only
friend I made down there (…) an ape]. This ape, Faussone says, was not
even good looking, but “uno di quelli con la pelliccia intorno alla testa e
la faccia da cane” (971) [he was one of those with fur around his head
and a dog face]. Nowhere does the narrator reveal the actual species of
the ape at stake, but we can reasonably argue, given the description, that
it was an orangutan. For a sensitive lover of linguistics and a keen early
reader of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) as Levi was, selecting the
orangutan not only as “the helper” but—we will see—also as a double of

the writer, merits comment.30
Levi’s selection of the orangutan might come from his need to make
the whole episode more geographically realistic. Or it may be a complete
coincidence. Yet, it is worth pointing out that, in The Open: Man and
Animal, Agamben notices that the orangutan has historically been the
prototypical ape on which the concept of the human was built by the
community of eighteenth-century naturalists. According to Agamben’s
account, long before Darwin, the father of modern taxonomy Carl
Linnaeus noted in his Systema Naturae (first published in 1735) the ines-
sential difference between humans and apes. He therefore inscribed
humans among other apes under the label Anthropomorpha, an order that
only from the tenth 1756 edition onwards will become Primates.
Linneaus’s revolutionary work was certainly based on new first-hand
observations but also on previous research, in which the distinction
between anthropomorphic monkeys and, for instance, some human pop-
ulations was even less clear. This is the case of the first scientific descrip-
tion of an orangutan by Nicolaus Tulp, 1641, in which the original Malay
and Indonesian name of the ape (orang-hutan) was directly translated
into the Latin Homo sylvestris, namely man of the forest (Agamben 2002,
32). As Agamben puts it, we have to wait for Edward Tyson’s 1699 dis-
sertation, curiously entitled Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, or, the
Anathomy of a Pygmie, for the physical difference between ape and man
to first be posed on the solid grounds of comparative anatomy (32).
Notwithstanding, the case of the Homo sylvestris/orangutan testifies how
in the eighteenth century the boundaries between humans and animals
(and sometimes fantastic creatures as the cynocephali or the satyrs) were
not yet so sharp. Linneaus’s ironic genius was to pose the human, tenta-
tively enough, at the other end of an imperative: in his taxonomy, at least
until the tenth edition, near the label “Homo” there is only the old saw
nosce te ipsum (know thyself ). Agamben concludes claiming that to define
the human not through a specific trait but through this self-knowledge
means that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be
human (“l’uomo è l’animale che deve riconoscersi umano per esserlo;”
33). Therefore, Linneaus’s formulation is meant to prompt man to
actively mould himself out of the features of an ape: those who ardently
134 D. Benvegnù
deny that they are animals ironically display, in this very refusal, their
own relinquished animality (34). This very mechanism lies also at the
core of what Agamben calls “la macchina antropologica dell’umanesimo”
(35) [the anthropological machine of humanism], in which the limitro-
phy between humans and animals is denied through the artificial imposi-
tion of just one sharp divide.31
Whether Levi knew the taxonomical history of the Homo sylvestris or
not, his literary orangutan seems to have been created precisely to com-
plicate this sharp identitarian boundary. As its historical and taxonomical
ancestor tracked down by Agamben, Faussone’s “scimmiotto” belongs in
fact to an optical machine. The difference is that, in this case, the reflec-
tions are multiple and, more important for what we are arguing here, all
of them are staged within a technological setting.
First, the ape is a mirror image of Faussone, as Marco Belpoliti has
already pointed out (Belpoliti 1997, 203). As Faussone himself main-
tains, this quasi-identification happens primarily for emotional reasons:
even the ape is lonely, and therefore when two are so lonely together, with
the same melancholy, it does not take time to become friends (CaS, OI
971). This common loneliness is also the junction where a second identi-
fication develops, between the animal and the narrator, to which we will
return soon. Before that, though, we must observe that Faussone has no
problems in recognizing the emotional tie between himself and the ani-
mal, as if, in terms of needs and desires (for a female companion, for
instance), they were indeed neighbors. What they share, however, is not
precisely a positive ability, but once again a lack or a loss, a general void
able to induce in both of them melancholic feelings and a state of com-
mon boredom (“Si annoiava”). The impossibility to avoid this psycho-
logical suffering is what initially connects the human and the non-human
character. If we agree with what Žižek writes about neighborhood,
Faussone’s gesture of recognizing the ape’s common status belongs already
to ethics: the first ethical gesture accomplished by Faussone is indeed a
“mutual recognition of limitation” that “opens up a space of sociability
that is the solidarity of the vulnerable” (Žižek, 139).
It is however Faussone’s job that truly establishes the bond between the
two. After an initial period of apathy, the “scimmiotto” begins mimicking
what the rigger does on the derrick. Soon the animal becomes Faussone’s
helper or assistant, receiving a proper call to which he responded (“lo

chiamavo e lui veniva;” CaS, OI 972). Though the animal shows ability
and cognition, this friendly collaboration sadly does not last. A catastro-
phe is approaching: the ape, left alone for a whole day, manages to nearly
demolish the newly built derrick (972).
It might seem, then, that the whole story is a satire of dumb creatures,
proving indeed Heidegger’s point on animals having no hand and there-
fore being unable to build anything properly. Only a human being can be
a homo faber and the story of the dumb “scimmiotto” would thus confirm
the abyss between humans and animals that we have previously discussed.
But this interpretation would be a mistake for at least two reasons. On
the one hand, the whole chapter has what Belpoliti calls (for the whole
book) “an evolutionary tone” (Belpoliti 1997, 203). The constant refer-
ence to the ape as a “bambino” [child] who likes to play and, at times, to
moan (CaS, OI 972), rather than creating an abyss between the human
and the animal, shapes instead a quasi-evolutionary chain of beings, in
terms of both phylogeny and ontogeny. The adult rigger Faussone is then
the last step in a lineage that begins with the infans and the animal; the
playful attitude of the childish “scimmiotto” will eventually become the
skills of the homo faber. On the other hand, Faussone’s empathy also
reveals that the boundaries between himself and the animal are tangled,
until the point that they can be inverted. For instance, Faussone envies
the animals precisely for a reason that is the reversal of what Heidegger
claims to be the superior uniqueness of humans. He tells his interlocutor
that “è proprio un peccato che anche noi montatori non abbiamo quattro
mani come loro, e magari anche la coda” (971) [it’s really a shame that us
riggers don’t have four hands like apes do, and maybe even a tail].
Curiously, Faussone seems to acknowledge in this passage what another
controversial German philosopher, Arnold Gehlen, called the “singular
lack of biological means” of humans (Gehlen, 26).32 According to Gehlen,
human beings have to overcome their “deficiencies” in terms of “natural”
skills, and therefore they become “creatures of discipline,” whose unde-
termined natures compel them to undergo a process of formation: “com-
pared to the great apes—he writes—man appears hopelessly unadapted”
(26). Humans, then, compensate their deficiencies with their “ability to
work and [their] disposition toward action” (26). This very disposition
136 D. Benvegnù
toward action we have seen also in Tilgher’s book, transforms “man” into
“an anticipatory being,” who “like Prometheus, must direct his energies
toward what is removed, what is not present in time and space. Unlike
animals, he lives for the future and not in the present” (25). The Levian
homo faber as he appears in “Una bottiglia di sole” indeed shares with
Gehlen’s “man” not only the characterizing disposition toward action
(and therefore fabrication), but also the “anticipatory” aspect that it is,
according to Levi, his unique feature as a constructor of containers.
Moreover, in other essays Levi himself acknowledges that animals have
superior abilities and therefore humans have developed certain features to
overcome (and hide) their biological vulnerability.33
We might then say that the human-animal divide in the relationship
between Faussone and the “scimmiotto” reveals at least a double tangle,
where the evolutionary continuum faces an original deficiency or lack.
This tangle explains the sudden sadness with which Faussone narrates his
decision not to take the animal with him once the job was done. Once
again, it is what I would like to call an ethical sadness, namely, the mark
of a friendship based on reciprocal, but different, vulnerabilities.
Paraphrasing Eva Feder Kittay, we may say that Faussone and the orang-
utan develops an ethics of care: their story unravels a relationship that—
to a certain extent—is genuinely caring and respectful because it does
acknowledge their dependency as a feature of both human and non-
human life (Feder Kittay 2011, 54).
There is, however, a second overlap that shows how the alleged human-
animal divide makes this story more complex than expected. We have
already seen how common loneliness and boredom are the first reason
why Faussone and the “scimmiotto” got to know each other. It is also at
this point, when Faussone mentions how quickly they became friends,
that the narrator, the alter ego of Primo Levi, writes the following:
Un pensiero mi ha attraversato la mente: di nuovo eravamo soli noi due, e

con addosso la malinconia. Ero subentrato allo scimmiotto, ed ho perce-
pito una rapida ondata di affezione per quel mio con-sorte lontano, ma
non ho interrotto Faussone. (CaS, OI 971)
[A thought crossed my mind: again we were alone, the two of us, and
with melancholy upon us. I had replaced the ape, and I felt a rapt wave of
affection for that now-distant sharer of my fate, but I didn’t interrupt

Faussone.]
The identification between the narrator and the ape reappears a second
time toward the end of the book, where the narrator tries to convince
Faussone that chemists think like riggers: “cerchiamo di farvi il verso,
come quel suo aiutante scimmiotto” (1081) [we try to imitate you, like
that ape helper of yours]. These two identifications between the narrator
and the animal might be taken as something in between sentimentalism
and mockery. Of course, a reader might say, Levi is simply kidding: he is
not an ape, and chemists are way more advanced, in terms of rational
thinking, of riggers, who think with their hands! And indeed, these two
passages are quite ironic, but they also express another possible refraction,
through what Alberto Cavaglion calls “a stylistic expedient usually hardly
used: dissimulation” (Cavaglion 2006, 2).34 If we consider the whole
frame of the book, the first refraction/identification is in fact between the
narrator, a professional chemist, and Faussone, the rigger. However, the
very evidence of the book we are reading reveals that our chemist has also
another job, that is, he is a writer. In another chapter of La chiave a stella
entitled “Tiresia” this tension between the two natures of the narrator
becomes explicit. Almost reluctantly, Levi the character is forced by
Faussone to admit that
un po’ Tiresia mi sentivo, e non solo per la duplice esperienza: in tempi

lontani anch’io mi ero imbattutto negli dèi in lite fra loro; anch’io avevo
incontrato i serpenti sulla mia strada, e quell’incontro mi aveva fatto
mutare condizione donandomi uno strano potere di parola: ma da allora,
essendo un chimico per l’occhio del mondo, e sentendomi invece sangue di
scrittore nelle vene, mi pareva di avere in corpo due anime, che sono
troppe. (CaS, OI 988–989)
[I really did feel a bit like Tiresias, and not only because of my double
experience. In distant times I, too, had got involved with gods quarreling
among themselves; I, too, had encountered snakes in my path, and that
encounter had changed my condition, giving me a strange power of speech.
But since then, being a chemist for the world’s eyes, and feeling, on the
contrary, a writer’s blood in my veins, I felt as if I had two souls in my body,
and that’s too many.]
138 D. Benvegnù
First, we have an indeed interesting image of Auschwitz as the encoun-

ter with the snakes responsible for Tiresias’s metamorphoses.35 Therefore,
Auschwitz—or the encounter with an ambiguous image of animality we
might say—is also responsible for both Levi’s specific fissure and the gen-
eral splitting of the paradigmatic integrity of the Cartesian subject we have
already explored in the previous section. Second, what is striking in this
comparison between the narrator and Tiresias is that Levi says here that
two natures or souls are too many, while it is well known that in other
places of his works he maintains instead that having two natures is the
original state of every human being. “L’uomo è centauro, groviglio di carne
e di mente, di alito divino e di polvere” (SP, OI 746) [Man is a centaur, a
tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust], Levi famously writes
in the first element, “Argon,” of Il sistema periodico; and indeed the centaur
is, for his own admission, a sort of archetypical emblem of himself and of
his idea of humanity. We will explore in the following chapter how this
double nature works in some of his short stories. Right now, though, we
must stress that this passage is meant to recognize that not only the chem-
ist shares something with the rigger, but that the writer does it as well.
Despite the differences, not only all three professions, “i due miei e il suo,
nei giorni buoni possono dare la pienezza” (CaS, OI 989) [my two and his
one, on their good days can give fullness], but they all also require some
technical skills to be performed. More importantly, if the work of both the
chemist and the writer are somehow mirror images of the work of the rig-
ger, then they should therefore also perform a bit like the “scimmiotto,”
who indeed mimics Faussone and whom the narrator recognizes twice as
an image of himself. And, in fact, Levi acknowledges that chemists, like
riggers—and apes we can add now—think “con le mani e con tutto il
corpo” (989) [with our hands and with the entire body]. Writers, on the
other hand, have incredible “momenti di creazione” [moments of cre-
ation], but they are also “degli irresponsabili, e non si è mai visto che uno
scrittore vada sotto processo o finisca in galera perché le sue strutture si
sono sfasciate” (988) [irresponsible, and no writer was ever put on trial or
sent to jail because his constructions came apart]. Writers are thus as irre-
sponsible as the “scimmiotto” who destroyed the derrick, and therefore
they seem to share the same impossibility of being completely moral and
legal agents, at least when it comes to the outcomes of their mimetic work.
This “paragone” [comparison] might sound as “stiracchiato” [forced]

as the narrator of La chiave a stella calls the first one between the narrator
and Tiresias. Yet, Levi defends it, claiming that literature’s goal is to pro-
duce “un accoppiamento impossibile” [impossible coupling] and “lavorare
al limite della tolleranza, o anche fuori tolleranza” (988) [to work at the
tolerance limit, or even beyond the limit]. Faussone seems to agree with
the writer, and with good reasons: the double comparison with the ape
alludes to two elements that are the implicit pivots of the whole episode,
and—as we have already seen in the previous section—of most of Levi’s
stories.
In their wrestling with matter, Faussone, the narrator, and the ape
share in fact a common ability of using their hands as first technology and
source of skillful work. However, their playful irresponsibility also ties the
writer and the animal into an asymmetrical bond of creation and mime-
sis, which challenges and is challenged by dualistic distinctions such as
between reality and imagination, possibility and impossibility, human
and animal. The relation between the eulogy of hand-working and the
human-animal divide expressed in La chiave a stella thus complicates,
instead of simplifying, what Heidegger calls techne and the alleged human
identity of the homo faber we are investigating. As we have just observed,
Levi grasps the question of “un lavoro ben fatto” [a well done job] from
tangled perspectives: almost as a quadrumane, he manages to build a lit-
erary structure in which the practical, the ethical, and the playful dimen-
sions converge. Moreover, he creates a system of refractions and
duplications, based on both positive and negative abilities, in which what
is supposedly human proper cannot be easily identified. Instead, in its
several duplicities, these refractions carry the relations between humans,
animals, and technology into a regime of limitrophy rather than to the
edge of one sharp distinction.
Recognizing the significance of this kaleidoscopic system, though,
does not mean that we have already fully answered the question about
Levi’s homo faber and to what kind of techne he is bearing witness. To do
that, we must instead return to the nexus of technology and gaze under-
lined by Derrida in his insightful comment on Heidegger’s hand and
explore the connection between Levi’s testimony and the hybrid marvels
of his science fiction.
140 D. Benvegnù
Notes
1. Cf. for instance E. Morante, Pro e contro la bomba atomica (1987) and
P. Volponi, Corporale (1974). For Calvino, see especially his job as editor
for the Notiziario Einaudi; cf. Martino 19–20.
2. According to a very broad definition, science is a systematic knowledge
base, where a series of steps is followed to reliably predict the type of
outcome, while instead technology is applying the outcome of scientific
principles to innovate and improve the manmade things in the world.
Several essays have been written on the general importance of science
and technology in Levi’s work, and some of them will be properly
quoted. However, on this topic see also Klein (1990), Borri (1992),
Cicioni (1996), Battistini (2004), Guagnini (2009) and Di Meo (2011).
3. Levi (1986), then RS and OII 993.
4. The “cobra” can be also seen as a link to the monstrous as described by
Harrowitz (2001), 51–64.
5. Levi (1985); then RS and OII 958–961.
6. Carole Angier, for instance, claims that in “Una bottiglia di sole” Levi’s
depiction of the human-animal divide is “semi-seria” [half-serious]; see
Angier (2007), 5.
7. Horace, Sermonum I, 1, 3, 28–35: sicut/parvola—nam exemplo est—
magni formica laboris/ore trahit quodcumque potest atque addit acervo/
quem struit, haud ignara ac non incauta futuri.
8. In 1974 Levi arranged to go into semi-retirement; the last chapter of La
chiave a stella describes Levi’s last activity as an employee at SIVA.
9. Arendt is actually quoting here Aristotle’s Politics, 1254b25.
10. Cf. also Arendt 1973, 474–475: “Isolation is that impasse into which
men are driven when the political sphere of their lives (…) is destroyed
(…) Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is
deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer recognized as
homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary ‘metabo-
lism with nature’ is of concern to no one. Isolation then becomes loneli-
ness (…) Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of
totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of
its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and
superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the
beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the
rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of
political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be

uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaran-
teed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at
all.”
11. Cf. Arendt (2008), 300: “Processes, therefore, and not ideas, the models
and shapes of the things to be, become the guides for the making and
fabricating activities of homo faber in the modern age.”
12. Cf. Zinato (2001).
13. Bergson (1907). Needless to say, the original Latin expression is also in
the famous passage attributed by Sallust (or the Pseudo-Sallust) to
Appius Claudius Caecus’ Sententiæ: “Homo faber suae quisque
fortunae.”
14. Antonello—who also tells that Frisch’s book was published in Italy two
years later by Feltrinelli—points out how the protagonist of Frisch’s
Homo Faber is influenced by Hannah Arendt’s critique of technology.
According to the scholar the difference between Frisch’s approach and
Levi’s lies therefore in the lack of ideology in the Italian writer. We agree
that Levi works instead deductively, but Antonello seems to generalize a
bit too much when he writes that Levi always avoids “di formulare dei
giudizi perentori sul mondo, cosciente per concreto esercizio della realtà
che il caso, l’errore, il dubbio, sono sempre in agguato” [to judge peremp-
torily the world, made aware by the concrete experience of reality that
chance, error, doubt are always lurking]. One of the goals of this section
is to demonstrate how some of Levi’s non-fiction works, as exemplified
by “Una bottiglia di sole,” actually formulate sharp judgments that are
instead complicated and challenged by his fiction production.
15. Salvatorelli’s articles on Tilgher are available on the Archivio Storico de La
Stampa website. The correspondence between the two, revealing a rela-
tion that goes beyond their jobs, is instead available on the website of
Fondazione Luigi Salvatorelli (http://www.fondazionesalvatorelli.org
[accessed on November 2016]). The link between Tilgher and Salvatorelli
might have been Ernesto Buonaiuti, important figure of the so-called
“modernismo teologico,” with whom both Tilgher and Salvatorelli were
in touch.
16. The definition is in d’Orsi (1999), 467. For the relationships between
Salvatorelli and Franco Antonicelli, who became after the war the first
editor of Se questo é un uomo, see also d’Orsi (2000).
17. Interestingly, another collaborator of La Stampa, who has been already
mentioned in the previous chapter, A.C. Jemolo, wrote an article in
142 D. Benvegnù
1975 entitled L’homo faber e le sue colpe (La Stampa, August 15, 1975,
11) in which he alerts his readers about the danger of the contemporary
technical development.
18. It is worth noticing that a version of this very idea became popular after
the war via another Piedmontese homo faber, Adriano Olivetti (1901–
1960), and its factory in Ivrea which gathered workers as well as artists
and writers.
19. This article has been published first with the title L’uomo senza bussola in
La Stampa, July 8, 1984. It was then collected in L’altrui mestiere, with
the different title Eclissi dei profeti.
20. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.
Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on April 21,
1933. On May 1 he joined the Nazi Party. Although he resigned as rec-
tor a year later, Heidegger remained a member of both the academic
faculty and of the Nazi Party until the end of the war. Notably, after the
war and the “denazification” of Germany, Heidegger never apologized
nor expressed regret for either his affiliation to the Nazi Party or the
atrocities committed by the Nazis, except privately in the famous 1966
Der Spiegel interview that was however published, at Heidegger’s explicit
request, only posthumously ten years later. As Heidegger was probably
the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, it is indeed
relevant to understand to what extent his philosophy is organically
linked to Nazi ideology and the history of the Holocaust.
21. The two editors also add that “an ecological postmodernist of sorts,
Schirmacher [see Technik und Gelasenheit (Freiburg: Alber, 1983), 25]
cites the passage, not to criticize Heidegger but to underscore the need
to take a step beyond modernism.”
22. In the relevant endnote Neske and Kettering add: “Unpublished type-
script of ‘Die Gefahr’, 25”.
23. On this topic, see also R. J. Sheffler Manning (1996).
24. As Calarco pointed out, the first formulation in Heidegger’s oeuvre that
“demise and dying are modalities of the finitude to which animals simply
do not have access” (Calarco, 17) is in Being and Time, ∫∫ 46–53.
25. For a different understanding of Heidegger’s thought on the same issue,
see Mitchell (2011).
26. Now in Heidegger (1971).
27. Famous (despite its obscurity) is the distinction between “1. The stone
(material object) is worldless [weltlos]; 2. The animal is poor in world
[weltarm]; 3. Man is world-forming [weltbildend];” in Heidegger

(1995), 177. On this specific issue, see Calarco (2004).
28. Cf. the story of Levi’s academic formation in SP, OI, 758 and ffll.
29. In the chapter entitled Acciughe (II), Levi tells that his character was
once stopped by the Russian customs because he had a suspicious book
(in English) about the life of dolphins (CaS, OI 1098). As Belpoliti in
his Levian Bestiary (Belpoliti 1997, 175–176) attests, in one article
about what we can expect from the future appeared on La Stampa
‘Tuttolibri” in 1970, “Vediamo un po’ quali cose si sono avverate,”
Levi shows a particular ethological interest toward dolphins’ behavior
and language.
30. Levi’s knowledge of Linnaeus is testified by his first published poem,
‘You Don’t Know How to Study!’, a “pretty dreadful poem” according to
one of Levi’s biographer, Ian Thomson, in which the very young Levi
provided “a spoof of Petrarch’s famous love sonnet VII, as well as the
work of the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus.” Cf.
Thomson, 60; Angier (2002), 102–103.
31. On this subject, see also the special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the
Theoretical Humanities devoted to animals and technology, and espe-
cially Ron Broglio’s Editorial Introduction (Broglio 2013).
32. The original German edition of this fundamental work of philosophical
anthropology was published in 1940 (Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine
Stellung in der Welt). Although Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) is consid-
ered one of the fathers of the modern Philosophical Anthropology, his
name has been marked by his early (1933) enrolment into the Nazi
party. Although his main ideas were very far from the kind of social
Darwinism applied by the Nazis, his thought has been then gazed with
suspicion and almost forgotten. For a comparison based on the concept
of “techne” between Levi’s “human ethology” and Gehlen’s “philosophi-
cal anthropology,” see Porro, 153–154.
33. Cf. some essays in L’altrui mestiere, as for instance “Il salto della pulce”
(OI, 725) or “Gli scarabei” (OI, 790).
34. Although Cavaglion claims that Levi uses “dissimulation” scarcely, he
also shows how Il sistema periodico, and “Argon” particularly, are actually
based on this “stylistic device.”
35. The sex changes that occurred to Tiresias are told in Ovid, Metamorphoses
3, 316–388.
144 D. Benvegnù
Works Cited
Angier, Carole. The Double Bond: Primo Levi: A Biography. London: Penguin,
2002.
Angier, Carole. “Le storie di Primo Levi: messaggi in bottiglia.” In Voci dal
mondo per Primo Levi: in memoria e per memoria, ed. L. Dei, 1–20. Firenze:
Firenze University Press, 2007.
Antonello, Pierpaolo. Il ménage a Quattro: scienza, filosofia, tecnica nella lettera-
tura italiana del Novecento. Firenze: Le Monnier, 2005.
Antonello, Pierpaolo. “Primo Levi and ‘Man as Maker’.” In Gordon 2007,
89–104.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1973.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958 (2008).
Battistini, Andrea. “Bracconaggi culturali: le scorribande di Primo Levi nei ter-
ritori tra scienza e letteratura.” In Cultura scientifica e cultura umanistica: con-
trasto o integrazione?, ed. G. Olcese, 217–236. Genova: Ed. San Marco dei
Giustiniani, 2004.
Bergson, Henri. L’Évolution créatrice. Paris: F. Alcan, 1907.
Borri, Giancarlo. Le divine impurità: Primo Levi tra scienza e letteratura. Rimini:
Luisè, 1992.
Broglio, Ron. “When Animals and Technology Are Beyond Human Grasping.”
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18.1 (2013): 1–9.
Calarco, Matthew. “Heidegger’s Zoontology.” In Animal Philosophy. Ethics and
Identity, ed. P. Atterton and M. Calarco, 15–30. London: Continuum, 2004.
Cavaglion, Alberto. Notizie su Argon. Gli antenati di Primo Levi da Francesco
Petrarca a Cesare Lombroso. Torino: Instar Libri, 2006.
Cicioni, Mirna. Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge. Oxford: Berg Publishers,
1996.
Derrida, Jacques. Psyche. Inventions of the Other, vol. II. Stanford: Stanford
Di Meo, Antonio. Primo Levi e la scienza come metafora. Soveria Mannelli:
Rubbettino, 2011.
d’Orsi, Angelo. “Laboratorio di culture.” In Storia di Torino. IX. Gli anni della

repubblica, ed. N. Tranfaglia. Torino: Einaudi, 1999.
d’Orsi, Angelo. La cultura a Torino tra le due guerre. Torino: Einaudi, 2000.
Guagnini, Elvio. “Letteratura, scienza e tecnica in Primo Levi.” In Mémoire
oblige: riflessioni sull'opera di Primo Levi, ed. A. Neiger, 137–148. Trento:
Dipartimento di studi letterari, linguistici e filologici, 2009.
Harrowitz, Nancy. “‘Mon maître, mon monstre’: Monstrous Science in Primo
Levi.” In Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, ed. K. Jewell. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2001.
Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking? Translated by F. Wieck and
J.G. Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Translated by P.D. Hertz. San
Francisco: Harper, 1971.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by A. Hoftadter.
New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Heidegger, Martin. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Edited by D. Farrell Krell
and Translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude. Translated by M. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana
Kittay, Eva Feder. “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability.” Ratio Juris
24.1 (March 2011): 49–58.
Klein, Ilona. “‘Official Science Often Lacks Humility’: Humor, Science and
Technology in Levi’s Storie Naturali.” In Tarrow 1990, 112–126.
Levi, Primo. If Not Now, When? Translated by W. Weaver. New York: Summit,
1985.
Levi, Primo. Racconti e Saggi. Torino: Edizioni “La Stampa”, 1986.
Levi, Primo, and Regge Tullio. Dialogo. Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1984.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “As if Consenting the Horror.” Critical Inquiry 15.2
(Winter, 1989): 485–488.
Mitchell, Andrew. “Heidegger’s Later Thinking of Animality: The End of World
Poverty.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 1 (2011): 74–85.
Neske, Gunther, and Kettering Emil. Martin Heidegger and National Socialism.
New York: Paragon, 1990.
Sheffler Manning, John. “The Cries of Others and Heidegger’s Ear: Remarks on
the Agricultural Remark.” In Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, ed.
A. Milchman and A. Rosenberg, 19–38. New Jersey: Humanity Press, 1996.
Tilgher, Adriano. Estetica. Roma: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1931.
146 D. Benvegnù
Tilgher, Adriano. Homo Faber. Work through the Ages. Translated by D. Canfield
Fisher. Chicago: Gateway, 1958.
Tilgher, Adriano. Homo Faber. Storia del concetto di lavoro nella civiltà occiden-
tale. Bologna: Boni, 1983.
Valabrega, Paola. “Mano/Cervello.” In Belpoliti 1997, 380–392.
———. “Primo Levi e la tradizione ebraico-orientale.” Primo Levi: un’antologia
della critica, ed. E. Ferrero, 263–288. Torino: Einaudi, 1997.
Zinato, Emanuele. “Primo Levi poeta-scienziato: figure dello straniamento e
tentazioni del non-senso.” Istmi: Tracce di vita letteraria 9/10 (2001):
149–161.
5
Techne II. Hybrids and Hubris
Our analysis of “Una bottiglia di sole” has showed how the apparently
clear divide between humans and animals that Levi offers in this essay is
troubled on two different sides: from below, with the overlapping between
what Arendt called animal laborans and Levi’s own experience in
Auschwitz; and from above, with the danger of a society in which science
and technology can be used against life, as it happened in Nazi Germany.
Paradoxically, what should have been a clear cut becomes instead a very
vague intermediate space in which humans as constructor of containers
are surrounded by animal phantasmata. However, one point is clear: Levi
poses the human-animal divide in relationship with a certain idea of
technology and fabrication, as his definition of humans as builders of
receptacles betrays. Thus, to understand who these constructors are and
what technology distinguishes them from the other animals, we had to
investigate the nature and essence of Levi’s homo faber. First, we estab-
lished a potential link between Levi and Adriano Tilgher’s book entitled
precisely homo faber. Tilgher’s and Levi’s respective understandings of the
relations between humans and technology have some common features,
despite belonging to generations separated by the horror of the Second
World War. For instance, both seem to believe that action and fabrication

148 D. Benvegnù
are somehow ethical processes per se, and, more importantly, that in
authentic fabrication as well as in aesthetic issues the idea does not over-
come its practical realization, but form and content, theory and praxis,
culture and nature, must be one. These significant similarities between
Tilgher and Levi, though, did not explain how the homo faber is con-
nected to the human-animal divide, and therefore we turned to a phi-
losopher who spent much of his career thinking about this connection,
Martin Heidegger. Initially, we noticed how his thought uncannily ties
technology and concentration camps, in a way that, strangely enough,
might recall both Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt. Specifically, we con-
sidered how Heidegger claims that a certain practice of technology
responsible for most of the horrible events of the twentieth century is also
what made those human beings who died in the camps unable to achieve
death as such: therefore, they only perished, as animals do. This disturb-
ing dichotomy drove us to explore further Heidegger’s concept of tech-
nology. We have seen how Heidegger outlines, taking mainly containers
as examples, an idea of technology as divided into two parts: the authen-
tic techne on the one hand, able to establish the essence of things as such,
and modern technology, which instead is a mere exploitation of natural
resources. Only the former can be called a poiein, an authentic making,
in which what is privileged is the proper work of the hand. However, if
the authentic work is necessarily a Hand-Werke, to keep the abyss between
humans and animals, Heidegger is forced to say that animals have no
hands. This lack of the hand means that they cannot perform the very
work Heidegger put in the essay we are reading—that is, writing.
This complex tangle between action and technology, writing and
human “handiness,” brought us back to Primo Levi. Although he also
emphasizes the hand as the symbol of the prototypical homo faber, in La
chiave stella he builds what we called a literary optical machine able to
produce reflections of the author and thus complicate what for Heidegger,
and for certain humanism, is instead a sharp cut. For instance, not only
the true protagonist of the book, Libertino Faussone, functions as a mir-
ror image of the narrating writer, but his helper as well, the orangutan of
the homonymous chapter. This multifaceted structure of refractions and
only partial identifications troubles the human-animal divide as elabo-
rated by what Agamben calls “the anthropological machine.” Moreover,
Techne II. Hybrids and Hubris 149
it forces Levi to admit the problematic split essence of his own writing, a
techne born out his own double “human-animal” nature as it is revealed
by the figure he picks to describe himself: a centaur. Whether this identi-
fication with the half-human, half-horse mythical creature is already fully
expressed in Se questo è un uomo, Levi publicly acknowledges it as an
image of himself with the beginning of his science fiction production.1
5.1 S
cience Fiction and the Monstrous Work
of Zoomorphism
Levi’s first collection of short stories, Storie naturali, was first published in
1966 under the pseudonym of Damiano Malabaila. This collection gath-
ers some of the few short stories Levi had already published separately
some years earlier under his real name, and other stories that Italo
Calvino, when asked his opinion in 1961, has called “racconti fantabio-
logici”2 [biological fiction stories]. Calvino gave a quite encouraging reply
to Levi’s doubts about his own creative—that is, not testimonial—writ-
ing, and the five years in between his answer and the real publication are
not an editing issue but the manifestation of a deeper conflict within Levi
himself. This conflict finds its compromise in the use of the pseudonym,
while the name of the real author is nonetheless made clear in the back
cover of the volume through a reference to his “due libri sui campi di
concentramento” [two books about the concentration camps]. Apparently,
this solution was suggested by the publisher, but it immediately received
Levi’s approval. Once asked to explain the reason for the pseudonym,
Levi in fact said that he felt
un leggero senso di imbarazzo, forse anche di pudore nei riguardi di una

certa parte dei lettori dei miei due libri precedenti: c’era chi, magari toccata
di persona o nella famiglia dalla tragedia dei Lager, leggeva i miei racconti
sul “Giornale”, e poi mi diceva: “come puoi scrivere queste cose, tu che
vieni da Auschwitz?” È un’opinione che non condivido (…), ma che risp-
etto: perciò, per segnare un distacco, una differenziazione dall’autore di Se
questo è un uomo, ho accettato la proposta del mio editore di firmare il libro
con uno pseudonimo.3
150 D. Benvegnù
[a slight sense of difficulty, perhaps even of decency toward a certain part

of those readers who read my two previous books. Some of them, maybe
touched personally or in their families by the tragedy of Lagers, read my
stories on “il Giornale” and then said: “how can you write these things,
when you are coming from Auschwitz?” I disagree with this opinion (…)
but I respect it. Thus, to separate, to distinguish from the author of Se
questo è un uomo, I accepted my editor’s proposal to sign the book with a
pseudonym.]
Nevertheless, in the same interview and in others released immediately

after the publication of Storie naturali, Levi also acknowledges that there
is no real contradiction between his testimonial literature and his “fanta-
scienza” [science fiction]. Actually, he explains to Gabriella D’Angeli on
the Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, there is an intimate bond
between his previous work and his last book: in both “vi è l’uomo ridotto
a schiavitù da una cosa: la ‘cosa nazista’ e la ‘cosa cosa’” (D’Angeli 1966)
[there is man reduced to slavery by one thing: the ‘Nazi thing’ and the
‘thing thing’]. In another interview about Storie naturali, when asked to
explain the reasons of his interest in science fiction, Levi also offers for the
first time the image of himself as a centaur:
Io sono un anfibio—dice—un centauro (ho anche scritto dei racconti sui

centauri). E mi pare che l’ambiguità della fantascienza rispecchi il mio des-
tino attuale. Io sono diviso in due metà. Una è quella della fabbrica, sono
un tecnico, un chimico. Un’altra, invece, è totalmente distaccata dalla
prima, ed è quella nella quale scrivo, rispondo alle interviste, lavoro sulle
mie esperienze passate e presenti. Sono proprio due mezzi cervelli. È una
spaccatura paranoica (come quella, credo, di un Gadda, di un Sinisgalli, di
un Solmi). (Fadini 1966)
[I am amphibian, he says, a centaur (I’ve written stories about centaurs).
It seems to me that the ambiguity of science fiction reflects my present
destiny. I am split in two. One half of me is the factory, is the technician
and the chemist, but there is another, quite separate half that lives in the
world of writing, giving interviews, working on my past and present expe-
riences. They are two halves of my brain. I live with this paranoiac split (as,
I imagine, did figures like Gadda, Sinisgalli, Solmi). (Belpoliti & Gordon
2001, 85)]
Levi’s answer contains in nuce several issues that we have already dis-
cussed partially and that are now our main subject. First, Levi uses an
animal to describe himself. We can easily guess that Levi takes the first
image of himself as an amphibian from the work of a writer very dear to
him, Aldous Huxley. In a famous essay entitled The Education of an
Amphibian, Huxley contends in fact that each human being is five or six
amphibians rolled into one, and therefore education must emphasize
both theoretical thought and practical action, to develop all the different
natures of humanity (Huxley 1956). Whether Levi knew this essay or not
(though, it is probable), this almost Renaissance concept of man not only
reminds us of Tilgher’s homo faber, but also fits perfectly in Levi’s
Weltanschauung. Moreover, paraphrasing an article by Dror Pimentel on
Heidegger, we might say that Levi’s literature ponders upon the original
Greek meaning of techne through an examination of the modal differ-
ences between praxis and theory that goes back to their etymology:
whereas theoria is the positioning of beings within the locus of truth by
means of the gaze, pragma is the very same positioning by means of the
hand (Pimentel 2005). Once again, we will see shortly how the dialectics
between these two terms finds its locus in a writing practice wherein the
animal imagery functions as a device against reductionist identification.
Second, Levi seems to disregard here the possible differences between
being an amphibian and being a centaur. While the former is generally
considered a figure of metamorphosis and the latter one of hybridity, he
seems instead to offer them as equivalent images of himself. These two
elements—the becoming something else of metamorphosis/evolution
and the possession of a double or multiple nature of hybridity—are in
fact present in different shapes not only in his science fiction (SF) but
throughout Levi’s oeuvre. For instance, we have already seen how in La
chiave a stella, the partial identification with the “scimmiotto” has both
evolutionary and hybrid features. Therefore, we will read some of Levi’s
SF stories paying attention to both processes, as if they were complemen-
tary manifestation of the same strategy of limitrophy and dissemination.
Third, we must deal with what Levi calls the ambiguity of science fic-
tion. This chapter is obviously not the place for a full examination of this
literary genre. Nevertheless, there is at least one element we must
152 D. Benvegnù
consider before moving to the actual reading of Levi’s SF stories. In the

special issue of the journal Writing Technologies devoted to Heidegger,
writing, and technology, Roberts asks an ironic question about the pos-
sibility of handwritten science fiction. Roberts’s essay begins by exploring
Heidegger’s preference for hand-work and his complementary aversion to
modern technology, the latter being “hostile to the possibilities of poetry”
(Roberts, 58). Therefore, he continues, for Heidegger “a poetics of tech-
nology—a science fiction—would be a contradiction in terms” (58).
Picking up a Derridean remark, Roberts notices how this antipathy for
technology is revealed, among other things, by Heidegger’s famous resis-
tance to the typewriter, supposedly because the machine degrades the
word and reduces it to a simple means of transport, to the instrument of
commerce and communication. Roberts argues instead that the famous
SF author Philip K. Dick “and his writing machine (more fully: Dick as
writing machine) is the archetypal figure of SF productivity” (59). Science
fiction, in fact, not only is often written rapidly and impersonally, but
also manifests a generic fascination with machine-work rather than hand-
work, with monstrosity rather than “humanness.” This switch, however,
happens precisely as a way of that revealing that Heidegger re-establishes
as aletheia, in which the missing handiness, we might say, the lack of
proper work of the hand, is what constantly reveals itself. Therefore,
Roberts concludes, “SF as a genre hands us, or draws us, into thinking as
Handwerk. It is not a ‘literature of ideas’ in the banal sense that phrase
often invokes, but in the more profoundly Heideggerian enframing of
the ways in which thinking happens” (64).
Although Heidegger would probably reject this conclusion, Roberts’s
point seems to be valid for Primo Levi’s science fiction. Most of his SF
short stories are in fact characterized by a meta-literary level, in which the
act of writing as specific technology is reflected through zoomorphic or
monstrously hybrid references. This is the case, for instance, of a very
ironic and disturbing story entitled Censura in Bitinia, in which the
“handiness” of human beings is at stake. Written in the form of an official
bureaucratic report, this story tells how, in a fictional country named
Bitinia, censorship has been officially and properly regulated. Noticing
that both human labor and mechanization—that is, technology—did
not perform this task accurately enough, some scientists decide to entrust
animals with this duty. As the report and the ironic writer behind it claim,
the mammals closest to humans were found to be least useful for the task,
while “il comune pollo domestico” (SN, OI 411) [the common barnyard
chicken; TS 49)] has given instead remarkable results. The anonymous
compiler ends his report wishing that this experimental method with
chickens will be hopefully soon extended to all the censorship offices in
the country, but the story is not finished yet. Immediately after the end
of the last sentence, Levi puts the stamp of a chicken’s foot and the label
“verificato per censura” [approved by the censor]. The new method, then,
is already at work and we do not know how much of the original report
has been already censored. As Baldasso has pointed out, “Censura in
Bitinia” is indeed another example of Levi’s fondness for reversals, in
which the upside-down perspective satirizes not only totalitarian control,
but also the technology behind it (Baldasso, 116). But there is more. Levi
himself claimed that his literary model or style was that of the “weekly
report” commonly used in factories,4 namely what “Censura in Bitina” is
supposed to be. The chicken’s mark—the animal equivalent of the human
hand—becomes, therefore, another way to question both writing as a
technology in general and the very writing that the story/report embod-
ies, that is, Levi’s writing itself. It thus becomes quite meaningful that the
story suggests not only that truthful communication is usually oral, pass-
ing “di bocca in bocca” (SN, OI 411) [by word of mouth] rather than in
written form, but also that we should look upon any written statement
with (ironic) suspicion. We will return shortly to this tension between
orality and writing because it is an ongoing theme of several of Levi’s SF
stories, often intertwined with his reflection upon animality and hybrid-
ity. For now, we can say that for Levi writing was a technical problem,
and science fiction was the literary place where different solutions to the
complicated relation between nature and culture, orality and writing,
were staged and revealed.5
Finally, we must say something about what Levi calls, in the above pas-
sage and in other places, his “spaccatura paranoica.” This term is not
precisely technical, it does not belong to any specific analytic theory, and
scholars usually avoid explaining it in detail because we have no idea
either from where Levi borrowed it or to what extent it refers to an exact
meaning. It is thus usually understood as an original coinage of Levi,
154 D. Benvegnù
generic enough to fit into his well-known skepticism toward

psychoanalysis. However, it seems that at least this paranoiac fissure refers
to or perhaps even expresses an epistemological approach, a structure or
organization of knowledge that could not be achieved otherwise. As Mills
pointed out, from Freud to Klein and Lacan there is a fundamental rela-
tion between paranoia and knowledge, because—as he writes—
“knowledge is a dialectical enterprise that stands in relation to fear—to
the horror of possibility—the possibility of the not” (Mills, 30). Levi’s
science fiction, as a manifestation of his paranoiac fissure, seems indeed
to embody a modality of knowledge as aletheia in direct contact with that
not and that fear. We have already seen in the previous chapter, for
instance, how the issue of animal suffering is staged by Levi between two
different impossibilities, in a kind of dialectical image composed of den-
egation and limitrophy. Levi’s very relation with psychoanalysis as tech-
nique and knowledge is also characterized by this double bond. On the
one hand, he always refuted the capacity of psychoanalysis to say the
truth about what happened in the concentration camps.6 On the other
hand, though, he was forced to confirm basic Freudian intuitions and
admit that he has a subconscious, too, and this Es sometimes speaks (for)
him. Specifically, he applies to his mental organization the same kind of
quasi analytic division he uses for his work: on one side the practical, use-
ful, and reflective, prosaic “metà razionale” [rational half ] and on the
other side the playful, poetic, visceral “metà non razionale” [non-rational
half ] (ADI, OII 517). In the preface of what is his most revealing book,
La ricerca delle radici, Levi goes even further, stating that his irrational
and visceral half is filled with an ecosystem composed by “saprofiti, uccelli
diurni e notturni, rampicanti, farfalle, grilli e muffe” (RdR, OII 1363)
[soprophytes, birds of day and night, creepers, butterflies, crickets and
fungi].
The number of animals in this metaphorical exhibition of his Es is
striking for an author taken as a champion of rational humanism. Yet,
this connection between animals and subconscious is not so surprising if
we consider how Levi describes the only true phobia he portrays in the
whole of his oeuvre, otherwise marked by several moments of horror
and despair rendered instead with calm and scientific objectivity. This
phobia is indeed attached to animals, and it is recalled in an article
entitled “Paura dei ragni” (AM, OII 755–758) [Fear of Spiders]. Levi
begins this 1981 short essay claiming that another article by Isabella
Lattes Coifmann about insects’ sexual life, published a few weeks earlier
in La Stampa,7 brought him back to one of his most overwhelming fears:
a “lontano terrore per i ragni” [a distant terror of spiders]. Levi does not
ponder upon the possible sexual content of this fear, but instead asks why
humans have generally such a phobia.8 Interestingly, one of the answers
he suggests but ultimately rejects (“odiamo i ragni perché tendono
agguati;” we hate spiders because they ambush) underlines an argument
that links human deficiency to the reason behind such specific fear. The
incredible technical ability of a spider, Levi writes, is natural, instinctive:
maybe the fact that the spider’s knowledge “gli è stata trasmessa insieme
con la forma” [has been transmitted to it together with its shape] is pre-
cisely what horrifies us (AM, OII 757). Yet, Levi prefers “spiegazioni più
semplici” (simpler explanations] and he offers to his readers a final
account that connects the animal’s technological skill with memory and
oblivion. He maintains first that the fear of spiders likely comes from the
unstoppable reappearance of a sort of primitive or magic thought, belong-
ing to previous stages of human life. However, he continues, spiders’
webs are also the visible manifestation of evanescent memory: they are
the banners of desertion, absence, decay, and oblivion, because they
“velano le opere umane, le avvolgono come in un sudario, morte come le
mani che in anni e in secoli le hanno costruite” (758) [they veil human
work, envelop them as though in a shroud, as dead as the hands that
through years and centuries built them]. For a witness who fought obliv-
ion through his hand-work as writer, this duplicity inherent in the spi-
ders’ technology makes them quite unheimlich, at the same time familiar,
fascinating, and repulsive. A similar tangle of emotions is recalled by Levi
in what he calls the “atto di nascita” [birth certificate] of this fear of his:
È l’incisione di Gustavo Doré che illustra Aracne nel canto XII del
Purgatorio, con cui sono venuto a collisione da bambino. La fanciulla che
aveva osato sfidare Minerva nell’arte del tessere è punita con una trasfigura-
zione immonda: nel disegno ‘è già mezza ragna’, ed è genialmente rappre-
sentata stravolta, coi seni prosperosi dove ci si aspetterebbe di vedere la
schiena, e dalla schiena le sono spuntate sei zampe nodose, pelose, dolorosa:
156 D. Benvegnù
sei, che con le braccia umane che si torcono disperate fanno otto. In ginoc-
chio davanti al nuovo mostro, Dante sembra ne stia contemplando gli
inguini, mezzo disgustato, mezzo voyeur. (758)
[It is the etching by Gustave Doré which illustrates Arachne in the
twelfth canto of Dante’s Purgatory, and with which I collided as a child.
The young girl who dared challenge Minerva in the art of weaving is pun-
ished by a foul transfiguration: in the drawing she is ‘almost half a spider’,
and is brilliantly depicted as utterly frantic, with full breasts where one
would expect to see her back and from her back have sprouted six legs,
knotty, hairy, painful: six legs which, together with human arms that writhe
desperately, add up to eight. On his knees, before the new monster, Dante
seems to be contemplating its crotches, half disgusted, half voyeur.]
In this system of reflections and mirror images that characterizes the

Urszene (primal scene) of Levi’s phobia, we must first remember that in
Dante’s Commedia Arachne is also a (negative) imago of the author.9 At
the same time, being somebody who dared the gods and was punished for
it, Arachne cannot but remind us of both Prometheus, the original homo
faber, and most importantly Tiresias, another mirror image of the narra-
tor in La chiave a stella. The transitive property of this multifaceted iden-
tification is confirmed not only by Levi’s poem in first person entitled
Aracne, but also by the partial overlap between his work as a producer of
paint and the spider’s “secret” web fabrication, as it is described in a 1986
article entitled “Il segreto del ragno” (PS, OII 1305) [The Spider’s Secret].
Finally, the link between Arachne weaving her audacious web and the
spider has been obviously understood as a double metaphor of writing:
the spider’s web is therefore a metaphorical representation of a text that
deals—as Levi pointed out—with daring, memory, and oblivion.10
These connections between spiders, mirror images, and writing can be
retrospectively found in a key moment of Se questo è un uomo. We have
already seen how the famous scene of the chemistry exam is characterized
by an insistent stress on what constitutes properly human and what
instead belongs to a different, monstrous species. As we are told, the
German doctor brings his scientific gaze to rest upon what he sees as the
animal Häftlinge # 174517, but Levi’s interest in Dr. Pannwitz does not
differ too much from the fascination Dante shows toward Arachne. The
difference, of course, is that in this case Levi himself is supposedly the
monstrous, non-human Arachne, and indeed he describes himself and

his fellow prisoners almost as already half spiders. This short description
is incredibly relevant: in a book that usually insists on animalization as
degradation, this is one of the very few positive occurrences of becoming
animal and therefore it is worth exploring it further.
We are at the beginning of the chapter devoted to the chemistry exam,
and Levi and the other prisoners are waiting to be conducted into the
room where Dr. Pannwitz will examine them. In the meantime, they
must wait in the corridor, and Levi describes this moment, saying that
they were not simply always happy to wait, but that “siamo capaci di
aspettare per ore con la completa ottusa inerzia dei ragni nelle vecchie
tele” (SQU, OI 100) [we are capable of waiting for hours with the com-
plete dull-witted inertia of spiders in old webs]. This apparently very
minor animal image, usually overlooked by scholars, discloses a precise
literary strategy and a key meaning. In fact, Levi retrospectively identifies
himself, in that decisive moment of his life, with an animal he affirms to
fear, with a spider. This identification is unusual not only because of Levi’s
phobia, but most importantly because the typical position of the prisoner
in Auschwitz is to be and feel like an animal prey. Instead, spiders are
predators who build their webs to hunt and, as Levi acknowledges in the
essay we mentioned earlier, their peculiar characteristic is that they pre-
pare ambushes (AM, OII 757). While waiting in the corridor Levi and,
to some extent, his peers were thus not the prey; instead, they are repre-
sented as predators, preparing ambushes. But ambushes for whom? And
how, given their contingent position of weakness?
An answer comes if we consider what we have introduced earlier,
namely, that spiders are also images of writing, and their webs are there-
fore texts. I believe in fact that this momentary animalization has to do
with Levi’s future career as a writer. This reading is confirmed by the
several allusions to writing present throughout the whole chapter in Se
questo è un uomo. Specifically, the entire episode with Pannwitz is brack-
eted between two images of writing. The first one is situated just before
the door of Pannwitz’s office opens and the prisoners are brought inside
for their exam: one of the prisoners has a pencil, and all of them are
crowded around him because they are not sure “se saremo ancora capaci
di scrivere, vorremmo provare” (100) [if we still know how to write, we’d
158 D. Benvegnù
like to try]. The second image concludes instead the exam and Levi’s
short relationship with the German doctor. Like a modern Dante, Levi
stares “istupidito e atono” [dull and flat] not at Arachne but at Pannwitz’s
hand, “la mano di pelle bionda che, in segni incomprensibili, scrive il
mio destino sulla pagina bianca” (103) [the fair skin of his hand writing
down my fate on the white page in incomprehensible symbols].
With this framing Levi seems to suggest that if you cannot write, per-
haps you are indeed non-human: once again, the ability of writing with
your hands is the handwork that establishes one’s humanity. Yet, if this is
what the two images appear to assert, the central animal identification
instead troubles the linearity of such an assumption. Although the writer
Levi explicitly claims that the prisoner Levi felt and was looked upon as a
kind of dumb animal by the Nazi doctor, the affirmation of his “spider-
ness” is instead what will lead him to use his natural, instinctive technol-
ogy to build webs, that is, texts. These webs/texts will be used as testimony
against oblivion, they will be the perpetual memory against Pannwitz’s
scientific hand. The very text we read, Se questo è un uomo, is therefore the
patiently made spider web into which the Nazi doctor has finally fallen,
as Levi ends the chapter with the famous judgment against both Pannwitz
and Alex the Kapo.
This reversing power of the spider image is a manifestation of that
paranoiac knowledge we discussed earlier. The arachnophobia of Levi’s
youth is in fact reversed and staged as a paranoiac, almost denegational,
“not.” This spider “not” is an animal weapon, an ambush Levi prepares
against the handy (namely, human) technology embodied by both the
German doctor and, by metonymy, the whole Nazi enterprise. The tech-
nology of the spider is thus set against not only Pannwitz’s writing but
also against his scientific gaze: a gaze posed to suggest that the doctor and
the prisoner are two different beings, as Levi recalls. This time, though,
the prisoner switches the table precisely through an animal identification:
Levi is the predator, he is the one who prepared the ambush, and the
whole narrative is an upside-down, both testimonial and animal, hunt in
which the unaware prey is the German chemist and his dreams of Über-
humanness and purity.
Levi was a crafty writer who paid an incredible attention to details.
Although the image of the waiting spider can be easy to neglect, there is
no doubt that such an implicit reversal of Auschwitz’s usual dynamics was

instead for him utterly important. A similar switch is in fact explicitly
described in another story in which once again a radical shift between the
human perspective and the hunting gaze of an animal is at stake.
Trattamento di quiescenza [Retirement Package], included in Storie natu-
rali, belongs to the little saga in which the main protagonist is a bizarre
American businessman named Simpson. In this story, Simpson invites
the narrator to experience a machine that provides realistic but virtual
images along preset themes, called “The Torec.” The narrator thus under-
goes several realistic identifications, in which he experiences the reality
from the perspective of, respectively, a thirsty man, a soccer player, an
Italian-American boy involved in a fight, a woman. It is only with the last
one, though, that the narrator is completely satisfied (l’ultimo nastro (…)
mi aveva soddisfatto profondamente;” SN, OI 565) and the story achieves
what Robert Gordon has called “a natural climax of the identification
with altered perspectives” (Gordon 2001, 169). The source of such satis-
faction lies in the identification provided by the last tape, a recording
made of an animal, precisely a bird of prey. The story describes in fact the
experience of a hunt from the perspective of the bird, and the narrator is
that bird, hunting a blue hare. The hunt ends with the predator killing
the prey: the sense of tension the narrator felt before, as something he had
to do but could not remember, “era cessato” [had ceased] (SN, OI 565).
Did Levi feel the same relief from an internal tension when he wrote
the episode of the chemistry exam in Se questo è un uomo? Probably yes,
if the reversal of the role between the predator and the prey we have
explored in our reading of the spider quasi-identification was effective.
From this perspective, writing becomes in fact an “animal” technology
that sets the gaze of the bird of prey and the “handiness” of the spider in
opposition to what Pannwitz represents, including, as we have seen, the
very practices of writing and technology as they were performed by the
Nazis.
This friction between two different technologies, human and animal, is
exemplified by another story from Storie naturali in which another bird-
like experience is featured. This time, though, the science behind the story
is in the hands of a sort of doppelgänger of Pannwitz, the Nazi scientist
Doctor Leeb. “Angelica Farfalla” [Angelic Butterfly] is one of the few short
160 D. Benvegnù
narratives staged in postwar Germany and, by Levi’s explicit admission,

represents a possible nexus between his testimonial literature and his sci-
ence fiction. The butterfly of the title refers to the experiment led by the
above-mentioned Doctor Leeb during the dramatic days of the fall of the
Third Reich.11 As humanity in Dante’s Divine Comedy is described as a
worm that will eventually develop into an angelic butterfly, so Leeb’s sci-
entific experiment was supposed to develop the allegedly neotenic poten-
tial of humanity, that is to say developing human beings into Übermenschen,
closer to angels.12 The whole story is initially narrated from the perspec-
tive of an Allied officer who reconstructs the theoretical background of
the experiment once the war is over, analyzing the voluminous manu-
script Leeb left behind before disappearing. Later, though, it becomes the
testimony of a girl who lived next to the apartment where the events took
place, who tells the horrific conclusion of the experiment. In both cases,
Levi clarifies that Leeb’s experiment represents not simply “la quintessenza
della Germania” (SN, OI 436) [the quintessence of Germany], but also a
version of Auschwitz. Doctor Leeb’s prisoners cannot but remind the
Muselmänner described elsewhere, while the reaction of denial by the girl’s
father mirrors what Levi asserts was the general German attitude toward
what was happening in the camps.13 Given such premises, it is not unex-
pected that the experiment does not end well. Instead of producing a new
kind of supra-human, Nazi science gives birth to “quattro bestiacce” [four
ugly beasts], who look more like four vultures (“Quattro uccelli: sembra-
vano avvoltoi”), unable to fly because their wings were closer to “le ali dei
polli arrosto” (439–440) [the wings of roasted chickens]. And as roasted
chickens they died: as soon as the Russians arrived, a hungry mob broke
into the apartment and devoured the poor creatures.
This story can be read as the best demonstration of how the logic
behind Storie naturali is not so distant from Levi’s Auschwitz testimony.
On the back cover of the first edition of the book, Levi claims in fact that
the decision to use a pseudonym comes from the sense of guilt he felt
toward the readers of his first two books, “libri seri, dedicati a un pub-
blico serio” [serious books dedicated to a serious public]. To offer to this
public a volume of what he names “racconti-scherzo, di trappole morali,
magari divertenti ma distaccate, fredde” [joke-stories, of moral traps,
erhaps amusing but distancing, cold] is thus almost consumer fraud.

p
Yet, Levi continues, he would not publish these stories
se non mi fossi accorto (non subito, per verità) che fra il Lager e queste
invenzioni una continuità, un ponte esiste: il Lager, per me, è stato il più
grosso dei ‘vizi’, degli stravolgimenti di cui dicevo prima, il più minaccioso
dei mostri generati dal sonno della ragione. (SN, back cover)
[if I had not noticed (not immediately, to tell the truth) that a continu-
ity—a bridge—existed between the Lager and these inventions. The Lager,
for me, was the biggest of the ‘defects’—of the distortions—that I had been
talking about before, the most threatening of the monsters generated by
the sleep of reason]
As Harrowitz pointed out, in his science fiction, and particularly in

“Angelica Farfalla,” Levi elaborates the connection between modern sci-
ence and the Holocaust “adopting a discourse of monstrosity as a method
of exploring and reading scientific epistemology and its relation to scien-
tific ethics and politics” (Harrowitz, 51). Leeb is therefore an image of
Mengele (whose nickname was the “Angel of Death”) and the whole story
is a way of saying how the science and technology developed by the Nazis
produced only monsters. Nevertheless, if we read again the passage on the
back cover of the book, we might also notice Levi uses the terms “vizi” or
“stravolgimenti” to refer both to Auschwitz and—less obviously—to his
SF writing. We might say, then, that even in “Angelica Farfalla” Levi is
referring not simply to the “mad hybrid mixtures” (Harrowitz, 55) that
Nazi science created. Instead, he is also pointing toward his own hybrid
products, that is, the very stories he is writing, on the one hand, and, on
the other hand, to his own hybridity, being himself both a quasi-scientist
and a writer. It is thus not a coincidence that Leeb’s manuscript is
described in “Angelica Farfalla” in ways that, apart from a few details, can
ironically remind of Storie naturali, uncannily connecting Levi the writer
to the German scientist.14 The monsters generated by the sleep of reason
are therefore mirrored by Levi’s stories as well, in which what is at stake is
precisely the complexity that produces and embodies such monstrosity.
Specifically, “Angelica Farfalla” seems to confirm two features we have
already partially explored.
162 D. Benvegnù
First, the story demonstrates that the action of the homo faber should
not be the mere application of a theory, the imposition of an idea over
matter, because the boundaries of humanity are at stake. What Leeb did,
creates only horror precisely because it is the opposite of what Tilgher and
Levi seem to share: their idea of fabrication is not based on idealistic and
metaphysical preconceptions, but must combine theory and praxis, as
well as nature and culture. Therefore, when metaphysical idealization
leads a project, the side-effect is the instantaneous degradation of who-
ever is involved, from the supposed demiurge to the crowd that in
“Angelica Farfalla” eats the poor creatures because it is unable to recog-
nize in them any trace of themselves. As Agamben would suggest, in
denying the creaturality of the “birds” as well as of every other human
and non-human animal, the German crowd makes a statement about its
own humanity: those involved in such misrecognition are no less human
monsters than the scientist and the four prisoners.
Second, Harrowitz points out that the tradition that links “monster”
to mostrare (to show, to reveal) lies at the heart of Levi’s science fiction
(Harrowitz, 60). Therefore, she continues, in his SF stories and particu-
larly in Storie Naturali “Levi effectively sets up a tension between the
question of the believability of events raised by Rabelais in the epigraph
and the historical reality of the Holocaust” (60). We can thus read his
short stories as monstrous ways of that revealing that belongs to both
techne and poiesis: little monstrous creatures in themselves, these stories
question our power of judgment and interpretation, showing our impos-
sibility to grasp an understanding of humanity based on idealistic theo-
ries. If in fact the question they are raising is ‘what kind of events are too
horrible to be grasped?,” as Harrowitz claims, then once again we must
reflect on the hybrid monstrosity that their maker stages before our eyes.
Is this ambiguous monstrosity a quality that intrinsically pertains to the
Levian homo faber?
This question and the reference to the literary and mythological diva-
gations of Leeb’s manuscript bring us back finally to where we began, that
is, Levi describing himself as a centaur. My intention is to end this section
by exploring how Levi uses the hybrid figure of the centaur in his science
fiction as a literary way of reflecting upon the boundaries between human
and non-human, the monstrosity of the homo faber.
5.2 Centaurial Literature, Hybrid Techne

In the interview about his science fiction, Levi explicitly maintains to
have written more than one story about centaurs. Scholars have usually
focused their attention on one narrative included in Storie naturali in
which centaurs are already in the title (“Quaestio de centauris”) without
investigating any further whether there are other stories in which these
hybrid figures appear. Yet, there is at least another story in which two
figures that may be centaurs are present, “I costruttori di ponti” [Bridge
Builders]. This very short story is included in Lilít, already a hybrid book
per se, in which old stories about Auschwitz are assembled with science
fiction narratives about events already accomplished but in the future
(this is the grammatical meaning of “futuro anteriore,” the section in
which “I costruttori di ponti” appears) and other accounts about suppos-
edly contemporary happenings (“presente indicativo”). This collection
represents, then, the literary place where some of the most important
genres of Levi’s oeuvre gather. All of them, though, take in Lilít a slight
new curve: if, in fact, the Auschwitz narratives are focused less on the
general horror of the concentration camp and more on apparently minor
characters, the SF stories are instead deeply influenced by Levi’s increas-
ing pessimism of those years. This pessimistic attitude seems to be the
very foundation upon which “I costruttori di ponti” is built. Published
fifteen years after “Quaestio de Centauris,” this story did not receive
much attention from scholars, probably deceived by the absence of the
actual term “centaur” in it. This is true: such a term does not appear in
the whole narration and it is even doubtful whether the two protagonists
are proper centaurs at all. Scholars have understood the epigraph of this
story as a clear indication that the protagonists are giants, and therefore
they have never linked “I costruttori di ponti” to the earlier narrative.15
Nevertheless, the extra-diegetic narrator opens the story with a descrip-
tion of the main protagonist that leaves very few doubts about her nature:
“Danuta era contenta di essere stata fatta come i cervi e i daini” (L, OII
104) [Danuta was glad that she was made like the deer and the doe; CW,
1446]. Although it may be taken as a quite unusual reference to a com-
mon vegetarianism, the rest of the description shows that Danuta and her
father Brockne are clearly hybrids of some kind: maybe not properly
164 D. Benvegnù
half-human, half-horse, but surely animal-like creatures associated with

wild nature as the centaurs of Greek mythology. Remarkably, Danuta is
also the name of a famous Buchenwald survivor, Danuta Czesch
(1922–2004), who after the war became the author of numerous schol-
arly studies of the history of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp,
including the fundamental The Auschwitz Chronicle. We do not know if
Levi knew her personally, and thus the reference might be totally coinci-
dental, but it is intriguing to believe that her name, hidden in “I costrut-
tori di ponti,” actually betrays even more the connection Levi establishes
between hybridity, Auschwitz, and his own testimonial literature.
Despite the complications about the two main protagonists’ nature,
the story is quite linear. Danuta and her father Brockne are creatures who
live in harmony with nature and with the other fantastic animals inhabit-
ing their world (unicorns and minotaurs are cited, for instance). One of
Danuta’s favorite places is a stretch of the river where a stone bridge steps
over the stream: she spends hours there, wondering who made the beauti-
ful bridge and how. Her wonder is triggered by her inability to reproduce
the bridge: although she tries, she fails because she would have needed
“quindici o venti mani, una per ogni pietra” (105) [fifteen or twenty
hands, one for each stone]. She also asked her father once, but he replied
that asking too many questions about beautiful things like the bridge
eventually results in obscuring their wonder and beauty, and Danuta did
not dare anymore. (Accidentally, this is the mirror image of the answer
given by the father in “Angelica Farfalla,” only this time on the “beauty”
side of the spectrum). One day, though, Danuta bumps into “un ani-
maletto” [a little animal] who, scared by her presence, threw on the
ground a lucent tool and slipped into the closest cave (“buttò a terra un
arnese lucente (…) e s’infilò nella caverna più vicina;” 106). Danuta is
immediately sure that that little animal is responsible for making the
bridge and develops a strong desire of owning the little fellow. Finally, she
gets him, but she also realizes that she does not know what to do with
him. In fact, she tries to keep him as a pet, but the little animal does not
live well in captivity: “era uno di quegli animali che quando si sentono
prigionieri rifiutano il cibo” (107) [one of those animals who when they
feel they are prisoners refuse food]. Danuta is then convinced by Brockne
to set the little animal free, and indeed she does free him, but with the
deep sadness of a child losing her favorite pet. Yet, the story is not over. A
few months later, Danuta and her father are sleeping in a clearing when
the smell of fire wakes them up. Actual fire is all over the hills surround-
ing them and Brockne immediately comments: “eccoli dunque all’opera,
i costruttori di ponti, piccoli e solerti” (108) [here they are again, the
bridge makers, tiny and industrious]. The conclusion translates sadness
into tragedy: the fire is getting closer and the two hybrid creatures try to
find a passage, but there is none. They are thus forced to go back to where
they were.
Nel frattempo, la radura si era popolata di animali di tutte le specie, anel-

anti e atterriti. L’anello di fuoco e di fumo si faceva sempre più vicino;
Danuta e Brockne sedettero a terra ad aspettare. (108)
[In the meantime, the clearing had become populated by animals of all
species, gasping and frightened. The ring of fire and smoke kept getting
closer. Danuta and Brockne sat down on the ground to wait; CW 1450]
This is the end of the story and we are not told what they are waiting
for, but it is reasonable to think that they are waiting to die, burnt alive
by the coming fire. Although the story is narrated from the perspective of
the two hybrids, the “animaletto” Danuta captures is clearly a human
being and the bridge builders of the title are therefore humans. We began
this chapter by noticing how Levi uses the term “costruttori” to address
humans as a peculiar species, and indeed, one of the stories of his favorite
homo faber, Libertino Faussone, is about him building a bridge some-
where in Asia (CaS, OI 1036–1056). Scholars have also recognized the
metaphorical value of bridges in Levi’s oeuvre, intended as devices able to
connect two different entities: his literature has thus been read as a “bridge
of knowledge” (Cicioni 1996), which of course makes Levi himself a
bridge builder. We may therefore say that a bridge builder is none but
another embodiment of the best qualities of the homo faber, epitomizing
through the technological activity of building bridges the very essence of
humanity. The problem is that, even if this is true, in “I costruttori di
ponti” this is not so inspirational. Instead, here the human bridge-builders
are not positive figures but murderers, using their Promethean technology
to kill not only Danuta and her father, but all the other defenseless
166 D. Benvegnù
animals of the forest. The Promethean myth of the good technology of

the homo faber, then, rather than creating a better, safer world, here breaks
the natural harmony of the cosmos: although certain outcomes might
look as magnificent as the bridge admired by Danuta, even basic human
technology hides a dangerous potential for destruction.
The upside-down perspective of the story helps readers side with
Danuta and Brockne, rather than with the technological human beings.
In fact, not only are the two hybrid creatures the victims, but they become
such because they release the “little animal,” that is to say, they are able to
overcome their own desires (Danuta’s “troppo amore”) to avoid harming
other creatures. Whether their hybrid nature is a way to link them to the
author and, more generally, to the concentration camps (as their passive
Muselmänner-like attitude at the end seems to suggest), they obviously
represent an almost mythical golden age, in which there was no need for
human technology and the world was in harmony. Nonetheless, readers
of this story cannot forget that they (the readers) are as human as the
bridge builders, and indeed we know at least from Levi’s testimonies that
they would not live well in captivity as “prigionieri” [prisoners] as well.
We know also from the previous chapter, that Levi uses the term ‘prigion-
ieri’ very deliberately, because it cannot fail to remind us of his own expe-
rience as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Finally, if the author is himself a bridge
builder in his quality of writer, then the book in which the story is col-
lected or even the story itself is, in a way, a manifestation of the same
technological skill that makes humans build bridges and kill other animal
creatures. But what is the result of these tangles? Is Levi suggesting in
“Costruttori di ponti” that all forms of technology, writing included, lead
to disastrous consequence and therefore are intrinsically evil? And if so,
would the lack of technology truly give us access to a hypothetically har-
monic world in which not only the relationships between humans and
animals are not based on violence, but the human-animal divide itself has
no meaning?
The challenge brought up by these questions frames Levi’s most famous
story about centaurs, “Quaestio de Centauris.” If possible, this earlier
story is even more ambivalent than “I costruttori di ponti” and represents
perfectly the double impossibility that we have already acknowledged as
the key literary device in Levi’s literature when animality is at stake.
Before exploring the story, however, we must say a few words about the
general centaur imaginary within Western culture. In Greek mythology,
a centaur is a member of a composite race of creatures, part human and
part horse. During the archaic age of Greek art, they were usually depicted
with the hindquarters of a horse attached to human bodies, keeping
therefore the human genitalia; in later renderings centaurs are given the
torso of a human joined at the waist to the horse’s withers, where the
horse’s neck would be. Levi refers to this second typology. What is impor-
tant, though, is that in both cases the human upper part is kept, embody-
ing a switch from earlier episodes of theriomorphism (the Egyptian gods,
for example, or the Minoan Minotaur) in which the animal head was
instead preserved. Belonging, however, to an earlier stage of the world
than the Olympian gods, centaurs reveal through their very embodiment
their double nature, based on an alleged conflict between the human
higher functions and the feral lower appetites. Usually the lower appetites
prevail, and in fact centaurs are famous for their violence, as it is narrated
in perhaps the most famous centauromachy, the battle the centaurs waged
against the Laphits for their women. There are, however, a few positive
images of centaurs, probably a legacy of the figure’s aristocratic origin (a
noble knight riding his horse).16 One of those is the famous Chiron, the
only immortal centaur, known for his exceptional goodness and wisdom,
and tutor to a few famous Greek heroes such as Achilles, Aesculapius, and
Actaeon.
Trachi, this is the name of the centaur co-protagonist of “Quaestio de
Centauris,” possesses both opposite qualities. His story is narrated by the
human friend who will eventually betray him and can be divided into
four parts. First, there is an epigraph in Latin that explains that the quaes-
tio at stake derives directly from the conversations about the nature of
centaurs Levi had with two of his friends. Latin of course places the whole
story already in a timeless dimension, but the epigraph also reminds us of
the oral origin of the story and the regime of friendship that, according
to Robert Gordon, leads to another important ordinary virtue of Levi’s—
storytelling (Gordon 2001, 219–258). Second, we have a short introduc-
tion that serves instead to make readers aware of the general setting of the
story. Trachi belongs to the family of the narrator, who, despite the
familiar prohibition for the supposed bad attitude of centaurs, spent
168 D. Benvegnù
significant time in his youth with the mythic creature, riding his horse-
like back all over the hills around their house. Trachi, we are informed,
can also speak, and what follows are “il frutto dei nostri colloqui” (SN,
OI 505) [the fruit of our long conversations; CW, 510]. One such out-
come is an explanation of centaur mythology as the narrator has heard it
from Trachi. We get to know, for instance, that centaurs have an episode
comparable to the biblical deluge, and the centaur equivalent of Noah,
Cutnofeset, saved all the archetypes of each zoological genus. What hap-
pened immediately afterwards was a chaotic and amazing “panspermia,”
during which all the boundaries among species, orders, or even domains,
were abolished, making any kind of hybridization possible. This fertile
moment—a second, truer creation (“fu questa seconda creaizone la vera
creazione”) that we will explore more in detail in the next section—
explains why there are, for example, dolphins, created by the encounter
between a tuna and a cow, or the hippopotamus, between a mare and a
river. Centaurs are the result of the wild passion (“amori sfrenati”)
between the biblical Cam and a mare from Thessaly. The narrator reports
also that Trachi told him that female-centaurs (“centauresse”) do not
properly exist. There are, however, a few poor creatures born from the
encounter between a horse and a woman, but they are very rare and,
aware of the ugliness of their bodies in which the lower half is human,
prefer to live in solitude. Afraid of the readers’ skepticism about this issue,
the narrator makes a claim against official science “imbevuta di aristo-
telismo” [permeated with Aristotelianism] that we might understand as
ironic, if we believe that behind such a statement lies the author Primo
Levi. Such identification between the narrator and the author, though, is
doubtful and precisely the impossibility to identify the position of the
author is one of the reasons why this story is so intriguing. In any case,
whoever is writing, the narrator clarifies his position on this issue, main-
taining with Prince Hamlet that there are more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and therefore it is stupid to
doubt his narration only on a theoretical basis. The account continues,
then, describing several characteristics of centaurs, as their alimentation
or their incredibly refined sense for reproduction or germination, from
the seed of a plant to the human one. This special empathy, usually kept
under control, gives them “uno stato di viva inquietudine al tempo degli
amori” [a state of vivid agitation during the season of love]: this agitation
is also responsible for the very story the narrator is going to tell his read-
ers. However, before beginning the story proper, the narrator makes
another statement that is thought-provoking. He claims, in fact, that
writing about what happened between himself and Trachi weighs heavily
on him, because it is a story of his youth and “mi pare, scrivendola, di
espellerla da me, e che dopo mi sentirò privo di qualche cosa di forte e
puro” [I feel as if in writing it I were expelling it from myself, and that
later I will feel deprived of something strong and pure]. Finally, the story
begins, and it is quite simple. Trachi fell in love with Teresa de Simone, a
local neighbor, and the narrator himself yields to her seduction and makes
love with her. Although far away, the centaur feels what is happening and
seems to go insane: he rampages around the neighborhood and rapes
several female horses, until he is last seen by some fishermen swimming
toward the Levant, wrongly taken to be a man riding a dolphin.
Carole Lambert has correctly pointed out that “the story is more about
the damage done by the betrayal of two (human) friends than about the
sexual prowess of a centaur” (Lambert, 108).17 Nonetheless, as Alfredo
Luzi has noticed, this betrayal refers also to something broader, because it
breaks the cosmogonic harmony between humans and animals (Luzi,
74). As in “Costruttori di ponti,” even in this story we observe a breach
of harmony that is connected to an alleged divide between human and
non-human animals. Given the exploration of Levi’s techne we have fol-
lowed so far, though, I would rather suggest a slightly different focus.
One of the key moments of the story is a long summer night that the
narrator, Trachi, and Teresa spend together, a prelude to the following
catastrophe.
Dopo il ritorno di Teresa, passammo una lunga serata insieme, noi tre. Fu
una serata di quelle, rare, che non si dimenticano (…). Si sentivano canti
lontani, e Trachi prese ad un tratto a cantare, senza guardarci, come in
sogno. Era una lunga canzone, dal ritmo fiero e alto, con parole a me sco
nosciute. Una canzone greca, disse Trachi: ma quando gli chiedemmo di
tradurla, volse il capo e tacque.
[After Teresa’s return, we spent a long evening together, just the three of
us. It was one of those rare evenings never to be forgotten (…). We heard
singing in the distance, and suddenly Trachi began to sign, without looking
170 D. Benvegnù
at us, as if in a dream. It was a long song, its rhythm bold and strong, with
words I didn’t know. A Greek song, Trachi said; but when we asked him to
translate it, he turned his head away and became silent; CW, 517]
The whole scene, including the following conversation in which Trachi

tells his human friend about his love for the girl and how this love is
changing him (“sto mutando, sono mutato, sono diventato un altro” [I
am changing, I have changed, I have become another person]), is imbued
in a general atmosphere of orality and oral communications that does not
fit well within the written testimony. In fact, the narrator recognizes his
uneasiness, claiming that Trachi “altre cose mi disse, che trascrivo con
esitazione, perché sento che difficilmente coglierò nel segno” [told me
other things as well, which I hesitate to write, because I feel it’s very
unlikely that my words will do him justice]. These two factors—the gen-
eral, almost confessional, orality of the episode and the difficulty of writ-
ing it down—cannot but recall a key passage of Se questo è un uomo. Even
the dreadful journey in the cattle-car that took Levi and his friends to
Auschwitz can be read as the negative picture of one of “those rare eve-
nings never to be forgotten” which the three main characters of “Quaestio
de Centauris” spent together. Even that horrible experience is in fact nar-
rated stressing not simply the intimate conversations Levi had with a
woman who never came back from the concentration camp, but also to
the extreme oral quality of those conversations (“ci dicemmo allora,
nell’ora della decisione, cose che non si dicono fra i vivi” (SQU, OI 13)
[in the hour of decision, we said to each other things that are never said
among the living]). The difference with Trachi’s story is that those whis-
pered words on a cattle train have never been written down. In the narra-
tive about Trachi, instead, orality faces and inevitably challenges the
written form of the story, establishing a tension that seems to stage
another form of betrayal, the one that the written testimony imposes over
the oral quality of both the untranslatable poetry of the song Trachi sings
and his intimate confessions in a moment of severe distress. We may
actually say that the whole story about the conflict between the two
natures of Trachi presents another tangle of double impossibilities. On
the one hand, orality is portrayed as a collective knowledge that cannot
be witnessed without betrayal and is therefore impossible to be fully

transmitted in the written form (Luzi, 71). On the other hand, the story
cannot really reveal and comprehend the truth of Trachi’s song, but it still
suggests a strong necessity to be written as a proper, albeit hesitant, testi-
mony on behalf of the centaur, by proxy.
According to Belpoliti, the hybrid is the human after Auschwitz
(Belpoliti 1997, 189). The hybridity in “Quaestio de Centauris” reveals
not only Levi’s displeasure for purity, but also his uneasiness toward writ-
ing when it comes to bear witness to the double nature of humanity in
and after the concentration camps. Levi’s uneasiness is revealed in the
centaur’s story by its surprising intimacy with what he otherwise would
consider bad writing. In “Quaestio de Centauris,” orality is in fact very
close to that “mugolio animale” [animal howl] that Levi, in “Dello scriv-
ere oscuro,” labels as not only incomprehensible but also before good and
evil. And yet, its opposite—that is, writing—is represented in the story as
a techne that poses the same ethical troubles as every other human tech-
nology does, to the extreme of betrayal. Once again, we are thus reminded
of the description of the homo faber Levi offers in “Una bottiglia di sole,”
as a creature bracketed between two different edges: the brute animal and
the dangerous technician. This time, though, the duplicity of the writer
himself is at stake, as we are asked to read and react to an entangled, fic-
tional text in which orality and writing, nature and culture, animal and
human are displayed in such a state of ethic and aesthetic tension that
their respective boundaries are continuously created and demolished.
Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, we may thus say that Levi’s literary ani-
mals function as dialectical images of technology, as a standstill not
between past and present—as in Benjamin’s project—but between two
approaches to the relationship between techne and animality.18 The out-
come is a hybrid, ambivalent, and somehow monstrous (both uncanny
and revealing) style of writing, a style that forces readers to reflect upon
writing as the distinctive feature of the only autobiographical animal, the
human. Yet, can this writing—as presented in “Quaestio de Centauris”
and in the other narratives we explored in this chapter—redeem the homo
faber from the destructive hubris of his own science and technology? Can
such centaurial literature rebuild and re-enchant the world after Auschwitz?
172 D. Benvegnù
We will explore the link between Levi’s animals and a possible “seconda
creazione” [second creation] in the next section of this book. It is time,
instead, to map the path we have followed so far and to conclude this
segment. We moved to his SF stories to understand how the relation
between Levi’s technology, that is, writing, and the human-animal divide
is staged there. This transition helped us to notice several important ele-
ments of the self-definition of Levi’s writing, as, for instance, the episte-
mological value of his “spaccatura paranoica.” The description of Levi’s
biggest fear, the fear of spiders, led us to consider how this paranoid split
is already working in the famous chemistry exam which happened in
Auschwitz. More specifically, we noticed that Levi’s identification with a
spider during that episode as it is narrated in Se questo è un uomo is clearly
a reaction against and a reversal of the imposed role of animal victim by a
differently animal, “predatory,” practice of writing. This “animal” writing,
however, does not completely eliminate the ambivalence either of tech-
nology or of writing. It makes it, instead, even more hybrid and poten-
tially transformative, as exemplified by “Angelica Farfalla.” Here, almost
every element troubles our assumption about humanness and writing:
from the bird-like creatures to the crowd that will eventually eat them,
from the Nazi Doctor Leeb to the author himself, they are all hybrids of
some kind. Unsurprisingly, the story itself is hybrid too, part science fic-
tion, part testimony; part reconstruction based on written material, part
oral account. This combination of ambivalent monstrosity and hybridity,
horror and awe, is the literary mark of the two last stories we analyzed,
where Levi not only explores the nature of this tangle, but links it even
more explicitly to the problematic relation between humanity, animality,
and (his own writing) technology. Our exploration of “I costruttori di
ponti” showed how the reversal of the usual human perspective might
help us to consider the possible danger of human technology. As the story
goes, the human bridge-builders are indifferent murderers. However, the
upside-down perspective does not allow us to forget that not only we, the
readers, are human too, but also the author of the story, who nonetheless
uses writing as a human technology capable of alerting us about the dan-
ger of human technology. This meta-fictional overlap becomes even more
complex in “Quaestio de Centauris.” Our reading has revealed how this
key story intertwines the human-animal divide with the relations between
orality and writing that characterized the whole of Levi’s literature. As a

well-done literary container, “Quaestio de Centauris,” is indeed exem-
plary of Levi’s accomplishment as homo faber: a hybrid text whose techne
employs the human-animal limitrophy to reveal the truth about the
hubris of humanity.
Notes
1. For a general survey of Levi’s science fiction, see Ross (2007) and, more
recently, Cassata (2016).
2. Cit. in the “Note ai testi,” OI 1429. Also in Calvino (1991).
3. Interview published as “L’ha inspirato un’insegna,” in Il Giorno, October
12, 1966. The author of the interview is only marked by the two letters
F.N. The translation is mine.
4. Cf. P. Roth, “A conversation with Primo Levi,” now in Levi (1996), 181.
5. For Levi’s idea of writing as a technical problem, see also VM 168.
6. Cf. Levi on Bruno Bettelheim, VM 237.
7. I. Lattes Coifmann, “Il sesso è un rischio mortale per insetti a ragni
maschi,” in La Stampa, May 6, 1981, 6. Isabella Lattes Coifmann
(1912–2007) was a Jewish Italian, but from Russian parents, ethologist
who began to write on the scientific insert of La Stampa, “Tuttoscienze,”
in 1981.
8. A partial analysis of the sexual connotations of this phobia is in Angier
(2002), 41 and ffll.
9. On the significance of Arachne in Dante’s Comedy, see at least Barolini
(1987).
10. Dante, too, is an author that has been taken by Levi as a kind of dop-
pelgänger. For instance, Dante’s position in Doré’s illustration is quite
unusual and reveals an ambiguity that Levi and Dante have in common:
they both have been characters in their own literary creations, and they
both are very attentive to the power of gazing. The illustration then
shows the importance of the point of view and the ambivalence of the
gaze staring at what is a monstrous self-reflection: as Levi writes, it is a
gaze in between disgust and voyeurism that reveals the nature of the
monstrum as well as the author’s identity.
11. For the literary reference in the title, see instead Dante, Purgatorio 10,
124–125.
174 D. Benvegnù
12. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online, Neoteny

[“Neotenia” in Italian] refers both to a biological phenomenon in which
adults retain traits previously seen only in juveniles, and to the attain-
ment of sexual maturity during the larval stage. In “Angelica farfalla,”
Levi gives only the second definition. Interestingly, the edition of the
Opere published by Einaudi we are referring to, has the adjective “neo-
tecnico” [“insomma, neotecnici siamo anche noi;” SN, OI, 438], while
the right adjective is “neotenico.” Needless to say, the lapsus calami seems
particularly well suited for what we are investigating.
13. “Io ero molto curiosa, ma mio padre diceva sempre: ‘Lascia andare, non
occuparti di quanto capita là dentro. Noi tedeschi, meno cose sappiamo,
meglio è” (439) [I was very curious, but my father always kept saying,
‘Leave it alone, don’t bother with what’s going on in there. For us
Germans the less we know, the better].
14. Cf. SN, OI 438: “una curiosa mistura di osservazioni acute, di generaliz-
zazioni temerarie, di teorie stravaganti e fumose, di divagazioni letterarie
e mitologiche, di sunti polemici pieni di livore, di rampanti adulazioni a
Persone Molto Importanti dell’Epoca” [a very curious mix of acute
obesrvations, reckless generalizations, extravagant and foggy theories,
literary and mythological divagations, polemical suggestions saturated
with malice, rampant adulation for the Very Important Persons of the
period].
15. Cf., for example, Tichoniuk-Wawrowicz (2008).
16. Cf. Padgett (2003).
17. Other readings of this story that are focused on the betrayal content and,
particularly, on Levi’s Jewish identity are Borioni and Beneduce in the
bibliography.
18. Benjamin’s “dialectical image” has been the subject of a good deal of
dedicated scholarship. For a compelling introduction, see Pensky (2004).
Works Cited
2002.
Barolini, Teodolinda. “Re-Presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art
of Dante’s Terrace of Pride.” Dante Studies 105 (1987): 43–62.
Belpoliti, Marco, and Gordon Robert, eds. Primo Levi. The Voice of Memory.
Interviews 1961–1987. New York: Polity Press, 2001.
Calvino, Italo. I libri degli altri. Torino: Einaudi, 1991.
Cassata, Francesco. Lezioni Primo Levi. 7. Fantascienza? Torino: Einaudi, 2016.
1996.
D’Angeli, Gabriella. “Il sonno della ragione genera mostri.” Famiglia Cristiana,
November 27, 1966.
Fadini, Edoardo. “Primo Levi si sente scrittore dimezzato.” L’Unità, January 4,
1966.
Huxley, Aldous. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Other Essays.
New York: Harper, 1956.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Translated by S. Woolf. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996.
Padgett, J. Michael, ed. The Centaur’s Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek
Art. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003.
Pensky, Max. “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin Cambridge, ed. David S. Ferris,
177–198. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Pimentel, Dror. “The Hand of the Gaze: Heidegger Between Theory and Praxis.”
History and Theory, Bezalel 1 (Winter, 2005).
Ross, Charlotte. “Primo Levi’s Science-Fiction.” In Gordon 2007, 105–118.
Tichoniuk-Wawrowicz, Ewa. “L’ibridismo nell’opera primoleviana.” Studia
Romanica Posnaniensia XXXV (2008): 93–101.
6
Creation I. A New Writing
In spite of his almost professional status as a public figure and the numer-
ous events in which he was invited to talk about his experience as a wit-
ness of the Holocaust, Primo Levi rarely offered explicit, that is,
non-fictional, glimpses of his writing process.1 This opacity is probably
due to his fear of being subjected to theoretical constraints: his rejection
of overarching historical theories equals his skepticism toward any all-
encompassing writing philosophy.2 Alternatively, it might have been,
quite simply, another example of his persistent discretion, which allowed
him to keep the doors of his private literary laboratory closed to strangers.
Whatever the true reason for his silence on this topic, there are nonethe-
less a few essays where Levi does discuss the general features, both theo-
retical and practical, of his creative process. In “Dello scrivere oscuro,” for
instance, Levi explicitly declares his preference for simplicity and preci-
sion in writing, and it is thus not a coincidence that Laurence Schehr has
called Levi’s very peculiar style a “strenuous clarity” (Schehr 1989). This
preference for clarity, however, does not necessarily apply to other writers,
as testified, for instance, by his admiration for Rabelais or by the inclu-
sion of the “esuberante, crudele, viscerale e spagnolesco” (RdR, OII 1497)
[extreme, crude, visceral and “Spaniard”] Horcynus Orca in the personal

178 D. Benvegnù
anthology La ricerca delle radici. Another essay, published in 1984 in La

Stampa and initially entitled “Personal Golem,” describes instead how
his, at first, humanistic angst vis-à-vis a personal computer evolved into a
still unusual but innervating joy of writing with such—at that time—
innovative technology.3 We have already discussed in the previous section
Levi’s ambivalent relationship with technology when the human-animal
divide is at stake. “Personal Golem” confirms such ambiguity, ironically
depicting Levi himself as a creator-rabbi who, for the first time, brings to
life [“destare a vita”] a golem.4 Once re-awoken, even this golem-computer
reveals its animal-like nature, for Levi writes that the machine “ronza
sommesso, fa le fusa come un gatto contento, diventa vivo, e subito mette
in luce il suo carattere” (AM, OII 842) [hums softly, purring like a con-
tented cat, comes alive, and immediately displays his character]. Yet,
there are other aspects of this short essay that disclose interesting facets of
Levi’s creativity.
First, “Personal Golem” replicates one of Levi’s most typical literary
habits, namely, his practice of including in the discourse or narrative a
meta-literary statement capable of revealing the rift between the diverse
chronologies at stake in writing. In this specific essay, for instance, the
sentence “io stesso ero, anzi sono tuttora, mentre scrivo qui sullo schermo,
un profano” (841) [I myself was, indeed still am, as I am writing here on
the screen, a layman], acknowledges that Levi is speaking about some-
thing he is performing at the same time, somehow suggesting another
facet of the double dimension of writing as techne we have discussed in
the previous chapter. We can find at least one similar meta-literary state-
ment in several of Levi’s works, from Se questo è un uomo to his late
poetry. Although the motives and meanings of this self-reflective strategy
may differ from book to book, most of these meta-literary passages stress
the presence of a writer not necessarily identifiable with the narrator, as
instead seems to be the case of “Personal Golem.” For instance, in the
fundamental chapter entitled “Esame di chimica” in Se questo è un uomo,
the meta-literary comment directly questions the correspondence
between the narrator and the protagonist, as well as the overlap between
what happened and what is told, between reality and the activity of writ-
ing. After having expressed his (at that time) wonder at the Nazi decision
to search for chemists, Levi writes in fact that “oggi, questo vero oggi in
Creation I. A New Writing 179
cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che
queste cose sono realmente accadute” (SQU, OI 99) [Today, at this very
moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not convinced that these
things really happened]. We will return to this specific topic later, when
we will discuss the meta-literary value of Levi’s animal imagery.
Second, “Personal Golem” forces us to consider an aspect of Levi’s
creative production that we have not yet mentioned and which has hardly
been explored by scholars. While displaying the various possibilities of
the machine, Levi discloses how the otherwise useful drawing program
represents an inconvenience for its owner (“Può anche disegnare, e questo
è per me un inconveniente di segno opposto”). Levi admits spending a lot
of time drawing with the computer, an activity that amuses him very
much but is also a distraction from more appropriate uses of the machine
(“mi diverte in maniera indecente e mi distoglie dagli usi più propri”). He
then concludes this admission writing that “devo fare violenza a me stesso
per ‘uscire’ dal programma-disegno e riprendere a scrivere” [I must do
violence to myself to “leave” the drawing program and go back to writ-
ing]. This self-imposed violence did not preclude him from drawing con-
spicuously, and in fact it is a very interesting computer-based animal
drawing of Levi’s that graces the cover of the first edition of L’altrui mest-
iere. Published by Einaudi in 1985, the otherwise minimal jacket of the
book presents a series of three owls “elaborata” [“processed”] by Primo
Levi “sul computer Apple Macintosh,” as the caption reads. Whether this
owl series truly represents the author’s self-portrait, as ironically Levi
writes in the dedication to Gina Lagorio’s copy of the book,5 it is none-
theless a fitting image for a volume that—as Italo Calvino wrote for its
publication—tends to fuse Levi’s two passions, for words and animals,
into “a zoological glottology or an ethology of language” (Calvino 1985).
Unfortunately, there is no other public proof of Levi’s drawing, although
at least “Personal Golem” suggests a quite exuberant activity.
We have, however, other examples of his personal and private involve-
ment in visual art: the famous photos taken by Mario Monge in 1986
testify that his artistic creativity was an important, although apparently
very private, part of Levi’s life. In these well-known pictures, Levi displays
in front of the camera some of the animals (a crocodile, a butterfly, once
again an owl) he made for friends and family using copper wire. In one
180 D. Benvegnù
of them, he even seems to wear the owl mask he made, confirming then
a partial and ironic identification with an animal that is symbolically
ambivalent, usually associated with darkness and heresy but also with
prophecy and wisdom. Curiously enough, there are very few owls in
Levi’s literature. Except for a vague allusion to the “uccelli diurni e not-
turni” [diurnal and nocturnal birds] which live in his guts (in the preface
of La ricerca delle radici), and a quick mention in one of his poems, the
only consistent reference to owl-like features is the Greek Mordo Nahum,
a fundamental figure of La Tregua and another doppelgänger of Primo
Levi. In their first encounter, Mordo is in fact described as having “un
aspetto rapace ed impedito, quasi di uccello notturno sorpreso dalla luce,
o di pesce da preda fuori dal suo naturale elemento” (LT, OI 228)6 [a
rapacious yet halting appeareance, like a nightbird surprised by light, or
a shark outside its natural environment (T 210)]. This mix of lack of
references on the one hand and overlap with the first free survivor Levi
met in his first journey outside the concentration camp on the other,
leads us to ponder the possible meaning of such identification between
Levi and the owl. What is certain, however, is not only Levi’s enjoyment
in creating these wire animals, but also his pleasure in displaying them
around, in front of the camera and generally in his office, as several of his
interviewers, from Philip Roth to Ian Thomson, reported.7 The reasons
behind such double pleasure can be properly found in his literature,
beginning with another essay included in L’altrui mestiere, “Romanzi det-
tati dai grilli” [Novels Dictated by Crickets], where the focus is once
again on writing and animals.
6.1 Toward “uno scrivere nuovo”

“Romanzi dettati dai grilli” was published initially as an article in 1979,
in a period of Levi’s life in which he was reflecting deeply upon issues like
suffering and pain. No suffering is present in this short piece, though, in
which the set tone is rather jovial. The apparent light key of the article
becomes even (ambiguously) brighter with the transition from La Stampa
to the book: Levi adds to the original text one of the very few references
to music in his whole oeuvre, comparing the grand-guignolesque mating
of spiders to the relationship between Don Bartolo and Rosina in Rossini’s
sparkling Il barbiere di Siviglia (AM, OII 693). In both versions, however,

Levi begins describing an essay by Aldous Huxley he read forty years ear-
lier. In this essay, Levi continues, Huxley answers to a young writer who
had turned to him for advice about writing, and recommends “di com-
perare una coppia di gatti, di osservarli e di descriverli” (689) [to buy a
pair of cats, observe them, and describe them]. The essay at stake is enti-
tled “Sermons in Cats”—originally published by Huxley in 1931—and
indeed, as Levi reports, what prompts such advice was Huxley’s convic-
tion that “primitive people, like children and animals, are simply civilized
people with the lid off” (Huxley 1931, 261). For Levi, Huxley’s remark
means that animals’ behavior is similar to what ours would be if we lacked
social inhibitions, and therefore ‘la loro osservazione è preziosa per il
romanziere che si accinge a scandagliare le motivazioni profonde dei suoi
personaggi” (AM, OII 689) [observing them is valuable for the novelist
who sets out to plumb his characters’ profound motivation]. If the article
ended here, of course it would be easy to make an almost “zoological”
connection between the lack of social inhibitions exhibited by some pris-
oners in Auschwitz, the observation of animals, and Levi’s testimonial
writing. But the new paragraph of “Romanzi dettati di grilli” states
explicitly that perhaps things are not that simple (“forse le cose non sono
cosí semplici”).
Levi turns in fact to ethology to affirm that, first, animal species are
both different from each other and from us, and, secondly, each species
follows its own laws, although these laws, so far as we succeed in under-
standing them (“fin dove arriviamo a comprenderle”), agree with the
theories of evolution. This double consideration means that we must
avoid the anthropomorphism of attributing human mental mechanisms
to animals, but we should also recognize that to describe man exclusively
in zoological terms, as Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape does, it is a
mistake:
Io penso che non tutte le azioni umane si possano interpretare cosí, e che il
metodo non porti molto lontano. Socrate, Newton, Bach e Leopardi non
erano scimmie nude. (689)
[I believe that not all human actions can be interpreted in this way and
that the method does not take us very far. Socrates, Newton, Bach, and
Leopardi were not naked apes]
182 D. Benvegnù
The four figures mentioned here embody respectively philosophy, sci-

ence, music, and literature (poetry), but also cover metonymically the
whole spectrum of human knowledge. Levi claims that it is not a general
superiority of humanity that must be preserved, but rather that this
knowledge cannot be reduced to a zoological or even evolutionary mea-
surement. Such reductionism would in fact both eliminate the differ-
ences in grades that instead belong from the very beginning to Darwin’s
theory and transform the whole of culture into a quite rudimentary
mechanism, as a certain practice of social Darwinism does. However, this
is not the main point of the article, but simply a premise. And in fact,
“detto questo” [that having been said], Levi adds that Huxley might have
been wrong in explaining his advice through a flat comparison between
humans and animals, but he “aveva trionfalmente ragione nel dare quel
consiglio al suo discepolo” [was triumphantly right in giving that advice
to his disciple]. Levi himself would actually be more than happy to follow
Huxley’s advice:
Se potessi, io obbedirei con entusiasmo alla raccomandazione di Huxley, e

mi riempirei la casa di tutti gli animali possibili. Farei uno sforzo non solo
per osservarli, ma anche per entrare in comunicazione con loro. Non farei
questo in vista di un traguardo scientifico (non ne ho la cultura né la prepara-
zione), ma per simpatia, e perché sono sicuro che ne trarrei uno straordinario
arricchimento spirituale e una più completa visione del mondo. (690)
[If I were to, I would follow Huxley’s recommendation with enthusiasm
and fill my house with all sorts of animals. I would make an effort not only
to observe them, but also to enter into communication with them. I would
do not do this for a scientific purpose (for this I have neither the education
nor the background), but out of affection, and because I am certain that
from it I would derive an extraordinary spiritual enrichment and a more
complete vision of the world]
We can now understand better why Levi surrounded himself with cop-
per wire animals. To say the least, their presence around him was a way to
follow Huxley’s advice and express his sympathy for them. Yet, the ficti-
tious immobility of all these artifacts could not completely satisfy him,
and in fact he admits that in the impossibility to have real live animals
around, he is used to read “con godimento e stupore sempre rinnovati”
[with ever-renewed enjoyment and amazement] many books about wild-

life. These books, Levi adds, gave him “un nutrimento vitale, indipen-
dentemente dal loro valore letterario o scientifico” [a vital nourishment,
independent of their literary or scientific value]: such nourishment derives
directly from the multitude of the animal kingdom, in which all the
extremes are represented. According to Levi, the incredible variety of ani-
mals creates in fact a kind of figural reservoir and a writer can easily scoop
up a multitude of examples from this universe of metaphors: “proprio
uscendo dall’isola umana, troverà ogni qualità umana moltiplicata per
cento, una selva di iperboli prefabbricate” (690) [precisely by coming out
of the human island he will find every human quality multiplied a hun-
dredfold, a vast thicket of prefabricated hyperbole]. Not all the metaphors,
however, are the same: some are weary, worn out by use, and no longer
usable. The new discoveries described by modern naturalists such as
Konrad Lorenz, Levi writes, will instead bring new material up for “uno
scrivere nuovo, ancora tutto da scoprire, che aspetta il suo demiurgo” (690)
[a new kind of writing, still to be discovered, which awaits its demiurge].
We may wonder whether, with the expression “scrivere nuovo” and the
term “demiurgo,” Levi is explicitly referring to himself and his own writ-
ing. It would not appear likely so: in 1979 Levi is already an important
writer, with several published books, sometimes apparently very different
from each other but undoubtedly marked by an already established style.
Moreover, although we witness in the same years to the end of the experi-
mental wave that had concerned so many Italian writers in the sixties and
early seventies, Levi’s literary style was not characterized by any specific
element of “novelty,” especially when compared to some of the authors
who initially gravitated around the experimental “Gruppo 63.” It is, how-
ever, unquestionable that Levi seems to stage at least a tension between
the new way of writing he predicts in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli” and his
own, as exemplified by the following long list of examples Levi offers to
his readers—a list that starts precisely with the story about crickets that
gives the title to the whole essay. This catalogue of short narratives, in
fact, illustrates quite well Levi’s ability to create a story out of zoological
information. We are told, for instance, how the changes in crickets’ repro-
ductive call might be the “germe di un romanzo” [germ of a novel], or the
mating behavior of spiders—indeed almost a totemic animal for
184 D. Benvegnù
Levi—should be described by a writer (in this case Levi’s himself ) as in

between tragedy and comedy, “la cronaca nera e l’opera buffa” [crime
news and comic opera]. Finally, the article ends with an explicit declara-
tion of intent:
Anche a parte questi esempi, mi piacerebbe inventare e descrivere un

personaggio-coccinella, riconoscibile forse in certe pagine di Gogol: ipo-
condriaco, malcontento di sé, del suo prossimo e del mondo, increscioso e
lamentoso, che inalbera una livrea riconoscibile da lontano (o un interca-
lare, o un difetto di pronuncia) affinché il suo prossimo, che egli detesta, si
accorga in tempo della sua presenza e non gli venga tra i piedi. (693)
[Even aside from these examples I would like to invent and describe a
ladybug character, seen perhaps in certain of Gogol’s pages: hypochon-
driac, dissatisfied with himself, his fellowman, and the world, irksome and
full of complaints, who wears a livery recognizable from a distance (or a
mannerism, or a speech defect) so that his fellowman, whom he detests,
quickly becomes aware of his presence and gets out of his way.]
Even beyond the patent irony of this conclusive passage, scholars have
recognized the hyphenated “personaggio-coccinella” Levi describes here
as another embodiment of those hybrid figures so present in his narra-
tive.8 There is a fundamental difference, though, between the other
hybrids and this one: while the others already exist as characters on page,
already in acto, in this case Levi seems to offer us a character in nuce, and
therefore a glimpse of that new writing he has just addressed. What we
are exposed to is the genesis of this new writing rather than the current
manifestation, the creative spark that leads to invent and describe rather
than the epiphenomenon.
If this reading is correct, and Levi is here truly offering us a privileged
entry into the process of his own literary creation, we are nonetheless left
with several questions. For instance, we might ask what the relation is
between this “scrivere nuovo” and his already published work: is there a
tension between these two writings? An overlap? Or is Levi’s understate-
ment at work here, and therefore that “scrivere nuovo” in which animality
has a primary role does lie already at the bottom of his own literature? And
if so, what kind of fundamental function, beyond referring to “suffering”
and “techne,” do animals and hybrids specifically have in Levi’s creation?
To begin answering these questions and to investigate what creation

Levi might have had in mind, we are forced to turn back to the first half
of “Romanzi dettati dai grilli.” We must initially recognize a friction in
the ways Levi invites writers to utilize the animal “mirror” evoked by
Huxley. In terms of representations, he seems in fact to suggest that
although it is incorrect to describe animals “con linguaggio antropo-
morfo” [in anthropomorphic language] and vice versa, we must accept a
certain level of anthropomorphism. This anthropomorphism is not only
inevitable even for ethologists,9 but it might be innervating for writers
too, who are forced to leave their human, protected, and ordinary, habi-
tat. In enjoying the multitude of animals, Levi declares, a writer does not
simply have the possibility to overlook the objective truths of the scientist
for the inter-subjective suggestions he might receive from the fauna, but
he is also exposed to an extreme, unheimlich alterity that only animals—
so similar and familiar, but also so alien—can offer. Thus, if there is a
rational Primo Levi who would have probably agreed with Thomas Nagel
that humans cannot truly experience, and therefore describe, how it is to
be a bat,10 nonetheless Levi the writer considers such overlap between
human and animal features not only possible but actually quite helpful.
It is true, in fact, that for Levi human fantasy appears to be always anthro-
pomorphic (Lollini 1997, 353), but this inevitable anthropomorphism
can lead to a disruption of anthropocentrism rather than to a confirma-
tion, to an exploration of the limits rather than to a self-centered
reflection.
There are different degrees or possibilities of anthropomorphism, some
of which can be part of a strategy that does not necessarily exploit the
animals or deny their peculiarities. For instance, in a recent volume enti-
tled Thinking with Animals, Daston and Mitman call for a usage of
anthropomorphic images that is allegedly the opposite of the arrogant
egotism decried by critics of anthropomorphism: “instead of projection
of one’s own way of thinking and feelings onto other minds, submersion
of self in the genuinely other is fervently attempted—but never achieved.
It is a virtuoso but doomed act of complete empathy” (Daston and
Mitman, 7). This description is particularly striking because it recalls
some of the features we have observed in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli.”
Empathy, an extraordinary spiritual enrichment, and a more complete
186 D. Benvegnù
vision of the world are in fact explicitly at the core of Levi’s attraction for
animals, and therefore they indubitably play an important part in his
general Weltanschauung. However, we must also ask if these elements are
even behind his animal imagery. I would suggest that, more than a gen-
eral affection, it is rather the kind of double movement described by
Daston and Mitman that truly informs Levi’s literary strategy, at least
when it comes to his animal representations. This double movement of
“virtuoso but doomed” empathy shapes the friction between complete
identification and its impossibility as we have already seen it in some of
the stories investigated in the previous sections. We can therefore wonder
if this unresolvable tension is foundational to the whole of Levi’s literary
creation. If this is the case, then his animal imagery is one of the sources
of that very difficult but remunerative enrichment that Arnold Davidson
suggests when he invites us to read Levi as a spiritual exercise and a mode
of meditation (Davidson, 19). Moreover, in his chapter devoted to Levi’s
“invention,” Robert Gordon has already pointed out some important ele-
ments of such enriching tension, underlining its ultimate ethical dimen-
sion. Yet, Gordon devotes his effective investigation exclusively to what
he calls “an ethics of the man-made.” Instead, the link between creativity
and animality, creation and animals, is—as I will demonstrate—one of
the most consistent features of Levi’s literature as an act of creation and
testimony.
To begin with, we must consider how Levi displays all the short stories
of the second part of “Romanzi dettati dai grilli” as a series of mini-
dramas, in which the animals and their behaviors are indeed, as he
declares for spiders, “una inesauribile sorgente di meraviglia, di medi-
tazioni, di stimoli e di brividi” (AM, OII 691) [an endless source of won-
ders, meditations, drives and shudders]. In these short narratives, Levi
combines his power of observation with the information he extracts from
ethology to offer us a series of tragic but wonderful, necessary but some-
how unfamiliar, stories in which the main argument appears to be repro-
duction. Levi mixes together modern Darwinism, Aristotle’s History of
Animals (according to which the life of animals can be fundamentally
divided into procreation and feeding),11 and the attention to the process
of generation we can find in the Book of Genesis, as testified by Levi’s
explicit allusion to the “multiplicamini,” a term used in the Old Testament
for both humans and animals (AM, OII 691).12 These multiple references
not only have all in common a peculiar interest in the power of creation,
but also allow us to compare this set of stories to another one, definitely
less euphoric, but strangely described as almost its inversion or negative
mirror image. There is in fact an earlier moment in Levi’s oeuvre in which
he seems to refer to another possible manifestation of that “scrivere
nuovo” that is the main subject of “Romanzi dettati dai grilli.” This well-
known passage is found in Se questo è un uomo:
[Resnyk] Mi ha raccontato la sua storia, e oggi l’ho dimenticata, ma era

certo una storia molto dolorosa, crudele e commovente; ché tali sono tutte
le nostre storie, centinaia di migliaia di storie, tutte diverse e tutte piene di
una tragica sorprendente necessità. Ce le raccontiamo a vicenda a sera, e
sono avvenute in Norvegia, in Italia, in Algeria, in Ucrania, e sono semplici
e incomprensibili come le storie della Bibbia. Ma non sono anch’esse storie
di una nuova Bibbia?
[He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly
a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds
of thousands of stories, all different and all full of tragic, disturbing neces-
sity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in
Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible
like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new
Bible?]
Of course, the two contexts are completely different, and for some
readers it might sound outrageous to compare the stories of the prisoners
in Auschwitz and the stories of animals Levi invents for his 1979 article.
Nobody is denying the differences. However, there are some pieces of
evidence that make this comparison possible and not irreverent at all, but
rather a moment of a literary process that reacts against the horror of the
concentration camps and the logic that was behind that horror from an
interspecific perspective.
We have already seen, for example, how Levi describes the camps as a
giant biological and social experiment in which the power of destruction
was applied to put humans and, allegedly, non-human animals on, quite
literally, equal ground. This very process forces Levi to read what hap-
pened in Auschwitz as “quanto di più rigoroso uno sperimentatore
188 D. Benvegnù
avrebbe potuto istituire per stabilire che cosa sia essenziale e che cosa sia
acquisito nel comportamento dell’animale-uomo di fronte alla lotta per
la vita” (SQU, OI 83) [which is more rigorous than any experimenter
could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to
the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life]. We have
already met and we will return to this “animale-uomo” in due course, but
we must at least notice here the way in which Levi discusses the possibil-
ity of a creature without inhibitions. As in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli,”
even in this different case he denies “la più ovvia e facile deduzione” [the
most obvious and facile deduction], that “lo ‘Häftling’ non sia dunque
che l’uomo senza inibizioni” (83) [the Häftling is consequently nothing
but a man without inhibitions]. However, he concludes, in the face of
driving necessity and physical disabilities—that is, in Auschwitz—“molte
consuetudini a molti instinti sociali sono ridotti al silenzio” (83) [many
social habits and instincts are reduced to silence]. It is not foolish then,
to associate the behavior of animals to the behavior of the prisoners as we
did: in both cases, we have creatures who are, paraphrasing Huxley, “with
the lid off.”
Secondly, while the short animal sketches in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli”
deal with reproduction and creation, these “storie di una nuova Bibbia” lie
on the specular side, witnessing rather death and devastation. This power
of destruction as exemplified in Auschwitz resulted in what Levi calls
explicitly a “controcreazione” (LT, OI 312) [a counter-creation]. This con-
cept of counter-creation has several ramifications throughout the whole of
Levi’s oeuvre and almost all of them deal with some kind of animal(istic)
imagery we will explore in detail. To stick for now with the mirror image
of the reproductive behavior that forms the core of the animal stories told
in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli,” Levi once commented that one of the earli-
est aspects of the “normal” society to disappear among the prisoners in
Auschwitz was sexual desire (Langbein, 402). In his specific case, one of
the reasons was the fact that his camp, the so-called Buna-Monowitz, was
exclusively for men. To see a woman and feel again some kind of sexual
attraction was therefore, Levi writes, “un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui
si usciva affranti” (L, OII 19) [a sweet and terrible experience, from which
one comes out broken-hearted]. Yet, Levi devotes an entire narrative to
one of these rare encounters, which might be indeed considered one of

those stories of the new Bible he talks about in Se questo è un uomo.
Already the title of this story, Lilít, refers directly to the Old Testament:
Lilith is explicitly mentioned in the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the destruc-
tion of the enemies of Zion. Although modern translations of this vision
differ substantially, sometimes even resulting in the omission of the term
‘Lilith’ from the text, the general setting is a wasteland inhabited only by
wild animals:
Wildcats shall meet with hyenas,

goat-demons shall call to each other;
there too Lilith shall repose,
and find a place to rest. (Isaiah 34:14)13
Whether Lilith comes from the Mesopotamian tradition as some schol-

ars have claimed,14 according to Isaiah she does belong to a world of wild
animals and nothing more is said about her nature. In a key study, the
Swiss psychoanalyst, Jungian scholar, and writer on Jewish mysticism
Siegmund Hurwitz has pointed out that, precisely because Lilith is not
explicitly mentioned in any other passage of the Old Testament, “later
biblical commentators were the first to describe her as a female demon, as
an animal that howls in the night, or as a bird which flies about” (Hurwitz,
87). In all these cases, we can assume that she was mostly recognizable for
her animal features rather than for her human nature. As the same Hurwitz
admits, however, in the Talmudic-Rabbinic tradition these animal fea-
tures are turned into something that was considered even more dangerous
than wild beasts, that is, “a seductive woman” (87). And who is the seduc-
tive woman par excellence in the Bible? Eve, of course, and although the
four references to Lilith in the Babylonian Talmud appear, in context, to
be unrelated to Adam, in the medieval period her figure eventually over-
laps with the (first) woman of the first man (Kvam et al., 162).
Primo Levi’s account appears to rely on this later tradition. During
their strangely euphoric “incontro a quattro zampe, quasi canino” (L, OII
19) [meeting on all fours, almost canine] in the middle of a rain storm,
Levi’s accidental interlocutor, the carpenter Tischler, names the young
190 D. Benvegnù
woman calmingly combing her hair in front of them, Lilith. Struck by his
companion’s ignorance of the two different narratives of creation in
Genesis 1 and 2, Tischler recounts the different stories about the woman
whom he calls “la prima moglie di Adamo” [the first wife of Adam]. In
the carpenter’s account Lilith is not simply the woman God created with
the first man in Genesis 1:27, but also the first to rebel against such patri-
archal creation and to abandon the first man, forcing the creator to make
a second effort (the second creation in Genesis 2). This act of disobedi-
ence forged her subsequent identity: she became afterwards a she-devil
who from time to time (1) endangers newborns; (2) gives birth to demons
through human semen, and for this very reason; (3) sexually stalks men
who sleep alone at night. It is, however, the last story told by Tischler
which is the most surprising: after the destruction of the Temple, God,
abandoned by his wife Shekinà (namely, his own presence in the cre-
ation), “non ha saputo resistere alla solitudine e alla tentazione, e si è
preso un amante: sai chi? Lei, Lilít, la diavolessa” (22) [he could not resist
loneliness and temptation, and he took a lover: do you know who? Her,
Lilith, the she-devil]. Tischler suggests that this scandal is also the cause
of their own “esilio dentro l’esilio” (22–23) [exile within the exile], that
is, Auschwitz, but claims that one day a powerful man will come to kill
Lilith and stop God’s lust and therefore their exile as well. Although these
are Tischler’s last words, Levi concludes the story with a bitter and ironic
note. He remarks, in fact, on how inexplicable it is that destiny has picked
him, an irreligious epicurean, to “ripetere questa favola pia ed empia,
intessuta di poesia, di ignoranza, di acutezza temeraria, e della tristezza
non medicabile che cresce sulle rovine delle civiltà perdute” (23) [repeat
this pious and impious fable, interwoven with poetry, with ignorance,
with temerarious sharpness, and with the unhealable sadness that grows
on the ruins of lost civilizations].
As scholars have noticed, this is one of the very few explicit references
in Levi’s testimonial narratives to the Hebrew tradition he discovered in
Auschwitz.15 This scarcity is quite surprising for a writer who actually
claimed to have truly discovered his Jewishness in the concentration
camp.16 In any case, Lilith can be read as a mythical embodiment of that
“controcreazione” called Auschwitz: she is actually the substitute of
“Shekinà” (Shekinah), God’s legitimate wife and manifestation of his
presence in the world. Only when God will be reconciled again with his
proper spouse, namely, when God will be manifestly present in the cre-
ation again and the wasteland associated with Lilith in the Bible will
become again fertile, the exile of the Jews will end. It is particularly sig-
nificant, then, that Levi does not allude in his account to the single
appearance of Lilith in the Old Testament we mentioned above. In his
short story, in fact, Lilith lacks any animal feature, and she does not share
anything with the wild beasts present in Isaiah 34. Rather, in Tischler’s
description she belongs from the very beginning to humanity, although
she does later acquire a demonic nature, and her illegitimate marriage
with God is what makes God himself desert his creation.
This focus on the human qualities of Lilith may be interpreted as a
negligible detail, but it should be noted that it is set against a background
in which both the narrator and the carpenter are described as having a
canine attitude (the “quasi canino” already mentioned), clearly a met-
onymical reference to the extended situation of animalization typical of
the Lager. The wasteland of Isaiah 34 can be seen in fact as an image of
Buna-Monowitz, but Levi’s Lilìt does not have the animal features attrib-
uted to her biblical mold. This contrast between the anthropocentric and
anthropomorphic version of the story told by Tischler and the instead
quasi-animalistic condition of the two interlocutors thus seems by no
means coincidental. Instead, we ought to interpret it, given the almost
comforting tone of the whole short story, as both an ellipsis produced to
forget the very process of bestialization occurring in Auschwitz and as a
moment of discovery, for the atheist Levi, of a tradition representing
God’s dwelling as (an only temporarily absent) immanence in the created
world.17 The lack of animal features attributed to Lilith by Levi, then,
would also mean that the devastation she represents, at least according to
Tilscher and his Talmudic explanation, and the devastation the two
prisoners are experiencing, can be counter-balanced by a return to the
immanence of the whole creation, in which animals play an important
role, as we will see shortly.
This interpretation also explains the overall minimal but positive appear-
ance of animals in the most important work Levi ever attempted on the
tradition of the Eastern European Jews from which Tischler comes, that is,
the novel Se non ora, quando?. Leaving aside the almost omnipresent but
192 D. Benvegnù
never really defined dogs connected to the group of Jewish partisans pro-
tagonists of the story, in Se non ora, quando?—the single completely origi-
nal novel written by Levi—there are only two episodes in which animals
appear. Yet, in both cases they play an important role.
The first one belongs to the account of the friendship between Pavel and
the horse he adopted and named “il Tordo.” In the context of the book, the
interactions between the animal and the human occupy only a few pages,
and it might seem that Levi includes it exclusively to give us a better idea
of what kind of human being Pavel is. However, given the situation and
the effort that such a relationship required during those dreadful times, the
tie between the tamed horse, a former animal laborans, and the partisan
represents also one of the most absurd and most touching interactions of
the whole book, although it ends with the tragic death of the animal
(SNOQ, OII 309–357).18 We will return shortly to the possible meaning
of this friendship. The second episode seems even more marginal, just a
paragraph: a group of partisans is coming back from a mission and they get
lost in the steppe. The situation is dangerous as they have no way of finding
their path back to the base, until at dawn one of them, Arié, spots a bird he
recognizes, a poor bird trying to hide from the horrible cold of the night:
Ma nell’alba nebbiosa Arié trovò, fra le radici di un frassino, un uccellino

intirizzito, e disse che la strada l’avrebbe indicata lui. Lo raccattò, lo riscaldò
tenendolo sul petto sotto la camicia, gli porse briciole di pane che aveva
rammollite con la saliva, e quando si fu rianimato lo lasciò volare via.
L’uccello sparí nella nebbia in una direzione ben definita, senza esitare.
(SNOQ, OII 428)19
[But in the foggy dawn, among the roots of an ash tree, Arié found a
half-frozen bird, and he said that it would show them the way. Arié picked
the bird up, warmed it holding it under his shirt against his chest, handed
it some breadcrumbs he had softened with saliva, and when the bird had
perked up, he let it fly away. The bird vanished into the fog in a clearly
defined direction, without hesitation]20
We may ask whether or not the interaction between Arié and the bird,
and the subsequent production of knowledge in this episode, exemplifies
a possible literary form of those “situated knowledges” identified by Donna
Haraway as manifestations of positive human-animal relationships.21 In a
sense, the bird is not simply the alienated object of Arié’s observation, but,
through the bodily contact between the two of them, the bird acquires
inter-subjective significance and saves the partisans’ lives. Furthermore,
the whole scene recalls Noah’s release of the dove to find the right direc-
tion toward the end of the Deluge in Genesis 8:6–12. Like Noah, Arié
releases the little bird to find salvation, and therefore to end one of the
most horrible nights they experience in the whole book. Lastly, scholars
have pointed out how Hitler’s cattle cars—used to transfer prisoners, par-
ticularly Jews, toward what was usually their death—might negatively
resemble Noah’s ark: the episode in Se non ora, quando? would then also
signify the beginning of a new covenant after the destruction of the
Holocaust.22
This reference to Noah and the ark full of animals leads us back to the
friendship between Pavel and the horse we mentioned above and to its
significance in both Se non ora quando? and Levi’s oeuvre. First, we must
acknowledge that friendship is, more generally, a fundamental theme in
Levi’s production: as Robert Gordon has pointed out, “the vocabulary
and imagery of friendship is everywhere in Levi’s work” (Gordon 2001,
221). Friendship becomes even more significant in the stories connected
to the concentration camp and the war in general. We know, for instance,
that in the transition from the 1947 De Silva to the 1958 Einaudi edition
of Se questo é un uomo Levi managed to give more space to the figure of
the only real friend he had in Auschwitz, Alberto.23 Another important
manifestation of friendship is in the last chapter of the book: during the
ten days of uncertainty spent in the Ka-Be, Levi connects with two other
prisoners, the Frenchmen Arthur and Charles. Se questo é un uomo ends
by showing how their friendship saved not only their lives but also the
lives of at least some other sick prisoners who shared the same little room
in the abandoned camp infirmary. One of the most remarkable moments
of this relationship occurs just half way through the kind of limbo they
experienced between the moment in which the Germans left and the
arrival of the Russian soldiers. During a dangerous expedition outside the
infirmary in search for food, the three friends get a miraculous stove, on
which they also manage to cook and share some of the potatoes they had
found. This generosity moves the other prisoners to divide their bread
with the three, an unimaginable outcome that meant that “il Lager era
194 D. Benvegnù
morto” (SQU, OI 156) [the Lager was dead]. Darkness came and found
the three prisoners in a very unusual spirit for Auschwitz: as Levi writes:
In mezzo alla sterminata pianura di gelo e di Guerra, nella cameretta buia

pullulante di germi, ci sentivamo in pace con noi e col mondo. Eravamo
rotti di fatica, ma ci pareva, dopo tanto tempo, di avere finalmente fatto
qualcosa di utile; forse come Dio dopo il primo giorno della creazione.
(157)
[In the middle of this endless plain, frozen and full of war, in the small
dark room swarming with germs, we felt at peace with ourselves and the
world. We were broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally accom-
plished something useful—perhaps like God after the first day of
creation.]
According to transitive property, if friendship among human beings

can be expressed and read in terms of (re)creation, we might ponder
whether the friendly community between human and non-human ani-
mals, as in the case of Pavel and Il Tordo, also reveals similar characteris-
tics. The friendship between the man and the tamed horse, in fact, is
apparently based on a general creatural sympathy, and therefore repre-
sents another sign that the Nazi regime of exploitation and violence is
over. As another Jewish intellectual who survived the concentration
camps, Emmanuel Levinas, once recalled, the encounter between a
human being and another animal can be the only way to avoid the total
degradation imposed over the prisoners by the Nazis and begin to retrieve
one’s identity.24 Moreover, Levi is staging this friendship in the only novel
he has ever written, the only one in which he was completely free to cre-
ate and mold both events and characters. Therefore, it is reasonable to
wonder whether animals and human-animal interactions in Levi’s books
are also meant to display writing as an act of creation per se, capable of
establishing new, immanent communities no more based on intraspecific
interests and exclusion of alterity.
Before pursuing these issues, however, we must first notice that the
reference to God’s creation might sound quite strange coming from a
writer who publicly claimed to be an atheist and whose works, at least
in some passages, express a clear rejection of any theological interpreta-
tion of the world.25 Of course there is no direct contradiction: the
Bible is as much an impressive reservoir of metaphors as the animal

world described by Levi in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli,” and it did belong
to the cultural heritage of every educated Italian of that time, especially
if the individual at stake had a Jewish education, although quite super-
ficial, as Levi did. Explicit references to the Old Testament are thus not
only frequent in Levi’s whole oeuvre, but these allusions also reveal, as
Rondini wrote, a sacred encyclopedia both deep and branched (Rondini,
363). Particularly, two books of the Old Testament were very important
for Levi, both marked by what Blenkinsopp calls “the continual re-
emergence and re-assertion” (Blenkinsopp, 18) of forces which follow
an almost circular pattern: creation–un-creation–re-creation. These two
books are the very Book of Genesis, to which we have already alluded,
and the Book of Job.
6.2 Creation and Re-Creation: Genesis

The two references to the Book of Genesis we have mentioned above,
Lilith as Adam’s first wife and Noah, already show that Levi’s treatment of
the first book of the Old Testament carries a certain amount of complex-
ity and ambivalence. However, Levi often attaches a negative tone to
some of the episodes from Genesis because they are used to express the
condition of the prisoners in Auschwitz. Probably the most commented
of all these episodes is, not surprisingly, the comparison in Se questo è un
uomo between the tower the prisoners were supposedly building in the
Buna factory and the tower of Babel (SQU, OI 68); a comparison Levi
himself confirmed several times throughout his whole life and which is
the basis, for instance, of the radio version of his first book.26 As Prescott
contends, in this comparison—in Levi’s work as well as in other survi-
vors’ memories—Babel is a “de-creative act. Certainly, the Nazi version of
Babel, saturated as it was in torture and death, was the antithesis of cre-
ativity” (Prescott, 97). The confusion of languages symbolized by Babel
belongs then to that regime of “controcreazione” [counter-creation] that
Levi recognizes as proper to Auschwitz. But the tower is not alone: from
the perspective of his animal imagery, other adversely connoted biblical
images emerge. The snake, for example, is what links the concentration
196 D. Benvegnù
camp to creation and original sin, and it is in general a sign of the degra-
dation of humanity. As Belpoliti noticed, there is just one positive snake
in the whole of Levi’s oeuvre: Kipling’s Kaa (Belpoliti 1997, 205).
Otherwise, snakes are usually depicted negatively: not only the ambigu-
ous Henri of Se questo è un uomo is compared to the first tempter, but
Levi also devotes several pages to exploring the reasons behind the general
aversion toward these animals.27
Yet, images from Genesis can also suggest a different scenario. There
are in fact other moments, both in Levi’s testimonial accounts and in his
other works, in which language and writing are instead tied to the book
of Genesis not simply positively but in a more “re-active,” “re-creating,”
or regenerative manner. As we have already seen at the beginning of this
chapter, both the Genesis allusion in “Storia di dieci giorni” and the
“multiplicamini” of “Romanzi dettati dai grilli” testify to the possibility
of a new beginning, of a re-creation. Interestingly, in these circumstances
Levi prefers some of the few chapters that are not included in Deborah
Prescott’s otherwise compelling book about imagery from Genesis in
Holocaust memories. For his re-creation, Levi’s preference goes in fact to
the very beginning, the chapters in which God properly creates the whole
world, including animals and humanity.28
The first two chapters of Bereshit (the Hebrew term for Genesis 1:1–6:8,
meaning “in the beginning”) have always represented a problem for read-
ers, given the two different accounts of the creation of humans and ani-
mals that are offered. Only recently, these two initial versions became the
object of a new, eco-critical, exegesis, through which scholars from differ-
ent disciplines not only address critically the differences between the
Priestly (Genesis 1:1–2:3) and the Yahwistic version (Genesis 2:4–24),
but also try to read them within the larger template of Western human-
ism and modern science. This is not the proper place for a summary of
the large variety of positions in the contemporary debate, but we have
already seen in the section devoted to “suffering” how, for example, dif-
ferent interpretations of the term “dominion” in Genesis 1:26 lead to
diverse understandings of human-animal relationships.29 In that circum-
stance, we noticed how Levi’s rejection of the traditional theological posi-
tion expressed by Chiavacci meant also a different ethical paradigm when
it comes to what we called “creatural compassion.” Yet, two other key
protagonists of this investigation of Levi’s animal imagery, both already

mentioned in the previous sections, have devoted some thoughts to the
two accounts of creation in the Book of Genesis and how they influence
our relationship with animals.
The first one is Hannah Arendt, whose distinction between animal
laborans and homo faber helped us to pursue Levi’s understanding of the
relationships between techne, writing, and animals. At the very opening
of The Human Condition, Arendt also addresses briefly how “in its most
elementary form, the human condition of action is implicit even in
Genesis (“Male and female created He them”), if we understand that this
story of man’s creation is distinguished in principle from the one accord-
ing to which God originally created Man (adam), ‘him’ and not ‘them,’
so that the multitude of human beings becomes the result of multiplica-
tion” (Arendt 2008, 8). In the explicatory footnote, Arendt underlines
the importance of discovering which version of the creation story is cited
by traditional writers, because their preferences tell us a lot about differ-
ent attitudes toward the role of women in society. However, according to
Arendt, these differences indicate much more than that, as for instance in
the case of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. Augustine, in fact, “not only
ignores Genesis 1:27 altogether but sees the difference between man and
animal in that man was created unum ac singulum, whereas animals were
ordered ‘to come into being several at once’” (8, n.1). As a result, to writ-
ers like Augustine the creation story offers a welcome opportunity to
stress the species-character of animal life as distinguished from the singu-
larity of human existence, and therefore to stress the unique superiority
of each human being to the undifferentiated mass of animal genera.
Arendt’s point is well made, and useful for our reading for at least a
couple of reasons. First and more generally, Arendt’s comment reminds
us how much weight, in terms of the human-animal divide, lies in the
two different stories, and how each underlines a different kind of bond,
based respectively on a general dominion in the Priestly version and on
the naming of Adam in the Yahwistic one. Her reading, therefore, helps
us to pay attention to which part of Genesis Levi refers in his own rewrit-
ing of the creation of animals and men. In several short stories, he alludes
or explicitly quotes the creational myth, stressing peculiar sections of the
original account which we must likewise interpret as references to the
198 D. Benvegnù
reasons and meanings of his own writing and of his own literary creation.
As we have seen already, Levi rejects the theory of human dominion as
expressed in the first account of Genesis, and therefore we can assume
that the Priestly version would tell us more about his own creative pro-
cess. Second, Arendt’s critical comment stresses that for Augustine the
individual nature of humanity is implicitly a sign of superiority. This
uniqueness ad personam separates humans from the rest of creation,
according (once again) to that “abyssal” anthropocentric tradition we
have already explored. However, this separation is not necessarily a real
privilege, and we will see how there are counter-narratives seeking to
reconnect humanity to the whole of creation, with a different sense of
community, this time based on a mutual and untotalized system of inter-
ferences and convergences.
This new system is also the very focus of Jacques Derrida: as we have
mentioned, he calls it limitrophy. To shape such a limitrophy, Derrida
first follows the traces—as he writes—of the intrinsic ambiguity of “call-
ing” when humans talk of “this wholly other they call animal” (Derrida
2008, 14). This investigation leads him to interrogate the scene of “call-
ing” that happens in Genesis, and particularly the striking differences
between the two accounts of the creation of all the creatures, both human
and not-human animals included. As Derrida points out, “it isn’t the
man-woman of the first version but man alone and before woman who, in
that second version, gives their names, his names, to the animals” (15).
This characteristic of the second narrative has, according to Derrida, two
related results:
On the one hand, the naming of the animals is performed at one and the
same time, before the creation of Ishah, the female part of man, and, as a
result, before they perceive themselves to be naked; and to begin with they
are naked without shame. (…)
On the other hand, and this is especially important, the public crying of
names remains at one and the same time free and overseen, under surveil-
lance, under the gaze of Jehovah, who does not, for all that, intervene. (…)
God destines the animals to an experience of the power of man, in order to
see the power of man in action, in order to see the power of man at work,
in order to see man take power over all the other living beings. (16, empha-
sis in the original)
Out of this double reflection about the naming of animals in Genesis

2:18–20, Derrida extrapolates several consequences, the most important
of which reveals how the act of naming is framed between human (male)
exhibition of power and the odd withdrawal of God’s power “in order to
see” the ability of his own creature. The key to this passage lies in the kind
of sovereignty which the new despot, Adam, receives from God and how
it is linked to language and animals. Derrida concludes his analysis not-
ing that even “the animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have
instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority
to give to the living other” (23). However, if the general term “the ani-
mal” simply does not give justice to the multitude of living beings, but is
a way of exploitation, there are possibilities to name the animals that are
not necessarily so anthropocentrically prevailing. For instance, in recall-
ing the whole episode of God letting Adam, Ish [man], name the animals,
Derrida stresses how dizzying is the idea that in that moment we have “a
God who will say ‘I am that I am’ without knowing what he is going to
see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things” (17).
The term “poet” for Adam is pivotal. Through this term, Derrida is
recalling here that the naming of philosophy is not the same of the nam-
ing of poetry, and we are dealing therefore with two different discourses
on animality. Philosophy (and, on a different register, science) posits
animals as the passive object of theoretical knowledge and therefore is
inevitably blind to the animals’ own process of coming to know them.
As Rowe pointed out, for Derrida, “practitioners in these disciplines see
animals, but do not see that they are also seen by them” (Rowe, 125).
Poetry belongs instead to the same discourse of prophecy, for both rec-
ognize that modes of consciousness, desire, and suffering both transcend
and feed species multiple boundaries. Poets or prophets, then, in both
the actual and epistemic situation of poetry or prophecy, “admit taking
upon themselves the address of an animal that addresses them, before
even having the time or the power to take themselves off” (Derrida
2008, 14). This double movement of recognizing the gaze of the other
as well as unavoidable nudity forces poetry and prophecy not only to
acknowledge a certain subjectivity of animals, but also to refuse “to dis-
avow the active roles animals play in the shaping of our shared world”
(Rowe, 125).
200 D. Benvegnù
This tangle of origins, experience, and language finds in Levi’s oeuvre

an echo in two different narratives in which, once again, children and
animals are protagonists. The first one is entitled “Ranocchi sulla luna”
[Frogs on the Moon], and it is an autobiographical piece in which Levi
recounts his summer holidays in “campagna” [the countryside] with his
whole family. This short narrative is completely devoted to Levi’s first and
ever-new (“sempre nuovo”) encounter with nature, and specifically with
the various animals populating the surroundings of the house and the
adjacent river. The animals are therefore depicted with hyperbolic adjec-
tives—from the “pingue, ripugnante e minaccioso” [obese, repugnant,
and menacing] for the mole cricket, to the drangonflies “meravigliose, dai
riflessi turchini, metallici” (RS, OII 891) [wonderful, with deep blue,
metallic reflections; OPT, 49]—in order to render the general sense of
original discovery and wonder that probably belonged to the child. Yet,
the most significant encounter is the one with the tadpoles, an almost
metaphorical embodiment of the dramatic growth of the young Levi and
of every young man. Their metamorphosis is in fact described as “uno
spettacolo inedito, pieno di mistero come una nascita o una morte, tale
da far impallidire i compiti per le vacanze e da rendere fugaci i giorni e
interminabili le notti” [an unprecedented spectacle, full of mystery as a
birth or a death, enough to make the vacation homework fade and the
interminable days and nights fly by]. It is, however, the climax of their
transformation that truly attracts the young Primo: the tadpoles are ready
to jump out of the bowl in which they were placed, but the sides are too
steep and the child decides to help them by putting some pieces of wood
in the water.
L’idea era giusta, e alcuni girini ne approfittarono: ma era ancora giusto

chiamarli girini? Non più; non erano più larve, erano ranocchi bruni e
grossi come una fava, ma ranocchi, gente come noi, con due mani e due
gambe, che nuotavano “a rana” con fatica ma con stile corretto. E non si
mangiavano più fra loro, e verso di loro provavamo ormai un senti-
mento diverso, materno e paterno: in qualche modo erano nostri figli,
anche se alla loro muta avevamo dato più disturbo che aiuto. Ne mettevo
uno sul palmo della mano: aveva un muso, un viso, mi guardava striz-
zando gli occhi, poi spalancava la bocca di scatto. Cercava aria o voleva
dire qualcosa? (893)
[The idea was correct and some tadpoles took advantage of it: but was it
still right to call them tadpoles? No longer; they were no longer larvae,
they were brown frogs, as large as a fava bean, but frogs, people like us,
with two hands and two legs, who swam “the breaststroke” with effort but
perfect style. And they no longer eat each other, and by now we had a dif-
ferent feeling about them, maternal and paternal: in some way they were
our children, even if in the molting stage we had given them more trouble
than help. I would put one of them on the palm of my hand: it has a
muzzle, a face, it looked at me blinking its eyes, then it suddenly snapped
its mouth wide open. Was it gasping for air, or did it want to say
something?]
It is obvious that the whole episode is told from the perspective of the
young Primo Levi, as though the author were, for the enchanted space of
this passage, again that child. And in fact, Levi the adult rebalances the
rest of the story, ending the narrative with two episodes that are meant to
show objectively the detached law of nature, unconcerned by the struggle
of the poor tadpoles.30 Nonetheless, in the few lines we provided above,
there are many of the same themes we find in the works of the mature
Levi, such as the fascination for metamorphosis we have already explored
in its negative connotations in the previous section. We will return to this
specific topic soon, to display what we might call the positive side of
metamorphosis. Right now, we should focus instead on the almost
Freudian primal-scene value of this account, as if Levi were telling us
something about the origin of his future creation as a writer. Some of the
characteristics of the creation in Genesis are in fact at work here, begin-
ning with the idea that the tadpoles were almost imago Dei (“gente come
noi”) to arrive to the feeling of “parenthood” experienced by the protago-
nist and his companion (probably Levi’s sister, Anna Maria). If we follow
Derrida’s suggestion mentioned above, though, it is the last feature of the
interaction between Levi and the little animals which is the most impor-
tant. Contrary to the experience of philosophers and scientists, Levi rec-
ognizes in fact the face of the animal. Actually, he does not acknowledge
just its face, but its gaze, the fact that the tadpole is returning the human
gaze. This response is what triggers Levi’s fascination, to the point that he
is almost expecting the animal to talk, to refuse its own muteness in order
to say something. In Levi’s account, the animal is going to respond, and
202 D. Benvegnù
according to Derrida this recognition of the subjectivity of the animal,

this openness toward the animal’s possible word, is sufficient to identify a
future poet in the young Primo Levi. Given the premises, it is not surpris-
ing that the mature writer can be seen as a new Adam, calling/naming the
animals as a poet does.
The second narrative is not as strictly autobiographical, but children
are still the protagonists. In the spring of 1980 Levi published in La
Stampa an article entitled “Inventare un animale” [To Invent an Animal],
which would be later collected in L’altrui mestiere.31 This article deals with
an activity done in a middle school near Turin, in which the teachers
asked their students to invent an imaginary animal and describe its fea-
tures. The tone of the whole essay is bright, and Levi spends most of his
piece amusedly recalling the most wonderful animals conceived by the
children, or what he calls their “intuizioni audaci, allegre ed allarmanti”
(712) [bold, amusing, and alarming intuitions]. Nevertheless, he does
not miss the opportunity to introduce his article with a more serious
reflection about what are indeed the challenges of “inventare un animale”
[inventing an animal]. He stresses first that “inventare un animale che
possa esistere (intendo dire che possa esistere fisiologicamente, crescere,
nutrirsi, resistere all’ambiente e ai predatori, riprodursi) è un compito
pressoché impossibile” (711) [to invent from nothing an animal that can
exist (I mean to say that can physiologically grow, nourish itself, resist the
environment and predators, and reproduce itself ) is an almost impossible
feat]. In fact, Levi adds, even the most updated human understanding of
natural laws cannot catch up with the real process of evolution: of course
science has answered many questions, but every solved problem generates
a dozen new ones, “ed il processo non accenna a finire” (711) [and the
process gives no sign of ending]. Nature, instead, operates and creates
without any need of explanation or conceptual thinking. If we move
from science to art, the issue is no less complex. Actually,
l’esperienza di tremila anni di narrative, di pittura e di scultura ci dimostra

che inventare dal nulla un animale a capriccio, un animale di cui non ci
importa affatto che possa esistere, ma la cui immagini stimoli in qualche
modo la nostra sensibilità non è compito facile. (711)
[the experience of three thousand years of storytelling, painting, and

sculpture shows us that even inventing at whim an animal from nothing,
an animal whose ability to exist we do not consider important but whose
image somehow stimulates our sensibility, is not an easy task]
It is thus not surprising that almost all the animals invented by mythol-
ogy are pastiches, made by collecting features of different existing crea-
tures, like the Chimera—a term, Levi comments, adopted by biologists
to indicate the monsters they create (711)—or the centaurs so dear to the
author himself. All the above considerations force Levi to conclude his
introduction with a revaluation of the natural world: even in the beauti-
ful Manuale di zoologia fantastica of the otherwise not so esteemed Borges,
one cannot find a single truly original animal.
Non ce n’è uno che si avvicini neppure vagamente alle incredibili soluzioni
innovative che si trovano ad esempio in certi parassiti, quali la zecca, la
pulce, l’echinococco. (712)
[There is not even one that vaguely approaches the incredible innovative
solutions one can see, for example, in certain parasites like the tick, the flea,
or the tapeworm].
All the “parasites” mentioned here by Levi are protagonists of a narra-

tive, article, or short story, in which their incredible features are displayed
as sources of wonder. It is, however, in one of his three theatrical pieces,
that is, in his fiction, that the incredible innovative challenge represented
by inventing an animal is directly addressed.
Outlined very early in his career but written in 1957 and then collected
in Storie naturali, “Il sesto giorno”32 [The Sixth Day] recalls already in its
title the Book of Genesis, and precisely the day in which God created the
animals and the humans (Genesis 1:24–31). As a technical scientist, Levi
offers a quite different account of how this creation happened, thinking
up an ironic parody of a board meeting, with all the risks of a creative
communal effort. The whole scene is marked by a high level of mockery,
in which all the experts at work seem to agree almost on nothing and
quarrel over each single detail. In their partial justification, their enter-
prise is actually very complex, given that “la Direzione” [The Management],
204 D. Benvegnù
after congratulating for the good job done with birds and insects, “rinnova,
in forma più esplicita, le sue pressioni affinché i lavori di progettazione
relativi al modello Uomo trovino sollecita conclusione” (SN, OI 532)
[reiterates, in a more explicit form, its recommendations that the plan-
ning work relative to the Man model be speedily completed]. The cre-
ation of Man as a specific animal is thus the subject of “Il sesto giorno:” if
we consider when Levi began to craft it, this story can be easily read as the
ironic, almost too ironic, upside-down mirror of Se questo è un uomo. The
humor of this short narrative, however, goes beyond the funny disagree-
ment among the gods/ministers for various, but very rational, reasons.
Instead, it is the end that renders this story so unforgettable. The techni-
cians have in fact finally reached a conclusion in line with the highest
rationality:
No, signori, la decisione è ormai presa, e l’Uomo sarà uccello: uccello a

pieno titolo, né pinguino, né struzzo, uccello volatore, con becco, penne,
artigli, uova e nido. Restano solo da definire alcuni importanti particolari
costruttivi, e cioé:
1. quali saranno le dimensioni ottime;

2. se converrà prevederlo sedentario o migratore… (546)
[No, gentlemen, the decision is made, and Man will be a bird: a bird in
every respect, neither penguin nor ostrich, but a flying bird, with beak,
feathers, claws, eggs and nest. There remain to be defined only a few impor-
tant construction details, that is:
1. What will be the optimal dimension?

2. Will it be preferable to envisage him as sedentary or migratory…]
The punctuated ellipsis in the text gives birth to a rare moment in

Levi’s oeuvre in which he might recall both Samuel Beckett and Franz
Kafka. A door is suddenly opened and a shy messenger peeps out to ask
the expert directing the assembly, Arimane, to talk outside. The outcome
is tragicomic: while the experts were talking, “la Direzione” has taken a
different decision and they created Man without waiting for any advice.
Back in the room, Arimane disconsolately reports that Management took
some clay and molded it into the shape of what appeared best to them;
then they infused into this creature “non so che alito, ed essa si è mossa.
Cosí è nato l’Uomo, o signori, lontano dal nostro consesso: semplice,
non è vero?” [I don’t know what sort of breath, and it moved. And so
Man was born, gentlemen, far from our assembly: quite simple, isn’t it?].
Such an ending can be interpreted on at least three different levels.
First, if Man is a “creatura anomala” [anomalous creature], as Arimane
says, made without any rational precaution, it is not so unusual that he
sometimes behaves in irrational or even unnatural ways, as “un uomo per
pura definizione e convenzione” (547) [Man purely by definition and
convention]. According to this reading, Levi is here not only criticizing
via parody any humanistic enterprises based on the nominal superiority
of humanity over the rest of the creation, but he is also possibly propos-
ing an ironic explanation of atrocious human behaviors. Second, Levi is
giving voice to what seems to be an old belief, the idea—repeated in
“Inventare un animale”—that nature works in mysterious ways, and it is
still more powerful than any human-like rational invention. Of course,
he parodies the creation as it is told in the Yahwist version, but he is
focused on showing how all the intelligent design proposed by the expert
scientists is overthrown by a creative act that apparently does not make
sense. The human-like knowledge of the expert quasi-scientists of the
story is overthrown by something inexplicable: science and technology
are only half of the story. Third, we cannot read “Il sesto giorno” without
thinking about Levi’s own difficulties in creating seemingly ex nihilo
both (literary) men—as, for example, in Se non ora, quando?—and (liter-
ary) animals (in his short stories). Is for him inventing an animal,
whether human or non-human, as plain and apparently irrational as the
“Direzione” made it appear? Or instead, does the animal products of
Levi’s literary creation look closer to the rational creatures the experts
would have provided? To answer these questions, we must now pay
attention to the imaginary animals Levi invented and to their implicit
and explicit ties with his testimony.
206 D. Benvegnù
Notes
1. For a survey of Levi’s self-understanding as a writer see at least the inter-
views collected in the second (“I libri”) and third section (“La lettera-
tura”) of CI 101–206. See also Carpegna (1996).
2. Cf. Ahr (2011).
3. First as Levi (1984); then in AM, OII 841–844 with the new title “Lo
scriba.”
4. The entire article has an ironically ambivalent tone, underlined by Levi’s
reference to “un giovane che paternamente mi fa da guida” [a young man
[who] has guided me], probably Levi’s son, who tells the author: “Tu
appartieni alla austera generazione di umanisti che ancora pretendono di
capire il mondo intorno a loro. Questa pretesa è diventata assurda: lascia
fare all’abitudine e il disagio sparirà” [You belong to the austere genera-
tion of humanists who still insist on wanting to understand the world
around them. This demand has become absurd: leave everything to the
habit and your discomfort will disappear]; 841. Needless to say, Levi not
only used a personal computer, but more important both the idea of
understanding the world as a coherent and meaningful whole, and the
importance of habits are themes largely present in his testimonial
accounts. On this topic see also Usher (2001) and Lollini (1997).
5. See Belpoliti’s “Note ai testi” in OII 1559. This dedication is confirmed,
along with some other details, by Angier (2002), 642. For a general
description of the relation between Levi and the fellow writer Gina
Lagorio, see Thomson, 426–427.
6. During their second encounter, the fish aspects have disappeared and the
Greek is recognized only for his “scialbi occhi di gufo” (313).
7. See Roth (1986) and Thomson (2004).
8. Cf., for instance, Ross, 150.
9. Levi stresses how “gli stessi etologi sono stati costretti ad introdurre nel
loro linguaggio il termine ‘corteggiamento’, che è una metafora umana”
[the ethologists themselves are compelled to introduce in their language
the term courtship, which is a human metaphor]; AM, OII 691.
10. Cf. Nagel (1974).
11. Cf. Aristotle, The History of Animals, book VIII, 1; available on The
Internet Classic Archives, MIT, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/his-
tory_anim.html
12. This is the whole passage: “Ma è indispensabile che la femmina risponda
giusto: una risposta stonata, anche solo di un quarto di tono, interrompe
il dialogo, e il maschio va in cerca di un’altra compagna più conforme al

suo innato modello. Pare che questa condizione di esatta sintoni acustica
sia una garanzai contro gli incroci sterili e perciò inutile ai fini del ‘multi-
plicamini’.” [But it is indispensable for the female to answer correctly: an
answer out of tune, even by one fourth of a tone, interrupts the dialogue,
and the male goes in search of another companion, more in conformity
with his innate model. It seems that this condition of exact acoustic syn-
thony is a guarantee against the crossbreeding of different species, which
would be sterile and therefore useless for the “you must multiply” aim.]
The multiplicamini belongs, of course, to the biblical formula “crescite et
multiplicamini” in Genesis, 1:22; 1:28, 8:17, 9:1, 9:8 and so on.
13. This translation belongs to the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
while the Revised Standard Version has “night hag” instead of “Lilith.”
In Italian, the 1974 CEI version reads as the following: “Gatti selvatici si
incontreranno con iene, i satiri si chiameranno l`un l`altro; vi faranno
sosta anche le civette e vi troveranno tranquilla dimora.” Only in the
2008 CEI Bible, “civette” has been substituted with “Lilith.” Obviously,
we do not know what version of the Bible was used by Levi to read and
consult.
14. See Kvam et al., 162–163 and relative note n. 33; 174.
15. On the influence of the Eastern European Hebrew tradition in Levi’s
work, see Valabrega (1997).
16. Cf. the interview with E. Bruck, Ebreo fino ad un certo punto, in CI 269.
17. In the Talmud quoted by Tilscher, the Shekhinah is in fact a concept
representing God’s dwelling and immanence in the created world. See
Eisenberg (2010), 6–7; and Novick (2008), 61–62.
18. Valabrega claims that the whole episode of the death of the animal “segna
l’addio alla vita del villaggio e la fine di un mondo” (in Valabrega 1997b,
287) [signifies a farewell to his village life and the end of a world].
Therefore, in her reading, Pavel connects with the horse just because “Il
Tordo” reminds him of his lost village and, more generally, because Levi
“contrappone... all’esilio ... l’ingenuità e il candore ‘francescano’ del
mondo animale” (287) [sets the innocence and the “Franciscan” candor
of the animal world against the exile].
19. Arié is also the name of the rabbi protagonist of the short story “Il servo.”
20. All the English translations of SNOQ come from INNW.
21. Cf. Haraway (1988).
22. For an interesting analysis of this theme also in other Holocaust writers,
see Prescott, 51–78.
23. Cf. “Note ai testi,” OI 1400.
208 D. Benvegnù
24. The encounter between Emmanuel Lévinas and the dog named “Bobby”
is told in a short essay entitled “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights”
(in Lévinas 1990, 151–153). Although this famous story has been read
as a way to incorporate Lévinas’s ethics into the animal studies, his posi-
tion towards animals is quite ambiguous and has been recently widely
debated. On this theme, see at least Clarke (2004).
25. Most commentators of the episode in Se questo é un uomo that ends with
the story of Khun have been struck by its apparent harshness (SQU, I,
125–126). On this topic, see both the interview with Levi by Giuseppe
Grieco, “Io e Dio,” in CI 282–290; and the longer one by Ferdinando
Camon (Camon 2006).
26. On this topic, see also Rondini, 365–367; and Hakarmi (2009).
27. For Henri, “inumanamente scaltro e incomprensibile come il Serpente
della Genesi,” see SQU, OI 96. For Levi’s exploration of the imaginary and
symbolic value of the snake, see AM, “Bisogno di paura,” OII 848–852.
28. Prescott’s volume begins with the presence of Genesis 3–4 in Holocaust
memories. The other chapters are devoted to, respectively, Genesis 6–9
(Noah and the Deluge); Genesis 11:1–9 (Babel); Genesis 22:1–19
(Abraham and Isaac); Genesis 22:23–33 (Jacob and the Angel); and
Genesis 4:1–26 (Cain and Abel).
29. On this issue see also Barton and Wilkinson (2009).
30. The end of the story re-establishes the quasi-scientific tone of most of
Levi’s essays, explaining for example why frogs produce so many eggs.
Furthermore, Levi ends his account telling how one of “their” tadpoles
was killed by a robin, which, in return, was then captured by their white
kitty, which “lo uccise a mezzo, come fanno i gatti, e se lo portò in un
angolo per giocare con la sua agonia” [she only half-killed it, as cats do,
and carried it off into a corner to play with its agony].
31. First as Levi (1980a), then in AM, OII 711–715.
32. According to the “Note ai testi” written by Belpoliti, “Il sesto giorno”
was designed in 1946–1947 and completed in 1957 (“in un dattilo-
scritto depositato presso l’Archivio Einaudi (…) è indicata la data di
stesura: 22 dicembre 1957;” SN, OI 1438).
Works Cited
Ahr, Johan. “Primo Levi and the Concept of History.” In Pugliese 2011, 41–55.
2002.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1958 (2008).
Barton, C. Stephen, and Wilkinson David, eds. Reading Genesis after Darwin.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Calvino, Italo. “I due mestieri.” la Repubblica, 6 marzo 1985.
Camon, Ferdinando. Conversazione con Primo Levi. Parma: Guanda, 2006.
Carpegna, Alessandra. “‘Io non pensavo di scrivere’: intervista a Primo Levi.”
Mezzosecolo 11 (1994–1996): 345–360.
Clarke, David. “On Being ‘The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Dwelling with
Animals after Levinas.” In Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject, ed.
B. Gabriel and S. Ilcan, 41–75. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2004.
Eisenberg, L. Ronald. What the Rabbi Said: 250 Topics from the Talmud. Santa
Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010.
Hakarmi, Batnadiv. “Hubris, Language, and Oppression: Recreating Babel in
Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and in the Midrash.” Partial Answers 7.1 (January
2009): 31–43.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–599.
Huxley, Aldous. Music at Night and Other Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931.
Levi, Primo. “Inventare un animale.” La Stampa, April 27, 1980.
———. “Nomi e leggende dello scoiattolo. La Stampa, June 2, p. 3, 1980.
Levi, Primo. The Periodic Table. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York:
Schocken Books, 1984.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Difficult Freedom. Translated by S. Hand. London: Athlone,
1990.
Lollini, Massimo. “Golem.” In Belpoliti 1997, 348–360.
Nagel, Thomas. “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review
LXXXIII.4 (October 1974): 435–450.
Novick, Leah. On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism’s Divine
Feminine. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2008.
Roth, Philip. “Philip Roth Talks to the Italian Writer Primo Levi About his Life
and Times.” London Review of Books 8.18 (23 October 1986): 17–19.
Schehr, Laurence. “Primo Levi’s Strenuous Clarity.” Italica 66.4 (Winter, 1989):
429–443.
210 D. Benvegnù
Thomson, Ian. “The Genesis of If This is a man.” In The Legacy of Primo Levi, ed.
S. Pugliese, 41–58. New York: Palgrave, 2004.
Usher, Jonathan. “The Author and the ‘Scribe’: Creativity and Computers in
Primo Levi.” Testo e Senso 4–5 (2001): 239–256.
Valabrega, Paola. “Mano/Cervello.” In Belpoliti 1997, 380–392.
della critica, ed. E. Ferrero, 263–288. Torino: Einaudi, 1997.
7
Creation II. Re-Enchantment
There is a connection in Levi’s poetics between the process of artistic

creation and animals. For instance, in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli” Levi
explicitly links the joy of observing animals with writing. He claims
that the combination of personal and more ethological observations
about animals can help a writer not only to enrich her spirit and enlarge
her worldview, but also to gain a “scrivere nuovo,” a new writing. This
new writing avoids simplistic anthropomorphism because it forces the
writer (and then the readers) to leave human isolation behind and to
experience instead the limits, the uncanny extremes that only animals—
similar but different, familiar but alien—can offer. “Romanzi dettati dai
grilli” ends with what we recognized as a possible distilled specimen of
this new writing: a series of very short narratives in which animals are
protagonists capable of teaching us something about both them and
ourselves.
The specific character of these short narratives and the references to the
Old Testament prompted us to compare this series of animal dramas to
another series of stories to which Levi refers. This second series is far more
dramatic, being the accounts of the prisoners in Auschwitz; stories of a
new Bible, according to Levi. These Holocaust stories belong to a

212 D. Benvegnù
narrative of “controcreazione”—this is the name Levi gives to Auschwitz—

and indeed we observed in the previous chapter that even desire in the
concentration camp, as in the story entitled “Lilít,” is characterized by a
sense of destruction and loss. Yet, the figure of Lilith gave us the oppor-
tunity to look at Levi’s interest in the tradition of Eastern European Jewry,
as exemplified by the novel Se non ora quando? Here, the very few animal
images play a key function, suggesting an idea of friendship capable of
inaugurating a new community among creatures, a new beginning after
the destruction of Auschwitz.
To investigate further this link between a new beginning, community,
and animals, we thus explored Levi’s references to the two books of the
Old Testament in which a pattern of creation–de-creation–re-creation is
easily recognizable: the Book of Genesis and the Book of Job. We first
noticed that the first two chapters of Genesis, with the two different
accounts of creation, represent an exegetical problem, and we turned to
Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida to shed light on them. Derrida’s
attention to the diverse “animal naming” of philosophy and poetry
prompted us to return to Levi to consider what kind of “naming” he uses.
In “Ranocchi sulla luna,” we saw Levi acknowledging animals of a poten-
tial response to the human gaze as, according to Derrida, only a poet
does. We then moved to an article in which Levi discusses the literary
problems of inventing an animal and how no human technology can
compete against the wonders of nature. This is the very topic of “Il sesto
giorno,” a short story in which Levi ironically addresses the complex
futility of inventing an animal ex nihilo. Yet, Levi did invent his own
animals.
7.1 Invented Animals and the Work

of Testimony
Just as the middle school students of “Inventare un animale” we men-
tioned in the previous chapter, Levi has indeed invented his own imagi-
nary animals. Although they do have a bizarre nature that makes them
difficult to interpret, they also represent certain extremes within the spec-
trum of Levi’s zoology and therefore reveal meaningful aspects of his
Creation II. Re-Enchantment 213
literary practice. The first invented animal is named Vilmy, and it is the
protagonist of the eponymous short story collected in Vizio di forma. The
description Levi offers of this creature suggests a big, strange, black opos-
sum, with some feline elements added,1 but it is its behavior that is par-
ticularly uncanny. The atmosphere of the whole story is in fact saturated
with the human-like ambiguity of the animal, which appears to be a pet
but behaves with “astuzia volpina” [foxy astuteness], as though it has con-
trol over its human owner. Through a dialogue between the owner Paul
and the narrator we learn that this is true: the Vilmy produces a milk with
a special power of addiction and Paul admits having tried it just once
and, since then, he could not stop drinking it. The animal, however, is
not innocent, and Paul claims that
lei, loro sono diabolici: sono corrotti, e buoni a corrompere. Capiscono

poche cose, ma questa la capiscono bene, come si seduce un essere umano.
Ti leggono il desiderio negli occhi, o non so dove altro, e ti girano attorno,
ti strusciano attorno, e il veleno è lí, tutto il giorno e tutta la notte, ti viene
offerto in permanenza, a domicilio, gratis. Hai solo da tendere le mani e la
labbra. Le tendi, bevi, e il cerchio si chiude, e sei in trappola, per tutti gli
anni che ti restano, che non possono essere tanti. (VF, OI 633)
[she—they are diabolic. They are corrupted and are good at corrupting.
They don’t understand much, but what they understand well is how to
seduce a human being. They can decipher the desire in your eyes, or I do
not know where else, and they circle around you, rub against you, and the
poison is there, all day and all night, offered to you permanently, at home,
free. You have only to extend your hands, your lips. You extend them,
drink, and the circle closes, you are trapped, for the rest of your years,
which can’t be many; CW, 640]
The rest of the narrative recalls the origins of the deep dependence
between Paul and the animal, and ends with the narrator leaving his
friend’s house with the feeling of having escaped some obscure suffocat-
ing menace. As Levi writes, when the Vilmy tries to jump on the narra-
tor’s lap, he suddenly leaves the house with such relief that, although the
night is foggy and cold, the air “mi parve profumata, e la respirai con
voluttà fino in fondo ai polmoni” (635) [seemed fragrant, and with great
pleasure I breathed it deep into my lungs].
214 D. Benvegnù
The reference to Vilmy’s milk reminds of two other stories of Vizio di

forma in which animals are not present but the milk is: respectively,
“Recuenco: la Nutrice” and “Recuenco: il rafter.” In these two short nar-
ratives, we face “a nutritive experience that is both desperately wished for
and potentially deadly” (Pirro, 110), associated by some scholars with
Levi’s relationship with his own mother and with women in general.2
Whether such Oedipal interpretation is compelling or not, in these two
stories Levi seems to reaffirm the ethical idea, well known by his readers,
that even the most amazing gift can be a threatening source of suffering
if received passively and without the proper preparation, as it happens to
the villagers who are almost killed by the sudden and unexpected distri-
bution of milk. The Vilmy story, too, might simply allude to the danger
of such passivity, as an embodied warning against the dangerous ethical
neutrality we have already explored in the previous chapter. Its ambigu-
ous and alluring animality would therefore express no more than the
ambivalence of human desire, caught between possession and homeosta-
sis. Yet, the allusion to the closed circle (“il cerchio si chiude”) in the
Vilmy story recalls another important theme in Levi’s oeuvre, that is, the
complicated relationship between imprisonment and liberation; a theme
that gathers human and non-human animals together, as we have already
seen in the story of the encaged squirrels in the section on suffering.
As several scholars have pointed out,3 the metaphor of the circle is very
present in Levi’s work, beginning with how he evokes one of the recur-
rent dreams he had in Auschwitz. Most importantly, this metaphor has
often a connection with animality. For instance, in the chapter of Se
questo è un uomo entitled “Le nostre notti” [Our nights], Levi recalls how
“la facoltà umana di scavarsi una nicchia, di secernere un guscio, di
erigersi intorno una barriera di difesa” [Man’s capacity to dig himself into
a niche, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of
defence4] even in the desperate circumstance of the concentration camp,
is quite astonishing and would deserve a serious study. The zoological
references to a “niche” and to a “shell” return often in Levi’s literature, as
though the almost conscious regression to certain animal abilities could
help coping with human horror. Even this protective niche, though, is
destroyed when we are not so conscious anymore, when we fall asleep and
begin to dream. From the unconscious of the prisoners, Levi confesses,
disturbing dreams of freedom and imprisonment arise. These dreams are

responsible for what Levi describes as pain in its pure state, “non tem-
perato dal senso della realtà e dalla intrusione di circostanze estranee” [not
tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circum-
stances]. As he writes almost forty years later in I sommersi e I salvati, this
pain “è la sola forza creata dal nulla, senza spesa e senza fatica. Basta non
vedere, non ascoltare, non fare” (SeS, OII 1058) [is the only force that
can be created from nothing, without cost or effort. Just don’t look, don’t
listen, don’t act]. We have already investigated the link between pain and
a certain passivity or impossibility in the section devoted to suffering, but
here Levi is adding another element to his literary equation, stating that
this very link is also our only possibility of creatio ex nihilo (“creata dal
nulla”). Yet, in one of these painful dreams, Levi’s condition as prisoner
takes specifically the shape of a symbolic more-than-human procession in
which the camp prisoners are seen as “grigi, e identici, piccoli come for-
miche e grandi come le stelle, (…) talora fusi in un’unica sostanza, un
impasto angoscioso in cui ci sentiamo invischiati e soffocati; talora in
marcia a cerchio, senza principio e senza fine” (SQU, OI 56) [grey and
identical, small as ants, yet so huge as to reach up to the stars, (…) some-
times melting into a single substance, a sorrowful turmoil in which we all
feel ourselves trapped and suffocated; sometimes marching in a circle,
without beginning or end]. This double sense of suffocation and repeti-
tion as experienced in the dream can be compared to the enclosing addic-
tion to Vilmy’s milk that Levi describes in his short story. The animal
therefore is not quite or only a metamorphosis of desire, as Belpoliti pro-
poses (Belpoliti 1997, 208). Instead, the human-animal relationship as
expressed in the story is an external, correlative manifestation of the same
mix of liberation and captivity which haunted Levi’s dreams in Auschwitz:
the Vilmy embodies an unheimlich feeling, as indeed at once familiar and
alien, intimate and threatening, as precisely those dreams.
A similar atmosphere of suffocation and restless repetition is the pro-
tagonist of another short story in which a different, less sophisticated,
invented animal is imprisoned within a circular structure. Yet, the con-
clusion of “La bestia nel tempio” [The Beast in the Temple] is, if possi-
ble, even more disturbing. The beast of this short story is in fact encaged
not only in a prison, but also in a mortal paradox: if one day the
216 D. Benvegnù
creature will be able to free itself, the humans who are waiting outside
“la uccideranno e la mangeranno, e allora il mondo sarà risanato: ma la
bestia non uscirà mai” (L, OII 92) [they will kill it and eat it, and then
the world will be restored. But the beast will never come out; CW,
1433]. If what we have said so far is correct, here Levi is also talking
about himself, but this time not simply as a prisoner in Auschwitz.
Instead, what mirrors the paradoxical trauma of the beast in the temple
is his condition of both being a survivor and witnessing what happened
through a written testimony. The common image of the circular prison
as a desire for freedom, as expressed for example in the camp dreams,
suggests in fact that even Levi the survivor, through his memories and
witnessing, is trying to free himself. Unfortunately, if his testimony
were to release him from the circular imprisonment, his identity would
still be menaced by what is outside, whether outside means, as for the
beast in the temple, freedom (to be killed) or the unknown and prob-
lematic reinstallation within the society, as several post-traumatic sto-
ries reveal. However, with the story of the beast, Levi seems also to
suggest that the survivor will never be completely freed from what hap-
pened to him: as for the beast, there is no actual escape from such a
traumatic imprisonment.
This interpretation seems to be confirmed, and complicated, by a very
elusive reference to the same book of the Bible in which Lilith—another
monster that must be killed to have redemption—appears, namely,
Isaiah. As Anat Pick has noticed, in La Tregua Levi recalls the first days of
the liberation from Auschwitz with an anecdote in which a cow, delivered
by the Russian army to feed the camp’s survivors, is swiftly set upon, torn
apart, and eaten. Pick writes that Levi’s story “is a sort of freakish rework-
ing of the prophecy of Isaiah” (Pick, 22),5 precisely the passage in which
a child leads the animals in the peaceful image of redemption in Isaiah
11:6.6 According to the scholar, the two passages are mirror images of
emancipation: “the liberation of Auschwitz marked the Haftlinge’s return
into history and humanity, while the biblical version glimpses a final
escape from history and the dictates of species” (24). Pick uses this inter-
esting comparison to offer an example of the cultural anxiety over species
identity in Holocaust representations, and therefore she does not explore
what she calls Levi’s implicit “irony with respect to liberation” any
further. If we instead link this image of sacrificial animal to the accounts

collected in Lilít, including the eponymous short story, we can observe
that such irony deeply affects the idea of testimonial memory Levi offers
by means of his animal representations. For instance, we first notice that
the survivors do to the cow what the beggars in “La bestia del tempio”
would like to do to the beast, where the animal sacrifice in both cases
symbolizes the beginning of a new era and perhaps the restoration of
God’s presence in the world, as Tischler suggested. However, we have also
seen how the beast of the short story can be read as an image of the pris-
oners themselves, specifically of a certain feeling of suffocation and repe-
tition that haunted their memories even after the end of the Second
World War; their memories, that also means their testimonies. Levi seems
thus suggesting that the (hi)story of the liberation from captivity begins
with the sacrifice of the cow, that is to say, with the sacrificial, but tempo-
rary, suppression of a lot of tragic memories of animalization in favor of
a new sense of reacquired humanity. Nonetheless, Levi also stated several
times that these memories eventually will return, and the prisoners will
be caught again in the same paradox of the beast in the temple: if they
free themselves from the prison, from their own memories as well as from
a misunderstood sense of animality, they are going to be (free to be) eaten
by those, maybe double images of themselves, who are outside. In other
words, if one forgets to be an animal and reclaim a state of pure, autono-
mous humanity before Auschwitz, this very humanity can easily strip you
again of your identity and make you think you are a beast. Why then
should one come out of the paradox of memorial imprisonment? Well,
on the one hand, there is the risk of spending one’s entire life with his or
her own Vilmy, that is, a set harmful memorial fixations and Auschwitz
dreams, and never breathing the fresh air of the night, as instead the nar-
rator of “Vilmy” does at last. On the other hand, the very possibility of
the outside does exist and appears to be connected to a dialectics between
the tormented need for liberation that comes from testimony and the
painful rejection of the alleged abyssal divide between the human and the
animal. This dialectics is in fact not only the very core of that new way of
writing testimony we are investigating, but also the gate from which a
refreshing sense of community and interspecific friendship—as in Se non
ora quando?—seems to breathe in.
218 D. Benvegnù
The description of the other animal Levi invented ex nihilo underlines

the significance of the refreshing wind/air that the narrator of Vilmy
experiences at the end of the story. While the Vilmy and the beast in the
temple still allude to the “controcreazione,” in this other case a re-
creational power is instead at stake. In “I figli del vento” [Children of the
Wind], another short story collected in Lilít, Levi creates not only ani-
mals but an entire imaginary archipelago, the “isole del vento” [wind
islands]. On one of these islands, Mauhi, lives a special kind of rodent.
The narrator tells us that this animal has such a strong dimorphism that
it is one of the few mammals in which the males (atoúla) are named dif-
ferently from the females (nanucu). However, this is not the main char-
acteristic of this species, but rather that “fra gli atoúla non esiste
accoppiamento” (L, OII 118) [Coupling does not exist among the atoúla;
CW, 1460]. Among these bizarre rodents, in fact, mating occurs without
direct contact, but by using the wind as a means of transmitting the
semen. During the mating season, the males gather in the highest places
of the island and there they stay, without food or water, for the whole
day: “volgono il dorso al vento, e nel vento emettono il loro seme” (118)
[they turn their backs to the wind and into the wind they discharge their
semen]. In the meantime, the females are restlessly waiting at the bottom
of the hills, in the moorland, ready to receive what the wind brings to
them. The whole island is inevitably influenced by the process: the wind,
Levi writes, “si carica di un odore acuto, muschiato, stimolante ed inbri-
ante, che trascina in una ridda senza scopo tutti gli animali dell’isola”
(119) [has a sharp, musky odor, stimulating and intoxicating, which
throws all the animals of the island into an aimless tumult]. Despite this
annually renewed and chaotic turmoil, the whole process works well and,
thirty-five days later, the nanucu give birth to their cubs, which after only
five months are sexually mature and therefore separated from the females,
“in attesa che la prossima stagione di vento prepari le loro nozze aeree e
lontane” (120) [waiting for the next season of wind to prepare their
remote aerial marriages].
The regenerating power of wind should not surprise Levi’s readers.
Already in Se questo è un uomo, reflecting upon (the lack of ) God’s pres-
ence and providence, Levi seems to link wind and re-creation in his first
narrative of liberation after Auschwitz:
Oggi io penso che, se non altro per il fatto che un Auschwitz è esistito, nes-
suno dovrebbe ai nostri giorni parlare di Provvidenza: ma è certo che in
quell’ora il ricordo dei salvamenti biblici nelle avversità estreme passò come
un vento per tutti gli animi. (SQU, OI 154)
[Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed,
no one in our age should speak of Providence. But without doubt in that
hour the memory of biblical salvations in times of extreme adversity passed
like a wind through all our minds]
The wind in the work of the atheist Primo Levi, then, functions as a
manifestation of God’s ruah, namely the breath/wind able to infuse,
according to the Book of Genesis, life not only into the first human, but
into the whole of creation.7 The particularity of “I figli del vento,” though,
is that the story is related almost in the manner of a scientific report, from
the imaginary perspective of a young Western zoologist arriving on the
island for the first time. Even this double usage of biblical references and
scientific discovery is not unusual at all for Levi, as explicitly testified by
the above quoted “Romanzi dettati dai grilli,” or, for a more explicitly
biblical example, by a poem entitled “Nel principio,” in which the author
mixes allusions to Bereshíd—“la prima parola della Sacra Scrittura” (AOI,
OII 544)—and the new theories about the Big Bang he had read in
“Scientific American.”8 Interestingly, even this short poem links the
almost inconceivable genesis of the universe and “questa/Mano che
scrive” [this hand that writes], displaying therefore the same meta-creative
dynamics we observed before. However, in the short story about the
unique mating behavior of the atoúla, Levi alludes not to a general scien-
tific discourse about the origin of the universe, but precisely to the work
of one of his favorite authors, Charles Darwin.
In a recent essay about the island as a paradigm of the world, Alessandro
Cinquegrani makes the connection between the atoúla and Darwin
explicit. Cinquegrani compares the islands invented by Levi to the
Galapagos visited by Darwin during his journey on the Beagle and claims
that in his short story Levi follows backward the epistemological process
of Darwin, representing his own reason in the image of the island
(Cinquegrani 2011, 97). If the Lager was the evil island of death and suf-
fering, the “isole del vento” are the equivalent good islands, as t estified by
220 D. Benvegnù
the allegorical title of the story in itself: for Cinquegrani a clear allusion
to the Romani and Sinti ethnic groups, destroyed in the concentration
camps and surely known by Primo Levi (101). Therefore, the “isole del
vento” do not follow the struggle for life that seems to forge Levi’s narra-
tive of the Lager, but they represent a paradigm that, according to
Cinquegrani, reverses both the image of the Lager and the lesson of On
the Origin of Species (105). “I figli del vento” thus both obliquely mirrors
Darwin’s account of his experience in the Galapagos and reverse the rep-
resentation (and the experience) of the Nazi Lager. Can we infer that
Levi’s “scrivere nuovo” is framed within these two double narratives as
well?
7.2 D
arwin, Job, and the Re-Enchantment
of the World
As many of the scholars before him, Cinquegrani’s compelling interpreta-
tion of Darwin’s influence in “I figli del vento” assumes that the major
impact of the British naturalist over the Italian writer is the theory of the
so-called struggle for life. This reading is indeed justified by the many
times Levi quotes what he calls “la lotta per la vita” to depict what hap-
pened in Auschwitz, but it does not take into due consideration that
there is another aspect of Charles Darwin that the writer deeply admires.
The most important manifestation of this admiration is in La ricerca delle
radici, in which Darwin appears in an important position, just after Job
and Ulysses. In this book, Levi’s explanation for his esteem does not con-
cern the struggle for life or the survival of the fittest, but rather Darwin’s
refusal of anthropocentrism. Anthologizing a famous passage of On the
origins of the species about how the beauty of animals has nothing to do
with human appreciation, Levi introduces it with these few words:
Darwin ebbe molti nemici: qualcuno ne ha ancora. Erano difensori della

religione, e lo attaccavano perché vedevano in lui un demolitore di
dogmi. È incredibile la loro miopia: dall’opera di Darwin, che coincide
con la sua stessa vita, spira una religiosità profonda e seria, la gioia sobria
dell’uomo che dal groviglio estrae l’ordine, che si rallegra del misterioso
parallelismo fra la propria ragione e l’universo, e che nell’universo vede

un grande disegno. In queste pagine, di polemica aspra e quasi divertita
contro la tesi assurda che gli animali e le piante siano stati create belli
affinché siano ammirati dall’uomo, Darwin raggiunge la composta
bellezza del ragionamento strenuo e serrate. Negando all’uomo un posto
di privilegio nella creazione, riafferma col suo stesso coraggio intellet-
tuale la dignità dell’uomo. (RdR, OII 1383)9
[Darwin had many enemies: he has some still. They were the upholders
of religion, and they attacked him because they saw in him a destroyer of
dogmas. Their myopia is incredible: in Darwin’s work, as in his life, a deep
and serious religious spirit breathes, the sober joy of a man who extracts
order from chaos, who rejoices in the mysterious parallel between his own
reasoning and the universe, and who sees in the universe a grand design. In
these pages, in sharp and almost amusing polemic, directed against the
absurd thesis that animals and plants are created beautiful to be admired by
human beings, Darwin attains the harmonious beauty of strenuous and
rigorous reasoning. Denying man a privileged place in creation, he reaf-
firms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man].
In the context of the famous egg-shaped “grafo” that Levi put as a map
at the beginning of La ricerca delle radici, Darwin belongs to the line
called “La salvazione del capire” [Salvation through Knowledge]. He is in
good company: all the other authors in this lineage (Titus Lucretius
Carus, Sir William Bragg, and Arthur C. Clarke) represent good exam-
ples of how philosophical and scientific research needs powerful fantasy
to succeed. As Levi writes about the astronomer and science fiction writer
Arthur Clarke (and perhaps about himself ), a modern scientist “deve
avere fantasia, e (…) la fantasia si arricchisce prodigiosamente se il suo
titolare dispone di una formazione scientifica” (1504, emphasis in the
original) [must have imagination, and (…) imagination is vastly enriched
if its owner has enjoyed a scientific education]. Levi attributes almost the
same combination of imagination and scientific gaze to Darwin, although
in Darwin’s case Levi seems to acknowledge him as a scientist who was
also able to maintain, along with his rigor, a religious and joyous under-
standing of the cosmos. The non-believer Primo Levi, in fact, does not
recognize in Charles Darwin the prophet of “nature, red in tooth and
claw,” a line by Tennyson used by both Victorian defenders of Christian
222 D. Benvegnù
dogmas to attack evolution and contemporary evolutionary biologists as

Richard Dawkins.10 Neither does he seem convinced that Darwin belongs
to that regime of “spiritual vacuity” that, according to Max Weber, was a
consequence of science and scientific explanation, a “disenchantment” of
the world that “came with the belief that all natural phenomena might
someday be explained rationally” (Levine, xiii).11 Instead, Levi’s admira-
tion for Darwin finds origin in two different, complementary reasons.
On the one hand, Levi shares Darwin’s critique of anthropocentrism:
as he writes in his introductory note, for both Darwin and himself,
humanity does not have a privileged place in creation, and therefore it is
absurd to believe that animals and plants exist for our own aesthetical
and practical consumption. As we may remember, this belief also lies
behind Levi’s critique of Chiavacci’s article as we explored in section two,
and leads to a feeling of disconcertedness alien to the traditional,
Cartesian, idea of human mastery and completeness. As Levi writes at
the end of the short introduction, even the great answers about our pres-
ence in the world, such as Darwin’s, are instead there only to give rise to
big new questions (RdR, OII 1383). Yet, for Levi this anti-anthropocen-
trism does not necessarily mean diminishing the value of human dignity.
Quite the opposite: such awareness of both our participation as equals in
creation and our limited understanding of the cosmos is an example of
intellectual honesty capable of reaffirming the proper place of human-
kind in the universe, reacquiring therefore the original meaning of the
term “dignity.” This term, or rather its Latin ancestor dignitas, is in fact
already present in one of the foundational documents of Humanism,
that is, the famous oration Pico della Mirandola wrote in 1486, untitled
but traditionally called “De hominis dignitate.” As Giorgio Agamben
and several other scholars have pointed out, in Pico’s oration the term
“dignitas” is often mistranslated as “dignity” but it actually refers to the
(lack of ) rank, standing, or position of mankind in God’s creation
(Agamben 2002, 35–37). Although it is not supported by any specific
mentioning, we can read Levi’s references to human dignity in his com-
ment to Darwin as also a way to evoke and deconstruct Pico’s dignitas,
that is to say, to deny the anthropocentric and essentialist interpretation
that certain Humanism gave of this term. Levi’s ontological and ethical
position as expressed here is thus marked not only by necessary
humility, but also by what we may now call ecological consciousness, a

entanglement of knowledge and beauty that resembles the explorations
of contemporary ecologists such as, for instance, Barry Commoner.
On the other hand, Levi admires the British naturalist for the same
reasons why George Levine ironically claims that “Darwin Loves You.”
Using almost the same words as Levi, Levine argues that “a close reading
of Darwin (or at least of parts of Darwin) can put us in touch with the
possibility of the blending of reason and feeling, the potential humanity
of science, and can put us in touch as well with the wonders of the ordi-
nary movements of nature” (Levine, xviii). For him, Darwin’s prose, if
not as exactly beautiful as for Levi, is nonetheless “dazzlingly imagina-
tive”: not only is it “rich with ‘mind experiments’ that force readers out of
the comfortable niches of their thought,” but also “in the precision of its
particular engagements with nature, it implies a passion for it” (18) that
has few equivalents. The very act of trying to understand the world mate-
rially and naturalistically entails right from the outset of Darwin’s career
“the attitude of wonder that is so central, on all accounts, to the experi-
ence of enchantment” (24). Therefore, Levine concludes:
Darwin’s theory does not pretend to avert the evil that even the most
enchanted among us most experience and confront, but in the midst of the
clear-eyed, often pained perception of the natural processes, it sustains the
enchantment of the material world.
In such a world, enchantment is not easy or constant. It is never worth
having without an awareness, as Jane Bennet puts it, of “the world’s often
tragic complexity,” which can never be justified. But it allows for the pos-
sibility (in fact, I would argue it is a condition of the possibility) of caring
for the world, even with all its “tragic complexity.” (…) As we follow
Darwin’s tough geodicy we find ourselves in a world of wonders, a world
worth loving; we become participants and observers in a life larger than
any of us, and more meaningful. (25)
This complex mix of imperfection, awareness and meaningful enchant-

ment seems to match perfectly what Levi thinks of Darwin’s writing, as it
appears in La ricerca delle radici and elsewhere. For instance, in an article
entitled “Le farfalle,” Levi recalls again Darwin’s theory about the beauty
of butterflies. In this short journalistic prose originally published as a
224 D. Benvegnù
report about a contemporary butterfly exhibition in Turin, he also adds

that the source of beauty is quite the opposite of the dogmatic anthropo-
centric view. In fact, the very concept of beauty does not move from a
general idea of humankind to the natural world, but it is actually shaped
through a distinct pattern of relationships and mirroring between human
communities and the environment that surround them: “io penso che il
nostro concetto stesso della bellezza, necessariamente relativo e culturale,
si sia modellato nei secoli su di loro, come sulle stelle, sulle montagne e
sul mare”12 [I believe that our very concept of beauty, necessarily relative
and cultural, has over the centuries patterned itself on them, as on the
stars, the mountains, and the sea]. This aesthetics, that combines cultural
and environmental features, is also present, though less plainly, in a num-
ber of other essays in which Darwin’s theory is not directly at stake, but
where a similar fascination for the marvelous natures of insects is at
work.13 It is, however, in a short prose piece entitled “Le più liete creature
del mondo,” that Levi powerfully displays a combination of the same mix
of scientific rigor and aesthetic joyfulness he attributes to the Origins of
the Species.
The essay in question, also initially published in La Stampa, draws its
inspiration from another article devoted to Giacomo Leopardi’s Cantico del
gallo silvestre and written by writer and Semitic scholar Guido Ceronetti. We
will return to Ceronetti’s article because it will aid the transition from
Darwin to the other biblical myth of re-creation so dear to Levi. “Le più liete
creature del mondo” [The Most Joyful Creatures in the World] instead
quickly abandons the “gallo silvestre” to focus on Leopardi’s other ornitho-
logical “operetta morale,” the Elogio degli uccelli [Praise of the Birds]. Levi
maintains that decades of ethology have changed completely our
understanding of animal behavior, but “il discorso poetico che percepiamo
nella natura intorno a noi non si é interrotto”14 [the poetic discourse which
we perceive in the nature around us is not interrupted]. However, given such
modification, even Leopardi’s apparent message—namely, birds are the most
joyful creatures of the world—might have changed “intonazione e contenuto”
(AM, OII 805) [intonation and content]. Levi does not claim that Leopardi’s
message has lost value or meaning, and the operetta is in fact described as
characterized by “pagine limpide e ferme, valide in ogni tempo” (806) [lim-
pid, firm pages, valid for all times]. Levi’s main point concerns instead the
knowledge on which the poet from Recanati based his work. If only
Leopardi had built his writing on Konrad Lorenz instead of his contem-
porary Buffon, Levi asserts, he would have also discovered that bird songs
and movements have nothing to do with laughter or spontaneous vivac-
ity, but that they are behaviors dictated by issues of surviving. These
observations do not prove, of course, that “l’ammirazione per gli uccelli
non sia giustificata” [admiration for birds is not justified]: it is still fully
justified, but for reasons “diverse e più sottili” (807) [different and sub-
tler], directly offered by modern ethology. As he did in “Romanzi dettati
dai grilli,” Levi moves on to displaying for his readers some of these new
virtues of birds as short stories constantly marked by the presence of the
term “meraviglia” [wonder]. But it is the very end of the article that
deserves our attention:
Gli uccelli, insomma, come altri animali, non sanno fare tutte le cose che
facciamo noi, ma sanno farne altre che noi non sappiamo fare, o non altret-
tanto bene, o solo se aiutati da strumenti. Se l’esperimento che Leopardi
sognava potesse essere realizzato, rientreremmo nelle nostre spoglie umane
con parecchie frecce in più al nostro arco. (809)
[Birds, like other animals, do not know how to do all the things we do,
but perhaps know how to do other things that we do not know how to do,
or not as well, or only with the help of instruments. If the experiment
dreamed of by Leopardi could be realized, we would resume our human
form with several more arrows for our bow in our quiver]
This final paragraph highlights two major points. On the “scientific”

side, Levi confirms his anti-anthropocentrism and an attention to differ-
ences he had also stressed in the short note on Darwin. Birds are indeed
different from humans, and recognizing both such difference and our
reciprocal limitations is not detrimental for either humans or other ani-
mals. On the “literary” side, instead, Levi subtly ratifies something he had
written in “Romanzi dettati dai grilli.” The experiment dreamed by
Leopardi, or rather by Leopardi’s character Amelio, is to be transformed
into a bird and experience life as one of “le più liete creature del mondo.”
Therefore, Levi is suggesting once again that experiencing life as an animal
would enrich our experience, especially—but not necessarily—if we are
professional writers. As several scholars have noticed, dreams of flight and
226 D. Benvegnù
a general “ornithology” are constant themes in Levi’s oeuvre. We have

already explored, for example, the difficult—at once ambivalent and
reinvigorating—identification with a bird of prey in “Trattamento di
quiescenza,” or the hideous and incomplete transformation of men into
vultures of “Angelica farfalla.” As Belpoliti writes, however, it is in Levi’s
poetry that the ornithological taxonomy finds its peak: seagulls, crows,
eagles, nightingales, sparrows, blackbirds, little parrots, owls (Belpoliti
1997, 207). Still, most of these birds can be read as memories of
Auschwitz (“Il canto del corvo”), or symbolize the damages of our con-
sumerist society (“I gabbiani di Settimo”), or even refer to cultural narra-
tives usually understood negatively (the “Promethean” vulture of
“Siderius Nuncius”15). There is nonetheless one occurrence in which a
positive message is attached to a bird-like experience and it is indeed
crucial.
The short story “La grande mutazione” [The Great Mutation] belongs
to the collection entitled Racconti e saggi, published for the first time in
1986, and, in some ways, it is a response to “Angelica farfalla.” The pro-
tagonist of the story, Isabella, is a young girl who develops a pair of beau-
tiful bird wings, feathers and all, on her back. She is the first case in her
village of what a young and nice “dottorino della mutua” (RS, OII 869)
[National Health Service doctor] calls the great mutation, a process that
is going to affect almost the whole community, the doctor himself
included. Not everybody, though, is happy: Isabella’s father, for instance,
cannot get used to his wings and “cosí se le fece amputare” (872) [so he
asked to amputate them]. Yet, Isabella’s experience is very different, and
the narrator’s point of view embraces completely her positive perspective,
maybe ironically recalling the dream of a perfect “Über-Bird-Man” of “Il
sesto giorno.” Furthermore, Isabella’s first amazing flight with the new
wings, with a new body, ends with her first menstrual period, meaning
that the status of maturity was achieved when she became a new—hybrid,
bird-like—creature. Although the narrative is very linear, scholars dis-
agree as to the significance of “La grande mutazione,” especially when
they compare it to the earlier story about the aborted Nazi scientific
experiment. Charlotte Ross, for instance, claims that “the bodily
metamorphosis is normalized, portrayed Isabella as a metaphor of our
existing creative powers enabled through sexual development in puberty,
or as a developmental phenomenon that need not disrupt daily life as we

know it” (Ross, 154). This interpretation, which stresses creative power,
implicitly seems to contradict Jonathan Usher’s reading, wherein he
maintains that flight in Levi’s work shows instead the illusion of what he
calls “the Boethian optimism of man, uniquely conceived amongst ani-
mals to look heavenwards, and desirous of wings to take flight” (Usher
1996, 215). For Usher, there is a constant implicit tension between posi-
tive and negative connotations of flight in Levi, and therefore flight itself
is not an answer (209–210). His opinion is shared by other Levi scholars,
who stressed how, within “La grande mutazione,” there are other mani-
festations of disillusion. As Elisabeth Lesquoy pointed out, if through
Isabella’s flight Primo Levi transcends time and space, at the end of the
story he brings us back to a world in which having wings is not perceived
as a miracle (Isabella’s father) or in which Isabella’s love-crush (the doctor)
fled away with a “normal” woman: as she explicitly states, the only pos-
sible and acceptable miracle seems to be one of life daily renewed
(Lesquoy, 1).
These two interpretations of “La grande mutazione” as creative power
and disillusion are not mutually exclusive if we focus on the animal fea-
tures rather than on flight. They reveal the complexity of Levi’s creativity,
forming an experiential tangle whose truth has been only partially syn-
thetized by Usher when he claims that for Levi “recall without prior expe-
rience, wisdom without suffering, are dead-ends” (Usher 1996, 215).
Whether this formula is valid for the whole of Levi’s oeuvre, it has none-
theless the merit of introducing a discourse of suffering that takes us back
to that article by Ceronetti that was the original trigger for Levi’s “Le più
liete creature del mondo.”16
In his short essay, Ceronetti connects Leopardi’s myth of the apocalyp-
tic “gallo silvestre” to another important biblical myth about the power
of suffering and creation, that is, the story of Job. Given that Job is a
recurrent figure in Levi’s oeuvre, brought up any time suffering is at stake,
this connection can be most likely counted as one of the reasons why Levi
was particularly intrigued by Ceronetti’s piece.17 Levi’s general fascination
for Job is not surprising: scholars have underlined how the Book of Job
“has indeed been appealed to a very great deal in the aftermath of the
Holocaust” (Tollerton, 1).18 Despite the numerous references scattered
228 D. Benvegnù
throughout his testimonial reflections, it is nonetheless in La ricerca delle

radici that Levi fully discloses the reasons behind his interest in Job. In
the introduction to the anthology, he in fact assigns Job “la primogeni-
tura” [the primogeniture], and therefore his story not only opens the
whole series of texts, but his name also heads the egg-shaped “grafo” we
have already mentioned. On the other side of the egg Levi puts “buchi
neri” [black holes], a feature to which we will return shortly. In the intro-
duction to the few passages he picked from Ceronetti’s translation of the
Book of Job, Levi explains why he starts with Job (RdR, OII 1369). He
claims that Job’s story—labeled as “splendida e atroce” [magnificent and
harrowing]—encapsulates the questions of all the ages, “quelle a cui
l’uomo non non ha trovato risposta finora né la troverà mai, ma la
cercherà sempre perché ne ha bisogno per vivere, per capire se stesso e il
mondo” (1369) [those for which man has never to this day found an
answer, nor will he ever find one, but he will always search for it because
he needs it in order to live]. For Levi, Job is the just man oppressed by
injustice, victim of a cruel wager between God and Satan about his faith
and probably, as Ticciati pointed out, about his identity.19 Before such a
patently unfair bet, Levi continues, “Giobbe il giusto, degradato come un
animale da esperimento, si comporta come farebbe ognuno di noi” (RdR,
OII 1369) [Job the Just, degraded to an animal for an experiment, com-
ports himself as any of us would].
The simile here with an “animale da esperimento” cannot but recall
what we have already said about the “animale-uomo” in Auschwitz, and
indeed the language utilized by Levi is almost the same. In a condition of
extreme suffering, for Levi Job is not simply a human being, but a hybrid
creature whose literary status has been already defined in the second sec-
tion of this book. Similar discourse can be applied to the ambivalence of
that “noi,” easily taken for granted but that instead hides—as Jonathan
Druker suggested20—an identitarian dilemma we have already explored
in the previous sections. Yet, Levi’s comment focuses on Job’s response to
the wager and then to the corresponding answer from God:
Dapprima china il capo e loda Dio (…), poi le sue difese crollano. Povero,
orbato dei figli, coperto di piaghe, siede tra i rifiuti grattandosi con un coc-
cio, e contende con Dio. È una contesa disuguale: Dio creatore di meravi-
glie e di mostri lo schiaccia sotto la sua onnipotenza. (RdR, OII 1369)
[at first he lowers his head and praises God (…), then his defenses col-
lapse. Poor, bereft of his children, covered in boils, he sits among the ashes,
scraping himself with a potsherd, and contends with God. It is an equal
contest: God the Creator of marvels and monsters crushes him beneath his
omnipotence]
Some scholars have read Levi’s conclusion almost exclusively as a mani-

festation of impotent resignation. Alford, for example, interprets this
final passage as a clear sign of Levi’s depression (Alford, 103–105).21
Whether this interpretation is correct, the fact that in other works Levi
explicitly links Job to what happened in Nazi Germany does increase the
sense that there is at least an overlap between not only Levi the prisoner
and the biblical figure, but also between Auschwitz and what God’s
speech at the end of the episode represents.22 Levi in fact refuses the
“happy ending” offered by the last chapter of the Book of Job, calling it
“apocrifo,” “assurdo,” and “sconcertante” [apocryphal, absurd, discon-
certing]. For him, Job’s lamentation is instead “una delle cose più disper-
ate che mai siano state scritte” [one of the most desperate things ever
written] precisely because it does not claim for any falsely pacifying con-
clusion.23 Yet, if we focus on God’s final two speeches, they offer us a
different interpretation of Levi’s interest in the Book of Job, not based
exclusively on irreparable suffering, but rather on the power of disruption
and re-creation implicit in the story.
To explore this different reading, we must begin by recalling which
chapters of the Book of Job Levi decides to anthologize. If the first three
anthologized passages belong to different dramatic moments of Job’s con-
tention with God (chapters 3, 7, 14), the last three present instead God’s
answer to the man, in which two famous monsters, the Behemoth and
the Leviathan, are described at length (chapters 38, 40, 41). As William
Brown pointed out, in both of God’s speeches Job “is taken on a grand
tour of creation’s fringes, a cosmic field trip on unimaginable proportion”
(Brown, 126). In this imaginary journey, he seems to experience the
whole process that leads from the desolate creation of the stars to the
kaleidoscopic carnival of animals, till the encounter with what has been
interpreted as the symbol of chaos, that is, the Leviathan, the only animal
in the whole Bible to which an entire chapter is devoted. Most of the
images displayed by God, however, are images of animals, from the lions
230 D. Benvegnù
of 38:39 to the eagle of 39:39, to the two giant beasts, traditionally inter-
preted as a hippopotamus and a crocodile respectively, with which the
speeches end. In a sense, the whole of God’s discourse in the whirlwind
can be read almost as a repetition or reflection, on a cosmic level, of Job
12:7–10, in which Job himself invites his friends to “ask now the beasts,
and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee
(…) Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath
wrought this?.” More importantly, though, Job can be also interpreted as
a double image of Adam, as indeed a new Adam who has first to witness
to a de-creation, losing every single thing which made his existential
identity, and then again to the re-creation of a cosmos full of incredible
creatures.24 This time, though, the new Adam is not invited to have
dominion or to name the animals; he is not called to be again the owner
of “seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred
yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses,” as he is described having in Job
1:3. Instead, as Brown notices, by the means of God’s incredibly detailed
speeches, Job is encouraged to see what looks like a ruthless life through
“a perspective that is God’s, but one that the animals also share. (…) Job’s
Earth trek is no descent but an ascent to Nature” (W. Brown, 128).25 At
the end of God’s speeches, Job is therefore understandably overwhelmed,
but this feeling offers him the opportunity to change the wrong concept
of being the peak of creation he might have inherited by the old account
of Genesis and by his own human success:
Job is no isolated creation and clearly not the apex of the created order.
Rather, he is created with his monstrous twin [the Behemoth], who receives
the credit of being born “first” or “best” (rē’šît, 40:19). But unlike the bibli-
cal character of Jacob, Job has no recourse to steal his elder twin’s birth-
right. Job finds himself to be a monster’s companion, and by extension, a
companion to all the monsters of the margin, the aliens of the world. (130)
According to Brown, the whirlwind speeches do annihilate the old Job

with the exhibition of the vast creation, but they also inaugurate the pos-
sibility of a new community, in which humanity is just a part of a world
of mutual limitrophy and wonder. Although the smallest display of the
creational power of God (the stars, for example) would have been
sufficient to convince Job of the necessity of such re-created identity, the

two monsters—and the Behemoth particularly—enlarge the spectrum to
include what is fearsome and more foreign. From a literary perspective,
this point is also drawn by Rachel Muers in an article entitled “The
Animal We Write On: Encountering Animals in Texts.” Muers maintains
that, generally speaking, the presence of animals in sacred texts “seems to
invite a pause before reading. They make the text more opaque, they
invite attention to the materiality of the book” (Muers, 139). In the Book
of Job, this opacity is obtained by the seemingly unreasonable appearance
of the Behemoth—a term that she etymologically translates as “all the
beasts,” “summed up (or whatever the animal equivalent of ‘personified’
would be) in a single larger than-life beastie” (145). In fact, Muers states
that
Job is invited to look at Behemot because he has something in common

with him/it—namely that they are both creatures. (…) This has two func-
tions. First, once Job or the reader has been freed from the need to define
himself primarily by or as non-beastliness, Job or the reader might be able
to rethink the ways in which he understands himself and the ‘beasts’. He
may not be the same as Behemot, but, when he does not need to base his
identity on the exclusion of Behemot, he might be able to see his own
‘beastly’ characteristic more clearly. Second, both Job and Behemot (and all
the other ‘beasts’) have a relation to God that renders them properly
ungraspable. (145)
The “particular and puzzling selves” (145) that both the Behemoth in
the world and the Behemoth in the texts embody are then on the one
hand a reminder of the community that Job and “all animals” share, a
community based on a material difference rather than on a phantasmatic
identity, on embodied existence rather than on metaphysical essence. On
the other hand, what is fundamental is the monster’s resistance to any
attempts to reduce its life to the possible interpretations that we, as
humans, can give to it; it is a resistance that thus rejects any easy and
taken-for-granted attributions to any creature.
Read from this angle, Levi’s interest in the story of Job takes on a differ-
ent meaning. Even what Alford calls Levi’s easiness “to move directly from
232 D. Benvegnù
the Book of Job to Black Holes,” cannot be interpreted as a mere sign of

oblivion, of Levi’s compliance of “being swallowed by the endless night”
(Alford, 104). Alford, and with him other scholars who read Levi’s identi-
fication with Job only as a negative sign of his depression, have of course
their reasons for making such a statement. It is in fact true that the term
“mostri” Levi uses for the Book of Job does name the black holes in the
desolate introduction of the last anthologized passage of La ricerca delle
radici (“i nuovi mostri celesti,” RdR, OII 1524). Moreover, a late article of
Levi’s about the rising Nazi revisionism and the Gulag/Lager distinction is
entitled “Buco nero di Auschwitz” (OII 1321–1342): although we cannot
be certain about the author of the title and the expression does not appear
in the content of the article, date and image somehow suggest a possible
overlap between the biblical, the astronomical, and the Holocaust con-
texts. Finally, we must also notice that the closing rhetorical question of
La ricerca delle radici, about human dignity being able to syllogize about
black holes and therefore to conquer “la paura, il bisogno e il dolore” (RdR,
OII 1524) [fear, poverty, and grief ], might sound quite preposterous. To
borrow a Gramscian famous motto, it seems more a counterintuitive opti-
mism of the will than anything else. Yet, this is not enough to justify an
exclusively symptomatic, and therefore negative, interpretation of Levi’s
fascination for Job. Instead, we must pay attention to how his animal
imagery functions within the overall narrative of de-creation and re-cre-
ation that is taking place in his body of work; how their presence fights
back the “siamo soli” (1524) [we are alone] Levi seems to leave us as his
final message. Specifically, we must return to the dual etymology of the
term monstrum which we have mentioned in the previous section on
techne. On the one hand, the Latin monstrare (to show or to display) reads
the monster as something that appears in front of our eyes, that is sud-
denly displayed. On the other hand, the Latin “monere” (to warn) tells
instead that the monster is a divine omen, a portent. Both etymological
lineages hold a meaning of “monster” as a creaturely event that can teach
us something. But what can Job learn from God’s display of portents?
Levi’s Job consciously portrays a desperation that nobody and noth-
ing can alleviate. The “contro-creazione” named Auschwitz and the
cruel bet between God and Satan seem to be the same: both crush the
“animale-uomo” Job beneath their fearful power and leave him with
memories that can only harm and to which his friends hardly listen.
Yet, through his selection of material, Levi decides also to stress that in
the Book of Job a re-creation follows the destruction. This re-creation
displayed by God in the whirlwind, though, is not simply the restora-
tion of the old order of things, of the old dominion over the earth. As
we have suggested, it involves instead a new chaosmos, namely, what
Philip Kuberski, drawing from both science and religion, calls “a uni-
tary and yet untotalized, a chiasmic concept of the world as a field of
mutual and simultaneous interference and convergence, and interani-
mation of the subjective and the objective, an endless realm of chance
which nevertheless displays a persistent tendency toward pattern and
order” (Kuberski, 3). Both in this new world and in God’s re-creation
as it is depicted in the last chapters of the Book of Job, the human self
cannot be identified without its animal features. Rather, it belongs to a
community of creatures that goes beyond the single unity without
denying neither the fearful, alien, aspects implied in this selfless trans-
formation nor the ultimate sense of unique presence of each creature.
God’s speeches indeed respond by overwhelming Job with wonders and
monsters, but they also allude to a new Job who partakes in and exist
within this new creation.
Primo Levi did not explicitly mention this option in his essays. Yet, we
must recall that, as Job, he did experience in and after Auschwitz some-
thing very much comparable to the whirlwind of which God speaks. It is
therefore inevitable that he identifies very closely with the overwhelmed
human-animal Job. However, Levi is not only Job, but, as a writer, he also
shares some elements with God: he, too, is a Creator of marvels and mon-
sters (“creatore di meraviglie e di mostri”), who displays them to show
Job a different way to be human.
This double identification is so significant that we can implicitly read
it even behind the account of Levi’s first excursion outside the Lager, as
narrated in La Tregua:
In quei giorni e in quei luoghi, poco dopo il passaggio del fronte, un vento
alto spirava sulla faccia della terra: il mondo intorno a noi sembrava ritor-
nare al Caos primigenio, e brulicava di esemplari umani scaleni, difettivi,
abnormi. (LT, OI 226)
234 D. Benvegnù
[In those days and in those parts, soon after the front had passed by, a
high wind was blowing over the face of the earth; the world around us
seemed to have return to primeval Chaos, and was swarming with scalene,
defective, abnormal human specimens]
Here Levi describes his first experience of freedom after Auschwitz, as

characterized by two intertwined elements. First a high wind that inevi-
tably suggests a new, natural, pneuma capable of re-creating the world
after the destruction of the concentration camp. Second, a re-creational
chaos different from the useless confusion of the Lager. It is in fact a
“Caos primigenio,” a return to a time and space in which even humanity
appears to have lost those specificities that have been traditionally consid-
ered as its own (and, accidentally, cheered by the Nazis as the manifesta-
tion of the pure Arian race: balance, lack of defects, normality). As in the
Book of Job, this “Caos primigenio” opens to a world in which abnormal
humans, monstrous “animali-uomini” are recognized as such, but they
are not so alien. After the whirlwind, the divide among different crea-
tures, and particularly between human and not-human animals, is not so
abyssal anymore. Instead, a new sense of community, a different under-
standing of identity, and a re-enchantment of the world, is possible.
This theme of the “Caos primigenio” is recurrent in Levi’s work. We
have already seen, for instance, the centaur myth as described in “Quaestio
de Centauris.” Yet, it is in a different story that this “panspermia,” as Levi
calls this combination of primeval Chaos and re-enchanted world,
becomes the main topic. Entitled “Disfilassi,” this story tells of an episode
in the life of Amelia, a university student who is about to take an impor-
tant exam. As readers, we follow her thoughts and, by the end, we are told
that she is part of an incredible mutation of the human species, the “dis-
filassi” of the title. This mutation allows the most bizarre extra-specific
combinations among different creatures, as demonstrated by the same
Amelia who has—through her paternal great-grandmother—some “larch
tree” in her blood. The outcome is a re-creation capable of giving birth of
a community of hybrids, in which the few nonhybrid humans are mocked
by the extra-diegetic narrator for their humanistic attachment to those
alleged good old times that had given two world wars to humanity (L,
OII 93). Although the university exam does not go as Amelia hoped, the
atmosphere of the whole story is saturated by an enthusiasm “strano e

meraviglioso” [strange and wonderful] towards this infinite combinatory
chaosmos full of desire. This joy finds its climax at the very end when, after
her exam, Amelia goes to the woods:
Si fermò davanti ad un ciliegio in fiore: ne accarezzò il tronco lucido in cui

si sentiva salire la linfa, ne toccò leggera i nodi gommosi, poi si guardò
intorno e l’abbracciò stretto, e le parve che l’albero le rispondesse con una
pioggia di fiori. Se li scosse di dosso ridendo: «Sarebbe bello se mi capitasse
come alla bisnonna!» Ebbene, perché no? Era meglio Fabio o il ciliegio?
Meglio Fabio, senza dubbio, non bisogna cedere agli impulsi del momento:
ma in quel momento Amelia fu consapevole di desiderare che in qualche
modo il ciliegio entrasse in lei, fruttificasse in lei. Giunse alla radura e si
sdraiò tra le felci, felce lei stessa, sola leggera e flessibile nel vento. (99)
[She stopped before a flowering cherry tree: she caressed its shiny trunk,
feeling the sap rise, lightly touched by its rubbery nodes, then looking
around, she embraced it tightly, and it seemed to her that the tree responded
with a rain of flowers. She shook them off, laughing: “It might be beautiful
if what happened to my great-grandmother happened to me!” Well, why
not? Was Fabio better, or the cherry tree? Fabio was better, no doubts, one
needn’t yield to the impulse of the moment; but at that moment Amelia
was aware of a desire that in some way the cheery tree enter her, fructify in
her. She reached the clearing and lay down among the ferns, a fern herself,
alone, light, and supple in the wind; CW, 1440]
Amelia desires the tree, and the language of the whole scene is strangely,
for Levi, sexualized. As Charlotte Ross has pointed out, this language
leads to a dream of fertile repopulation, and “repopulation is (…) a polit-
ical statement, against the Nazi genocide, and Amelia’s fecundity is a ges-
ture of defiance” (Ross, 157). Indeed, the new coherent entropy of this
hybrid chaosmos seems to mirror the dreadful organized entropy of pain
and suffering in Auschwitz. More specifically, the second creation repre-
sented in this story responds to the “controcreazione” of the concentration
camp: the marvelous animal monsters created by the “disfilassi” reverse
the imposed bestialization of the concentration camp.
From this perspective, Amelia can be thus read as a mirror image of Job
after the creator/Levi exposes her, and thus his readers, to his own
236 D. Benvegnù
imaginary “panspermic” whirlwind. She is in fact the reversal of the

humanistic idea of enclosed purity and symmetric perfection, to the
point that she has been addressed by some scholars as an embodiment of
postanthropocentric posthumanism (Ross, 158). More importantly, she
belongs to a world that is enchanted precisely because there are not strict
identities detached from bodily presence, and in which humans poten-
tially share features with all the other creatures. A new sense of an (im)
possible animal community spreads from “Disfilassi:” a community in
which even though Amelia is alone at the end of the story, it is not because
she cannot find anything human in the whole universe. Instead, she
acknowledges a different way to say “I,”26 a way through which she is
both unique and a constant part of the whirlwind, of that wind respon-
sible for the whole re-creation. Paraphrasing Esposito, we may actually
say that she refuses to be immune, rejecting the logic of immunization
that belongs to biopolitical power, and opening instead herself to a new
idea of humanness and more-than-human communitas (Esposito 2006).
From the perspective of the whole of Levi’s oeuvre, the writer is thus the
recreational force able to respond to Auschwitz by re-enchanting the
world through a “scrivere nuovo” that implies a new limitrophy between
humanity, animality, and everything alive. This entangled, re-creational,
and communal limitrophy lies indeed at the core of Levi’s testimony.
We began this second chapter on Levi’s creative process wondering
about the enigmatic and ambiguous Vilmy. We remarked how the epony-
mous story deals with the same imprisonment Levi experienced in
Auschwitz and afterwards, offering an intricate but quite pessimistic atti-
tude toward the relations between testimony and identity. Yet, the end of
“Vilmy” alludes also to a refreshing air/wind that is a constant presence in
Levi’s narratives of re-creation. Wind is also a key feature of “Le isole del
vento,” a story in which Levi creates an animal as well, this time with the
opposite goal of expressing a creation chaotic and regenerative. The ways
the animals are described in “Le isole del vento” forced us to consider the
possible source of Primo Levi, and we found it in Charles Darwin. We
underlined how Levi seems to refer to Darwin’s theories of “struggle for
life” and “survival of the fittest” to understand what happened in
Auschwitz. However, there is another Darwin dear to Levi. This second
Darwin is not only a severe critic of anthropocentrism, but also one of the
first modern scientists who proposed a new enchantment of the world

based on the wonders of nature. This new enchantment is directly applied
by Levi in an article devoted to Leopardi’s “Elogio degli uccelli,” in which
he claims that updated ornithological knowledge does not deny the poet-
ical value of the dream of becoming a bird. This becoming is in fact the
subject of a short story, “La grande mutazione,” in which the transforma-
tion into a hybrid human-bird creature reveals the controversial nature of
this wonder, but also new possibilities of human identities.
The Book of Job seems to gather these possibilities. Although scholars
have recognized the overlap between Levi and Job in terms of suffering,
nobody has explored another possible reason behind Levi’s fascination for
the biblical text. The fragments selected for La ricerca delle radici stress
not only Job’s protest, but also the final two whirlwind speeches. Our
analysis underlined how they display an animal imagery that forces Job to
re-forge his own identity in terms of community, wonder, and limitrophy
with the other creatures. Muers’s analysis of the Behemot also helped us
to think about the biblical appearance of animals in a more literary fash-
ion, this mythical monster being both an image of the resistance of liter-
ary animals to classification and a manner of revelation. Such appearance
at the end of God’s speeches affects Job, crushing him but also offering a
new sense of his own creature-ness. From this perspective, Job’s story
offers Levi a narrative of re-creation based on what we called chaosmos: an
intertwined world in which identities and limits are still present, but they
are not so exclusive anymore. This chaosmos provides Levi means for
fighting the counter-creation in which he was involved, not re-establishing
his old Cartesian ghosts of human autonomy, but through a literary prac-
tice that stresses fluid, anti-immune, and vulnerable communities over
fixed, protected identifications. This is the case, for instance, of the short
story entitled “Disfilassi,” in which the young Isabella embraces Levi’s
version of Job’s whirlwind and acquires the joy of being part of a new
community of hybrid creatures. This whirlwind is also Levi’s creative
power, which displays a textual world of wonderful and fearful animals to
give to himself and to us, the readers, the possibility—maybe never fully
achievable, always stretched between familiarity and strangeness—to
question who we allegedly are and enjoy instead a re-enchanted world in
which there is no need for human dominion.
238 D. Benvegnù
Notes
1. VF, OI 631: “Invece quella creatura, che era coperta di un lucido pelame
nero, si muoveva con la grazia sciolta e tacita dei felini: stranamente teneva
lo sguardo fisso su Paul e il muso puntato nella sua direzione, ma si diresse
quieta verso Virginia; nonstante la sua mole (doveva pesare almeno otto
chili) le balzò leggera sulle ginocchia e vi si sdraiò. Solo allora sembrò
accorgersi della mia presenza: mi lanciava a intevalli brevi occhiate inter-
rogative. Aveva grandi occhi celesti dalle lunghe ciglia, orecchie appuntite e
mobili, quasi diafane, e una lunga coda glabra, di un rosa livido” [CW, 638:
“Instead, this creature, covered in a shiny coat of black fur, moved with the
nimble and hushed grace of a feline. Oddly, it stared fixedly at Paul, with
its muzzle pointed in his direction, but went quietly toward Virginia;
despite its bulk (it must have weighed at least nine kilos) it jumped lightly
onto her lap and lay down. Only then did it seem to notice my presence,
sporadically throwing me quick questioning glances. It had big blue eyes
and long lashes, pointed, twitching, nearly transparent ears that culmi-
nated in two peculiar tufts of light fur, and a long, hairless, pale pink tail.”]
2. Cf. for example Angier (2002), 571–572.
3. The most exhaustive exploration of this metaphor is in Baldasso (2007),
in which strangely the “Vilmy” is not mentioned.
4. I slightly changed the translation here, adding the term “niche,” present
in the original Italian, but disappeared in Woolf ’s translation.
5. The episode of the cow is in LT, OI 209–210.
6. This is the version of the King James Bible: “The wolf also shall dwell
with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf
and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead
them.”
7. For an etymological discussion of the term ruah, see the Institute for
Biblical and Scientific Studies website: http://www.bibleandscience.
com/bible/books/genesis/genesis1_wind.htm
8. In the footnote, Levi refers directly to the “Scientific American” of June
1970, but it does not offer the precise article. The article read by Levi, how-
ever, should be the one entitled “The Origin of Galaxies” written by M.J. Rees
and J. Silk, in Scientific American, Vol. 222, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 26–35.
9. Although Levi gives only the name of the press, the edition he is quoting
is the translation made by Giovani Canestrini for the Istituto Editoriale
Italiano of Milano. Correctly Levi claims that such edition does not have
a specific date of publishing, but he infers that the volume was published
in the early twenties. What Levi does not say, but it may be interesting,
is that such edition belongs to a series named “Gli Immortali,” created
and directed by Luigi Luzzati e Ferdinando Martini. Luigi Luzzati
(1841–1927), albeit having the same surname as Levi’s grandfather, was
not directly related to Primo Levi’s family: he was born in Venice and
became an important Italian politician and Italy’s second Jewish prime
minister (after Alessandro Fortis).
10. The quotation belongs to chapter 56 of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In
Memoriam A. H. H., published in 1850, nine years before the first edi-
tion of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. However, Tennyson’s line about
the apparent conflict between love as the basis of the Christian religion
and the callousness of nature, became immediately part of the contem-
porary debate on the evolutionary theories. More recently, Richard
Dawkins used ‘red in tooth and claw’ in his The Selfish Gene to summa-
rize his theory according to which the behavior of all living things arises
out of the survival-of-the-fittest doctrine.
11. The theory of scientific disenchantment of the world is specifically elabo-
rated by Max Weber in his “Science as a Vocation” (1918–1919).
12. First with the title “Farfalle, fate e streghe” in Levi (1981). Then, as “Le
farfalle,” in AM, OII 752.
13. Cf. for instance in AM, essays such as “Il salto della pulce” (725–729) or
“Gli scarabei” (790–794).
14. First in Levi (1983), with the different title “Nel nido del cuculo.” Then,
in AM, OII 805.
15. The poems belong respectively to AOI, OII 524 and 538; p. 551 and
578. “I gabbiani di settimo” has its double as one of the imaginary inter-
views with animals Levi published on “Airone;” now, in OII 1335.
16. See Ceronetti (1983). The subtitle immediately mentions what is at
stake in the article: “Tra Giobbe, Saffo, e il profeta: Giacomo era alunno
dell’Oriente?”
17. The connections between Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, and Job have
been investigated by Baldini (2002).
18. Another interesting contribution on this subject is Alford (2009).
During our discussion on Levi’s usage of the Book of Job, it will become
apparent, I hope, why my reading differs from Alford’s interpretation,
which is exclusively based on Levi’s testimonial literature, and therefore
overlooks completely his other books.
19. See Ticciati (2005).
20. Cf. Druker, 54: “I argue that Levi’s ‘we’ is, at times, positioned within an
imagined community of scientists who look into the camp from the out-
240 D. Benvegnù
side, objectifying the victims and leaving them without an authentic voice
that can testify to the injustice they have suffered. The characteristics of
this ‘we’ reveal the tension between Levi’s embrace of the scientific method,
as an expression of human dignity, and his encounter with the social
Darwinism used by the Nazis to justify the creation of Auschwitz. The
dilemma for the rational humanist is that Darwin’s potent theory, a credit
to the acuity of the human mind, actually dethrones humans, transform-
ing them into animals subject to exploitation and even natural selection.”
21. About Alford’s interpretation, Tollerton has correctly pointed out that
“while Levi’s view of the divine speeches is discussed in After the Holocaust,
it is quickly sidelined” (Tollerton, 36).
22. A very interesting reference is in an essay included in L’altrui mestiere and
entitled “Il pugno di Renzo.” In this short article devoted to another
Italian writer, Alessandro Manzoni, Levi writes that, in the famous
“monatti” episode of I promessi sposi, “è adombrato il più grande dei
dubbi che affliggono gli animi religiosi, il problema dei problemi, il per-
ché del male. È l’enigma su cui si tormentano Giobbe e Ivan Karamazov,
e la macchia più nera sulla Germania di Hitler: perché gli innocenti?Perché
i bambini? Perché la Provvidenza si ferma davanti alla malvagità umana
e al dolore del mondo?” (AM, OII 700). Curiously, despite the presence
of Ivan Karamazov here, Levi claimed several times that he did not like
Dostoevskij; see, for example, RdR, OII 1364.
23. On Levi’s rejection of the “apocryphal” ending, see also Tesio (1983).
24. Cf. Meier (1989).
25. On this topic, see also Wilson (2006).
26. “Un modo diverso di dire ‘io’” [A different way of saying “I”] is the title
Levi gives to the passage from Thomas Mann’s Le storie di Giacobbe he
anthologizes in RdR, OII 1435–1443. On the importance of this expres-
sion in the whole of Levi’s oeuvre, see Cavaglion (2002), 85–91.
Works Cited
Alford, C. Fred. After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to
Affliction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
2002.
Baldasso, Franco. Il cerchio di gesso. Bologna: Pendragon, 2007.
Baldini, Anna. “Primo Levi e i poeti del dolore (Da Giobbe a Leopardi).” Nuova
Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 5.1 (2002): 161–203.
Cavaglion, Alberto. Ebrei senza saperlo. Napoli: L’ancora del Mediterraneo,
2002.
Ceronetti, Guido. “Leopardi e il gallo cosmico.” La Stampa, November 18,
1983.
Cinquegrani, Alessandro. “L’isola paradigma del mondo ovvero la lezione di
Charles Darwin per Primo Levi.” In Insularità: immagini e rappresentazioni
nella narrativa sarda del Novecento, ed. I. Crotti, 87–108. Roma: Bulzoni,
2011.
Esposito, Roberto. Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità. Torino:
Einaudi, 2006.
Levi, Primo. La ricerca delle radici. Torino: Einaudi, 1981.
Levi, Primo. “Nel nido del cuculo.” La Stampa, November 27, 1983.
Meier, Sam. “Job I-II: A Reflection of Genesis I-III.” Vetus Testamentum, 39.2
(April 1989): 183–193.
Tesio, Giovanni. “L’enigma del tradurre. Intervista a Primo Levi.” Nuova Società,
June 18, 1983.
Ticciati, Susannah. Job and the Disruption of Identity. London: T&T Clark,
2005.
Usher, Jonathan. “Levi’s Science Fiction and the Humanoid.” Journal of the
Institute of Romance Languages 4 (1996): 199–216.
Wilson, O. Edward. The Creation. An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. New York:
Norton, 2006.
8
Conclusion. Animal Testimony
One of the last articles Primo Levi published before his tragic death on
April 11, 1987, is devoted to the theme of origins and creation. Entitled
“Argilla di Adamo” [Adam’s Clay], the article was published in La Stampa
on February 15, and is essentially a review of the Italian edition of Graham
Cairns-Smith’s controversial book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. Levi
does not seem fully convinced by what became famous as “the clay
hypothesis” conveyed in the book, namely, that the primordial structure
that provided for transfer of information at the origin of life could have
been a clay-type inorganic substance. Nonetheless, he acknowledges the
importance of such new and fascinating hypothesis (OII 1329), probably
because, as Belpoliti suggests in the notes to the text, it also resonates with
his own theories as expressed in an article entitled “L’asimmetria e la vita”
[Asymmetry and Life] and published in La Stampa three years earlier.
Although directed to a popular audience, in this earlier article Levi had in
fact sketched out what is the most audacious theoretical attempt of his
double career, combining modern chemistry and several of his favorite
themes (from his preference for impurity to the fascination for Carbon)
to build a cosmology based upon the creative power of asymmetry. In a
sense, both the image of Job overwhelmed by the whirlwind of animals as

244 D. Benvegnù
presented by God’s speeches and the panspermia of “Disfilassi” with

which we concluded the previous section can be read as expressions of
this very same cosmology. Given the personal importance of the subject,
it is thus not surprising that Levi ends “Argilla di Adamo” with a sentence
that reflects his own work. Wondering about the longevity of Graham
Cairns-Smith’s theory, the last paragraph of this article maintains the pos-
sibly positive impact of such a new idea, in between chemistry and geol-
ogy, and concludes reaffirming one of Levi’s favorite literary paradigms,
the fecundity of hybridizations between different disciplines (“oggi sap-
piamo quanto feconde sono le ibridazioni fra discipline diverse”).
This imaginary overlap between Levi’s theories and those presented in
the book he is reviewing is repeated in another book review published in
the same year. This time the book reviewed is very much dear to Primo
Levi, being the new Italian edition of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild,
translated by Gianni Celati for Einaudi. Already in the introductory sec-
tion, Levi’s description of London cannot but remind of Levi, as “un
uomo che ha combattuto fino all’estremo la lotta per la vita e per la
sopravvivenza, e ne ha tratto ragione di scrivere” (OII 1317) [a man who
fought to the last in a struggle for life and survival, and found in this
struggle the inspiration to write; CW, 2749]. It is, however, in the way
London “ha travasato questa sua esperienza in un cane” [has transferred
his experience into a dog] that Levi recognizes the most important intu-
ition of the book and its major significance.1
As we have seen in the first chapter of this book, back in Il sistema
periodico Levi had already written about Buck, the dog protagonist of The
Call of the Wild, not only in enthusiastic terms, but also as a kind of dop-
pelgänger of himself in the critical conditions of Auschwitz. The 1987
review, entitled “Buck dei lupi,” confirms Levi’s fascination for this dog,
who according to him has no possible comparison in the whole of world
literature, because—Levi continues—Buck “non è un cane letterario” [is
not a literary dog]. This last expression is puzzling: Buck is certainly a
fictional product of London’s literature, so what does Levi mean by claim-
ing that he is not a literary dog? The rest of the article does not reveal it
explicitly, but we can attempt to follow Levi’s arguments to locate some
clues. First, Levi reconstructs Buck’s story, stressing the well-off origin of
the dog, who is “canino e umano allo stesso tempo” [canine and human
Conclusion. Animal Testimony 245
at the same time], as all the dogs, Levi says, who have an egalitarian rela-
tionship with their owners. However, even Buck is menaced by the insur-
gent rush for gold: taken away from his human peers, he is deported to
an inhospitable land where he goes through a series of horrible experi-
ences that would lead him to discover in himself “la primitiva bestia
dominatrice” [the primitive dominant beast] and to impose his will even
upon his new human owners. The terms Levi uses in his reconstruction
of The Call of the Wild surely mirror Levi’s own ordeal: his own origin
within the middle class of Turin and his “gentile” friends who did not
consider him as different; the sudden and dreadful “deportazione” [depor-
tation]; and the new hostile environment of the Lager where he learns
how to dig into his “niche,” precisely as Buck “impara a scarvarsi una
buca nella neve” [learns how to dig a hole in the snow] to survive both
metaphorical and literal intense cold. Furthermore, Levi compares the
job Buck is forced to perform to what Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author
who witnessed the Gulag, describes in his One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich. Levi was aware that Solzhenitsyn’s literature had been often
associated to his own testimony, and therefore we may easily say that he
is also comparing Buck’s job to what he had performed in Auschwitz (at
least before the chemistry laboratory).
Yet, it is just after this reference to the common work that the two nar-
ratives, Levi’s and Buck’s, seem to diverge. Levi writes in fact that Buck
discovers a sort of Nietzschean original beast inside himself which leads
the dog to become a leader, or, as he interrogatively writes playing with
the Italian word “capo,” a Kapo. This reference to those prisoners who
were assigned by the SS guards to supervise the other inmates (the Kapos)
is problematic because Levi stresses that Buck’s transformation into a
kind of morally arguable Prominent-Dog represents the last moment of
truth in the book. The next episode of the story in which the dog seems
to forget the “dominant beast” and falls in love with his new human
owner is where, for Levi, the book “si indebolisce” [weakens]. Following
“reminiscenze darwiniane mal digerite” [half-baked echoes of Darwin],
the rest of the story tells in fact how Buck becomes more and more
attracted by the so-called “call of the wild,” joins a pack of wolves, and
establishes himself as their leader. According to Levi, Buck is thus con-
verted at the end of the book into a mythical “Cane Fantasma” [Phantom
246 D. Benvegnù
Dog], who, in spite of his reputation as a dreadful hunter, every summer

visits the burial of the only man he loved: as Levi writes, an ending that
is indeed “un po’ troppo umano” [a bit too human] and, in its human
idealism, too complaisant toward the readers.
What seem to trouble Levi are two quite intertwined elements. First,
we have his own suggestion to see Buck as a Kapo, which appears to be
also the watershed in his process of sympathetic identification. This is not
surprising: wherever Levi describes the Kapos he met in Auschwitz, he
avoids associating himself with them. Already in Se questo è un uomo, for
instance, the only figure that shares with the Nazis the same absolutely
negative connotation is Alex, the Kapo described as a “bruto” (SQU, OI
104) [brute] at the end of the already mentioned chapter entitled “Esame
di chimica.” A lengthy exploration of these controversial figures is instead
part of I sommersi e i salvati, in the crucial section devoted to “la zona
grigia” [the Grey Zone]. Here Levi claims that to judge specifically the
Kapos is a very delicate and complicated task, because the motives behind
becoming one of them could have been varied and each case should be
carefully considered individually (SeS, OII 1024–1026). Yet, the Kapos
were the perfect embodiment of a moral gray zone and, although in dif-
ferent degrees, all of them had both an aspiration to gain personal, abso-
lute power over the other prisoners and a certain ambiguous predisposition
to compromise (SeS, OII 1027). This disgraceful combination of ele-
ments allowed most of the Kapos to survive the concentration camp: a
destiny that they shared with Levi, who was constantly, almost anxiously,
interrogating the rationale behind his own survival.
The reason why Levi is quite interrogative (and troubled) about the
possibility that even Buck behaves as a Kapo seems to lie in the undesir-
able repercussions of his own identification with the story of the dog.
This aspect leads us to the second element that disturbs Levi: Buck’s
“humanization.” According to Levi, at the end of The Call of the Wild
Buck becomes “too human,” switching from an experience at the edge of
human comprehension to a conciliatory and idealistic narrative through
which the readers can finally recognize their own indulgent humanity.
What annoys Levi, then, are not the anthropomorphic features of the dog
per se: we have already analyzed several accounts in which Levi seems to
have nothing against mirroring part of his experiences vis-à-vis animal
characters, or even exploring in quite positive terms the human-animal

hybridity that he also attributes to Buck. Rather, the problem is that the
animal’s final behavior suggests a simplifying retrospective understanding
of his experiences and therefore betrays their liminal nature, which was
what instead made possible the identifying comparison with Levi’s own
imprisonment in Auschwitz. The persistence of a certain amount of
incomprehension that belongs to both Buck’s and Levi’s experiences must
in fact remain as such to truly represent them.
What is at stake both in the case of the “Kapo” and in the “too human”
behavior of Buck is therefore the dangerous and fascinating limitrophy
the stories of the dog share with Levi’s own ordeal and the ways he decided
to narrate it. To return to Levi’s expression, when he describes Buck as a
“non-literary dog,” he is not saying that London’s dog is outside literature
or that the writer is telling a true story about a “real” dog without any
interest in how to set it forth. Rather, what we have here recalls Levi’s
comment on Galileo, and how the Italian scientist was “un grandissimo
scrittore perché non era uno scrittore affatto. Era uno che voleva esporre
quello che aveva visto” (CI, 174) [a great writer because he was not a
writer at all. He was somebody who wanted to tell what he had seen].
Buck is not a literary dog, in fact, because of London’s intuition to wit-
ness his own experiences as the dog’s. Consequently, the significance of
Buck’s stories lies first and foremost in London’s decision to narrate
through the combination of possibly real and symbolic events attributed
to an animal character which does not and cannot correspond perfectly
to either the human author or the human readers. Buck’s stories, as nar-
rated in the “good” part of London’s book, are in fact not “literary”
because they seem to belong instead to a liminal kind of literature that is
based upon the problem of how to properly “esporre quello che [uno]
aveva visto” [to express what one had seen], whether this one is Galileo,
London, or indeed Primo Levi. For London, the solution to this issue
engages not only the representation of an extreme, almost beyond words,
reality, but also—and more importantly—the attribution of this reality
to a dog. For Levi, this attribution also incorporates a paradoxical process
of doubleness and impossible identification with non-human characters,
an unheimlich mix of familiarity and alterity that is indeed the most
important aspect of his use of animality in literature.
248 D. Benvegnù
As we have observed in the first chapter of this book, even the genre
of (specifically) Holocaust testimony is organized according to this very
special combination of almost impossible realism and tantalizing iden-
tification; a literary organization that therefore belongs also to Levi’s
testimonial work. As Bartezzaghi has pointed out, Levi’s greater intu-
ition is the invention of himself as centaur, half narrator and half vic-
tim, victim who transforms himself (already at the time of the event, in
Auschwitz) into a witness (Bartezzaghi, 288). Already in Se questo è un
uomo, Levi shapes in fact himself as a “io-personaggio” [I-character]
which does and does not coincide with the writer Primo Levi, as he
indeed stresses in some of the most traumatic moments of his testimo-
nial account. Moreover, the testimony of this “io-personaggio” is such
as long as it incorporates those liminal, almost non-human creatures
who could not bear witness by themselves, because they did not come
back or they came back mute, as Levi explicitly declares. We can then
say that Levi is troubled and fascinated by Buck’s story probably because
he recognizes both the overlap between the dog’s account and his own
literature, and the significance of a testimony in which the distinction
between what is human and what is not can be played against our con-
ventional, and in this case inappropriate, ways to assimilate and nor-
malize literary texts.
Both the validity of this interpretation and its actual application can be
found in one of the very few short stories in Levi’s oeuvre in which the
whole narrative is offered as if coming from the perspective of an animal.
Published in La Stampa on January 22, 1977, and collected in volume
only posthumously, “Cena in piedi” [Dinner Party] sees as almost abso-
lute protagonist a kangaroo named Innaminka. Actually, nowhere is it
said what kind of animal Innaminka is, but the anatomical details that
are slowly disclosed and the very name of the creature—probably bor-
rowed from the name of a Regional Reserve in South Australia
(Innamincka)—reveal that we are indeed reading the story of a kangaroo.
Identifying the storyteller, however, proves more complex. “Cena in
piedi” is in fact told by an extra-diegetic narrator, but this narrator
describes the feelings and inner emotions of Innaminka with incredible
precision and psychological insightfulness, as if they were his own. For
instance, left alone at a certain point of his ordeal, the kangaroo tries to
imagine how all the well-dressed humans would behave “se un cane li
avesse inseguiti” [if they were being chased by a dog] and concludes, with
a peculiar sense of mockery and sarcasm, that even the fastest among
them “non avrebbe saltato neanche un terzo della distanza che lui poteva
saltare da fermo” [would not be able to jump a third of the distance that
he could jump from a standstill]. Only at that moment, another voice
intervenes, a voice more reflective but still as if coming from the kanga-
roo, which makes the statement that “non si può mai dire: magari loro
erano bravi in altre cose” [you can never tell, maybe they were good at
other things].
Despite the ambivalent, almost dialogic, complexity of the narrating
voice, the development of the story is quite simple. Innaminka is invited
to a high-society dinner party but once there he feels immediately very
uncomfortable (“si trovò subito a disagio”). His uneasiness is amplified by
both the architecture of the host house, unsuited for non-human bodies,
and the comments about him whispered among some of the (human)
guests. Two women (the hostess and an unknown lady) try to interact
with Innaminka, but both seem too preoccupied with themselves to truly
connect with the kangaroo, which is left with increasing thirst, hunger,
and psychological discomfort. In the case of the second woman, however,
something happens: Innaminka understands her unhappiness and feels
compassion and sympathy for her, perhaps because he was unhappy, too,
as the narrator suggests (OI 1215). When even this second encounter
ends abruptly, and “senza neppure (…) uno sguardo di saluto [without
(…) a farewell glance], Innaminka is ready to leave: he takes the first
opportunity to jump over one of the tables to get closer to the proper
exit. This movement innervates the kangaroo, his lungs “gli si riempirono
d’aria e di gioia” [fill effortlessly with air and with joy], and he climbs
down the stairs to flee and disappear into the outside night:
Sotto gli occhi inespressivi del portiere aspirò con volutta l’aria umida e
fuligginosa della notte e subito si avviò per via Borgospesso, senza più
affrettarsi, a lunghi balzi elastici e felici. (OI, 1216)
[Under the expressionless gaze of the doorman, he took a deep, volup-
tuous breath of the damp, grimy night air and immediately set off along
Via Borgospesso, no longer in a rush, with long, happy, elastic leaps]
250 D. Benvegnù
There are several points that need to be made about this apparently
simple story. First, we need to look at its place within the whole of Levi’s
literary corpus. In the structure of duplications and inversions we have
learned to recognize as proper of his literature, “Cena in piedi” resembles
and contrasts some features we have already observed in the short story
entitled “Vilmy.” Unfortunately, we do not know the exact date of com-
position of most of the stories collected in Vizio di forma, but we may
assume that, given the publication of the book in 1971, “Vilmy” was
written before “Cena in piedi,” which was instead published in La Stampa
only six years later. It is reasonable, then, to consider that consciously or
unconsciously Levi picked up some elements of the former once he
decided to tell the story of the kangaroo. For instance, the similarity
between the two endings is striking, with the innervating image of the
world outside in which the protagonists can finally regain their freedom.
In both cases, we have episodes of liberation, but in “Vilmy” there is a
human character who escapes from the menacing influence of an animal,
while in “Cena in piedi” we see an animal who frees himself from the
imprisonment expressed by the human environment. In the previous sec-
tion we have also pointed out, however, that the story of the Vilmy can
be interpreted as an allusion to the circular prison of the concentration
camp, and the unheimlich ambiguity of the invented animal as the cor-
relative manifestation of Levi’s own problematic dialectics between
imprisonment, liberation, and testimony. It is therefore remarkable that
in a story such as “Cena in piedi,” which seems to be the mirror-image of
“Vilmy,” Levi decided to make an animal the protagonist, and a specimen
of human society as the prison. We will return to this connection between
Levi’s testimony and the story of Innaminka momentarily.
Before moving to that controversial tangle, we must in fact stress a
second feature of “Cena in Piedi,” noticing how Levi is very attentive in
describing Innaminka’s physical characteristics and bodily experiences.
This is not just because of his passion for detail, as Ann Goldstein has
written (TS 15), but most importantly because corporality, as we noted
in the second chapter, is a key element of Levi’s poetics when it comes to
the limitrophy between humans and animals. In “Cena in piedi” the sig-
nificance of embodiment is expressed both when the kangaroo suffers
and when instead he experiences the pure joy of his animal body. We have
several specific examples of suffering, beginning with Innaminka’s inca-

pacity to properly use the stairs, to his painful awkwardness in trying to
eat human food. In general, Levi is keen in describing the elemental
needs of Innaminka’s body, from hunger and thirst to something even
more physiologically imperative (“Aveva caldo e sete, e ad un certo
momento si accorse con spavento che gli stava crescendo dentro un
bisogno sempre più acuto,” OI 1214), whereafter the kangaroo relieves
himself on one of the plants of the hall. Innaminka’s joy is instead already
evident in the final paragraph we have cited above: the kangaroo’s happy
liberation is tied to the possibility of experiencing and expressing his cor-
porality once again. It is worth noting here that for Levi animality is
always associated with what he calls “nobiltà corporea” [corporeal nobil-
ity]. This link is expressed explicitly at least a couple of times throughout
the whole of his oeuvre, once in the very first story of Lilít, “Capaneo” (L,
OII 7) and then again in an article-review published in 1982 and curi-
ously entitled “Non erano animali i primi antenati,” devoted to a very
important book in Levi’s life, that is, Rosny’s La guerra del fuoco2 [Quest
for Fire]. In both cases, Levi underlines how the protagonist of “Capaneo,”
Valerio, and the prehistoric human characters in the cinematographic
version of Rosny’s novel have lost their animal nobility precisely in rela-
tion to the incapacity to properly use their bodies: even in their respec-
tively different regressions they are, in a sense, too human. Or perhaps
just too Cartesian, that is to say, dualistic beings incapable of combining
“corpo ed anima” [body and soul], as instead, according to Levi, do
Rabelais and his characters (RdR, OII 1426).
There is, however, another element linked to Innaminka’s embodiment
that must be briefly considered before we move on. In Innaminka’s
encounters with the two women, we are given the impression that he
thinks, but we are openly informed that he cannot speak. In the case of
the hostess, Innaminka’s impossibility to respond ends the interaction,
although the woman comprehends that the kangaroo understands what
she says (“si rese conto che Innaminka la capiva abbastanza bene ma non
poteva risponderle, e se ne andò,” OI 1213). In the longer episode with
the narcissistic unknown lady, the linguistic communication between the
two is even less existent: indeed, the lady “parlava, e parlava” [talked and
talked], but Innaminka admits to having understood hardly anything of
252 D. Benvegnù
what she said. This lack of linguistic responsiveness, though, does not end
the interaction, which instead is carried on, at least for a while, only by
the body language of the two interlocutors. Of course, this body language
is displayed only through the actual language of the narrator, but still we
get to know that the muteness of the animal, its linguistic alterity, does
not then exclude a priori the possibility of a response. Rather, paraphras-
ing Jacques Derrida’s critique of Lacan, we might say that in “Cena in
piedi” the animal does respond and therefore he opens the possibility for
(impossible) community and compassion.3 Precisely this element leads us
to consider a third point.
In an article entitled “Tra le vette di Manhattan” and published in La
Stampa in June 1985, that is, seven years later than “Cena in piedi,” Levi
describes his journey to the United States. As Baldasso has noticed, this
article reveals many peculiar aspects of Levi’s prose, from his usual irony
to the use of zoological metaphors or his predilection for the pastiche cre-
ated by combining literary inversion and ethical reflection (17–18). There
is nonetheless another characteristic of “Tra le vette di Manhattan” that
may help us to better understand Innaminka’s story. Halfway through the
description of what he has seen and done in America, Levi engages
directly the American custom of throwing dinner parties. Humorously,
he claims that just one dinner party is more dangerous to our health than
any amount of sugar we ingest, mainly for two reasons. On the one hand,
at dinner parties one is forced to stand still on his or her feet for hours,
with something to drink or eat in both hands, in a way that one has noth-
ing left for gesticulation or to shake hands with those to whom we are
uselessly introduced (SR, OII, 955). On the other hand, instead, one is
assaulted from any side by talkative people, and all of them talk so loudly
that nobody understands anything; hence the acoustic fatigue (“la fatica
acustica”) increases exponentially with the duration of the dinner party.
Levi maintains that he had never experienced this peculiar kind of fatigue
before in his life: when it prevails, he continues, an expressive paralysis
develops and one is reduced to pretending to understand and to respond-
ing by making faces or nodding, or even by the production of indistinct
noises (956). Despite the patent comic features of this episode, Levi is
expressing here an overall discomfort that cannot simply be associated
with dinner parties, but is instead tied to his hybrid identity. In a long
interview with Germaine Greer published a year later, Levi admits in fact
to have had some problems in the United States, problems tied to the
nature of his “Jewish identity.” In one of the stops of his trip, he delivered
a lecture in Brooklyn and, to his great astonishment, the audience was
exclusively composed of people supposedly like him, male Jews (“Erano
tutti maschi ed ebrei,” CI 74). Even beyond the contingent “tumulto
generale” [widespread tumult] created by his position with respect to the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict, what seems to surprise and destabilize Levi is
the too homogeneous but still extraneous composition of his audience.
His overall uneasiness during his American trip, then, did not stem sim-
ply from the problematic setting of the dinner parties, as he ironically
pretends in his article. Instead, it is due to being a foreigner: not just
being an Italian in the United States, though, but a more ontological
status linked to his self-recognized hybrid nature, which troubles and is
troubled by any implicit identitarian bond based on essentialist and nor-
mative conditions, as, for instance, being Jewish and male. The feeling of
Unheimlichkeit he felt in front of a community of people who supposedly
were like him, then, comes precisely from the tangle of familiarity and
strangeness that has always characterized his own identity and, most
importantly for what we are articulating here, his literature.
The similarities between “Cena in Piedi” and what is described in the
article are unquestionable and impressive: we can easily imagine Levi
behaving at the dinner parties as Innaminka does. Yet, as we have men-
tioned above, “Cena in piedi” was written and published several years
before Levi’s trip to the United States, and therefore the latter cannot be
the source for the former. The similarities are instead due to the fact that
Levi did not need to go to the United States to experience the familiar
sense of strangeness and exclusion he describes in “Tra le vette di
Manhattan.” Since Auschwitz, in fact, his experiences made him a for-
eigner, somebody who has endured (what is beyond and before) the lim-
its of both our understanding and traditional identities. In this sense, the
concentration camp indeed transformed him into a modern centaur, a
monstrous creature who testifies to a state of limitrophy in which the
boundaries between what is familiar and what is alien are not as we sup-
pose them to be. What excluded him from the normality that Italy was
trying to regain after the end of the Second World War, in fact, was not
254 D. Benvegnù
the nature of his Jewishness, but his condition of “reduce” (his favorite
term for ‘survivor’) and his parallel need to tell what happened in
Auschwitz. The almost complete disinterest for the manuscript first and
then for the first De Silva edition of Se questo é un uomo (1947) are just
the mundane manifestation of an initial deeper exclusion that Levi explic-
itly describes in numerous places within his literary production, from his
poetry to some of the chapters of Il sistema periodico or even, quite cru-
cially, in Se non ora, quando?. Levi’s only novel ends in fact with the con-
temporary news of the birth of Isidor’s (one of the Jewish partisans) son
and of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. However, before
this final scene at the Italian hospital, Levi tells how some of the partisans
are brought to a party by their Italian “benefactor.” At this party, which is
supposedly in their honor, they feel and behave quite awkwardly: their
stories “ferivano le orecchie” (SNOQ, OII 501) [hurt the ears] of the
Italian guests, who end up treating the Jewish partisans “come le bestie al
giardino zoologico” (501) [as the beasts at the zoo], as strange, and some-
how dangerous, animals.4
What Levi manifests here and in other similar descriptions is a psycho-
logical sense of exclusion that lies in between historical reality and the
projection of personal fears. Unsurprisingly, the literary outcome displays
a dialectics between his real experiences (for which “la nostra lingua
manca di parole” (SQU, OI 20) [our language lacks words]), the need to
communicate and establish again a sense of community through testi-
mony, and the anguish of possibly being unable to testify and thus not
belonging to any community anymore. For instance, in several interviews
he returns precisely to the tangle between the will to survive, the need to
“raccontare le cose a cui avevamo assistito e che avevamo sopportate”
(SQI, OI 201) [tell what we had seen and we had to endure], and the
difficult decision of many survivors whether to testify once back home.
In one of these interviews, Levi talks about his family and how even his
own son Renzo never wanted to listen to his father’s stories (CeI, 51).
Levi seems to understand and accept his son’s feelings, but he also recalls
that the most disturbing dream in the concentration camp foresaw a sim-
ilar but more painful situation. In Auschwitz, Levi dreamt of being at
home again and of telling his experiences in the German Lager to his
sister and some intimate friends. In the dream, he feels an intense p leasure
in narrating his own testimony to his relatives and friends, but he also
realizes that they are not listening, “anzi, essi sono del tutto indifferenti:
parlano confusamente d’altro fra di loro, come se io non ci fossi. Mi
sorella mi guarda, si alza e se ne va senza far parola” (SQU, OI 54) [in
fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other
things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets
up and goes away without a word].
The references to the sister who walks away without a word and to the
people talking without paying attention cannot but uncannily recall
again the story of Innaminka in his interactions with the humans at the
dinner party. Whether we agree with Belpoliti that even “Cena in piedi”
is “a fantasy, a dream” (Levi 2000, 135), both narratives seem to stem
from a similar desire to witness and therefore have a few elements in com-
mon. As Rosen has pointed out, “Cena in piedi” in fact conveys “the
difficulty of the outsider/survivor trying to fit into a life of trivial civility”
(Rosen 2007), the same difficulty Levi experienced after he returned from
Auschwitz. In this sense, not only Innaminka has the author’s sympathy,
but his story seems to mirror the struggles Levi underwent as survivor of
and witness to the Holocaust. It is then particularly crucial to recognize
the tension between the animal identity of Innaminka, its story, and its
complex nature of the mirror image of Levi himself.
The main difference, of course, is that Innaminka does not speak, he is
mute, while instead Levi had the opportunity to tell not only his own story,
but the story of the kangaroo as well. Yet, this disparity also means that,
although “Cena in piedi” is obviously a fiction, it carries nonetheless the
same structure and significance of one of those “discors[i] conto terzi,” by
proxy, that Levi addresses as the only possible paradigm and the very
responsibility of testimony, as we have already seen in the section devoted
to suffering. Furthermore, Rosen has also noticed that “Cena in piedi” is
characterized by a peculiar “Swiftian” atmosphere. The reference is not per-
egrine: Levi collected two passages from Gulliver’s Travels in his La ricerca
delle radici and indeed Swift’s masterpiece is structured as an imaginary
(travel) testimony. It is worth noting, then, that for his personal anthology
Levi collects the uncanny experience of Gulliver in the land of the
houyhnhnm, the wise horses being an example, he writes, of discourses that
“non si lasciano esorcizzare facilmente” (RdR, OII 1408) [cannot be easily
256 D. Benvegnù
e xorcized] by any purifying reading. About this episode and the relation-
ships between humans and animals in Swift’s book, Philip Armstrong has
remarked that while we are supposedly facing a dualistic human-animal
distinction, a third term—“the notion of inhumanity”—operates in
order to keep Gulliver estranged from all three categories (Armstrong,
23–27). Even in “Cena in piedi” we apparently confront a double
dilemma, which mainly lies in the author’s evident “distaste for the
human animals as well as shame for the kangaroo, who relieves himself in
a houseplant and then eats some of its leaves before finally fleeing” (Rosen
2007). Yet, as readers we are instead caught in between a much more
complex situation.
On the one hand, we tend in fact to identify with the protagonist, who
not only has anthropomorphic features, but is clearly the victim, who
suffers most in the whole story, and thus calls for our emphatic reaction.
The final scene with the kangaroo happily escaping the party and experi-
encing again the joy of his own body cannot but trigger similar experi-
ences we have all had. However, Innaminka is also evidently an animal, a
quite unfamiliar animal for Italians, and at least in the scene just recalled
in which he urinates on the plant and then eats the leaves, we might say
that he behaves as such. The shame we feel in front of his biological
nakedness, makes therefore impossible any total identification. On the
other hand, the readers share with the other characters the same human-
ity, they are alike, and if the human characters do not understand
Innaminka it is not their fault: the kangaroo cannot speak, he is different,
foreign, other; indeed, just a (dumb, mute) Australian animal. Yet, the
human characters of the short story appear to be insensitive, narcissistic,
and, at least in the scene with the unknown lady and her mysterious male
companion, even inclined to violence. They behave, in a sense, inhu-
manly, and their inhumanity is what spoils our usual idealistic tendency
to fully recognize ourselves in them. Differently from the character
Gulliver, then, it is as readers that we experience, reading “Cena in piedi,”
a complex and uncanny sense of estrangement that we cannot avoid. The
hybrid nature of Levi’s invention troubles our reading habits with a dou-
ble identification which is at the same time very much suggested and
impossible—and in some ways unethical—to achieve.
This long discussion of Levi’s relationships with two animal characters,

London’s Buck and his own Innaminka has helped us to implicitly recall
some of the elements which we have been already investigating in the
previous sections. The suffering of both Buck and Innaminka summons
the exploration of Levi’s position on animal suffering we discussed in sec-
tion two. As we have observed there, the corporal compassion we have
recognized as Levi’s proto-ethical ground is articulated through the com-
mon nudity and vulnerability, between unbearable embarrassment and
suffering, of all the material creatures, human and non-human animals
alike. The apparent impossibility to speak shared by some humans and all
the animals, their muteness, increases rather than diminishes the need for
a “discorso conto terzi,” such as the one the narrator of “Cena in piedi”
produces on behalf of the kangaroo. This “discorso,” however, must be
capable of both testifying to the suffering and establishing compassion
without falling into the trap of identification, which instead would elimi-
nate two of the most important elements of such a testimony, namely, its
paradoxical impossibility and its radical strangeness. As we noticed, this
is accomplished through a complex system of double impossibilities that
force readers to question their identification with any character of the
short story, whether human or animal. Nonetheless, this literary strategy
does not neutralize the possibility of reacting to the story, but triggers
both an emotional response—that feeling-together-without-being-the-
same that we recognized as the true paradigm of compassion—and a
larger comprehension that includes the position of the reader into the
interpretative equation.
Similarly, what we have said about hybridity and invention as expressed
by “Cena in Piedi” convene respectively “Techne” and “Creation.” In the
section devoted to technology, we have in fact seen how Levi’s hybrid
texts alert us to the ambivalence of every techne, paradoxically including
his own writing. The animal characters embody a resistance to various
human attributes as positively described by a certain humanistic tradition
often embraced by Levi himself in his more theoretical explorations. This
resistance is often depicted as a lack (of language, of hands, of future,
etc.), but even this lack does not necessarily transform the animals into
victims unable to react and therefore inclined to their own sacrifice. In
258 D. Benvegnù
the case of Innaminka’s story, for example, Levi clearly represents the
kangaroo as lacking not only human language, but also the proper human
hands to eat and perform proper human tasks. Yet, the kangaroo is not
just a passive victim of a hostile environment or the dumb and alien
object of an investigation. Given the opportunity, the animal instead
reacts, demonstrating his sympathetic responses and his bodily abilities,
which are celebrated as both the manifestation of animal nobility and the
inversion of the overestimated purity or idealistic separateness of the
human. From this point of view, the apparently accommodating com-
ment in “Cena in piedi” about the human guests’ ability to be “good at
other things” besides jumping, takes indeed an ironically larger signifi-
cance. Furthermore, in our reading we have emphasized the final joy of
Innaminka, which reminded us of the end of a short story devoted to
another animal, the Vilmy. We stressed how “Cena in piedi” can be read
as the reversal of “Vilmy” and, therefore, as the latter corresponds still to
a language of destruction very much attached to Auschwitz, the former
belongs instead to a pattern of re-creation. As we concluded in Chap. 7,
Levi connects, via Darwin’s writing, this re-creation to a responsible use
of zoological observations capable of re-enchanting a world that instead
has gone through Auschwitz and might have lost appeal and meaning.
Even Innaminka’s story contains not only precise zoological details, such
as the passage in which the kangaroo recalls with affection his new born
and his need to return into his mother’s pouch (OI 1214), but also a real
fascination for the specific, both rich and strange, beauty embodied by
the non-human animal.
This very tendency can be also found in what was, according to the
editor of his Opere, Levi’s last literary project, unfortunately interrupted
by his sudden death but still partially circulated.5 Between 1986 and the
first few months of 1987, Levi published in (often both) La Stampa and
the Italian science magazine Airone six imaginary interviews with ani-
mals, respectively an ant, a mole, a bacterium (the Escherichia coli), a
seagull, a giraffe, and a spider. Almost all of these creatures had already
played some part in Levi’s works before, but in this case they become
direct protagonists of a dialogue with the author, according to a formula
that recalls the famous “impossible interviews” broadcasted by Italian
public radio in the seventies.6 The label under which these pieces were
published in Airone was “Zoo immaginario” [Imaginary Zoo], and Levi

humorously mixes here real zoological and ethologic data with marvelous
descriptions of animal life, often as anthropomorphic as the animal in
itself allowed. The overall result testifies to Levi’s fascination for animals
as sources of wonders, fears, and joy, and it is indeed intriguing to read
this small turbulent cosmos of literary human-animal relationships as his
unfortunately involuntary literary testament. It is surprising that these six
interviews have been usually considered a kind of divertissement and
therefore dismissed as not very serious. For Belpoliti, instead, they are not
only the epitome of Levi’s gaze upon the animal world but also the per-
fect manifestation of his writing in general. Belpoliti claims in fact that
through the imaginary interviews and, more generally, his literary ani-
mals, Levi “does anthropology while he is observing the natural world”
(UNG 140). According to this reading, Levi’s real goal in describing ani-
mals is not the animals per se, but rather making us think about our own
world as a matter of contrast, and this is possible because the two worlds,
although allegedly symmetric, are not superimposable. For Belpoliti, the
animal side is in fact the reversal of the human one, “as the Lager is the
reversal of civilized society” (141). Consequently, in Levi’s work the
human world unfolds in the words of the animal as its opposite, both for
good and evil, and this is an example of the lucid and relentless intelli-
gence of Levi as wonderful moral story-teller (141).
While I agree with the wonderful quality of Levi’s writing and with the
importance of animals in his body of work, I nevertheless believe that
Belpoliti’s interpretation risks reducing to a dichotomy—in which the
negative side seems represented by both the concentration camp and the
animal world—that which is instead a complex dialectics of multiple dif-
ferences. Just a survey of the six imaginary interviews reveals, for instance,
several elements that not only have been not considered by the Italian
scholar, but most importantly marked the whole of Levi’s animal imagery
as we have been interpreting it throughout our investigation. First, the
dialogic nature of the interviews allows the animals to express opinions
that are very much ironic critique of anthropocentrism. In the interview
entitled “Naso contro naso” [Nose to Nose], for example, the mole
rebukes the human interviewer, accusing him and the whole of human-
kind not only of judging exclusively according to their narrow
260 D. Benvegnù
parameters, but also of wrongly assuming that animals have no hands just
because they do not perform what humans do (OII 1325–1326).
Although Belpoliti acknowledges that in Levi’s fiction and poetry animals
become true characters (UNG 139), his analysis still misses the potential
ironic agency of these animal characters and its possible consequences for
any solipsistic epistemology which proclaims humankind the center and
the most important element of the universe. For instance, it is worth not-
ing that both in one of the interviews (“In diretta dal nostro intestino:
l’Escherichia coli”) and in a short story collected in Storie Naturali
(“L’amico dell’uomo”) the animals describe a condition that, although it
is within the human body, remains mostly ignored by human beings,
comically underlining our indeed very human ignorance. Moreover, both
accounts acknowledge that, even in our own body, we are “not alone,”
meaning that our constitution is built in chaosmic symbiosis with other
creatures almost from the very beginning of life.
Second, Levi does not describe the animals only to ground his opin-
ions on human society on scientific knowledge, or as a matter of bare
amusement. These aspects are sometimes present in Levi’s discourses (for
instance in the lecture on racial prejudice we mentioned in the introduc-
tion), but more often his fictional animals are meant to deconstruct our
normal perception of the relationships we have or can have with them.
Reading them from the perspective of the already quoted article on the
status of “Literary Animal Studies,” most of Levi’s animal stories fulfill in
fact the three main points of what should be any good critical theory of
animal issues in fiction (Copeland 2012). They in fact:
1. …deconstruct the reductive or disrespectful ways we are accustomed

to depict non-human animals, as exemplified by the just above-
mentioned passage about the hands of the mole. They actually per-
form even something more, for example criticizing through irony the
practice of keeping animals in captivity, as in “La giraffa dello zoo”
(OII 1340);
2. …reflect upon how the author presents the animal “in itself,” namely,
according to the specificity of each individual animal or singular spe-
cies. For instance, the large majority of the scientific information Levi
offered in the interviews are there to mark the uniqueness of each
s pecies, from the ant queen of “Nozze della formica” to the giraffe of
the already mentioned “La giraffa dello zoo;”
3. …allow the readers to have a better understanding of the relationships
between animals and ourselves, not just in terms of how much we can
mirror our experiences in theirs, but also as both elements of a shared
world. This is the case, for example, of “Il gabbiano di Chivasso,” in
which Levi imagines interviewing a Yellow-legged Gull, usually a
common bird along Italian shores, who instead now lives in Chivasso,
an industrial little town near Turin. Asked about his change of envi-
ronment, the gull replies that he was forced to leave the sea because
the water was too polluted, and as a result there was no more fish.
However, the decision to move to Chivasso comes from the new car
factory, which does not produce fish, but an incredible amount of
garbage, able to feed—the bird shamefully remarks—any kind of crea-
ture, including the once “kings of sky,” that is, the seagulls themselves
(OII 1336). Levi’s imaginary interview thus addresses the change in
nature of both the environment and the seagulls, underlining the
interconnections between the environment and all its creatures accord-
ing to an ecological concern that was an important feature of his late
literary production.7
The main goal of Levi’s use of anthropomorphic characteristics is thus

not the appropriation of non-human experience as an index of human-
ness, as Belpoliti seems to suggest. Instead, even in the imaginary inter-
views the anthropomorphic features of Levi’s animals challenge
anthropocentric supremacy. Levi’s non-human creatures are in fact “sym-
bols with a life of their own” (Daston and Mitman, 13). As such, they
uncannily suggest but refuse to settle into our interpretative habits usu-
ally constructed to boost the confidence we have in our own idealistic
identity. If there is one thing that we truly came to grasp throughout our
analysis of Levi’s animal imagery, it is the Unheimlichkeit we have recog-
nized as the main result of “Cena in piedi” and of almost all the accounts
in which animals and animality play an important role. Reading Levi’s
stories in which animals and animality are present, then, does not offer us
the indulgent confirmation of our own “humanity.” Instead, it means to
explore the limits of our comprehension and to question the unthought
262 D. Benvegnù
and normative assumptions we have about our being “human.” As both

Jones first and, more recently, Brown have pointed out for nineteenth-
century British literature, Levi’s literary animals, too, tend to surprise, to
invert, to challenge, or to experiment with expected modes of order and
stable structures of meaning (Jones, 8–9; L. Brown, 16–17), including
the episteme that supports our usual discourses about ourselves and our
place in the universe.
Yet, here is another characteristic of Levi’s animal imagery that goes
beyond both the three elements of any conscious animal criticism pro-
vided by Copeland and the three fundamental aspects we have just
unfolded. In the introduction to this book, we pointed out the problem-
atic nature of all Holocaust testimonies, stressing how Levi was very
much aware of the risks of witnessing what happened in Auschwitz.
Although Levi seems at times inclined to describe the concentration
camp as just the negative mirror of what a rational society would be (or,
as Belpoliti writes, as the reversal of civilized society; UNG 141), this
dichotomist approach would not do justice to the incomprehensible hor-
ror of what he experienced and witnessed. It would instead allow false
and self-reassuring identification and comprehension, which would
therefore betray the ethical responsibility of speaking on behalf of those
“testimoni integrali” who did not come back to tell or came back mute.
We then acknowledged that, in a sense, “the task Primo Levi had estab-
lished for himself was then ‘impossible’” (Goldkorn, 199), because his
testimony, to be both truthful and effective, had to incorporate an almost
impossible doubleness capable of simultaneously leading to identifica-
tion and away from it. Throughout this book, we have also observed how
Levi achieves a paradoxical doubleness through an extensive use of ani-
mal representations and references to animality. From our analysis of
“Nomi e leggende dello scoiattolo” to the interpretation of the story of
Innaminka, we have noticed how Levi’s animal narratives contain a prob-
lematic element as regards the more or less possible identification of both
the author and the reader with the characters involved in the narration.
More specifically, we have experienced how representations of animals
and animality in Levi’s fiction and poetry tend to complicate and some-
times sabotage the sharper dichotomy between human and non-human
animals that instead belongs to some of his more conceptual or
“philosophical” standpoints. In a sense, it is as if Levi’s poetic or fictional

language, his creation and re-creation, has the privilege and the responsi-
bility to challenge both the discourse that he inherited from the long-
established tradition of (a reductively Cartesian) Humanism and the
de-creational knowledge coming from his historical experience in
Auschwitz. Yet, this does not mean that Levi’s animals are just opposed
to the more discursive and historical inquiries about humanity that
instead have been always recognized as the most important feature of his
literature. Our analysis does not validate such sharp opposition either.
Instead, Levi’s literary animals mark his literature as dialectical gaps,
moments of friction between real and symbolic knowledge which trouble
our usual scholarly (and not just scholarly) reading practices, our ten-
dency to achieve knowledge through identification. The sense of an
impossible double identification which these stories inflict upon readers
as we have experienced in, for instance, “Cena in piedi” has in fact two
very important consequences.
On the one hand, in Levi’s oeuvre animals function as problematic
devices capable of replicating the impossible doubleness required by tes-
timony. We may therefore say that even when he is not writing about
Auschwitz, Levi continues to produce testimonial literature, a liminal
literary genre that explores and expresses the limits of our own compre-
hension, whether it is of what happened (our memory) or of what we are
(our identity). Through his animal images, Levi is not just witnessing his
time in Auschwitz and the nature of humanity there, but he expands the
inquiry to reflect upon how we traditionally depicted ourselves as a spe-
cies and our relationships with all the other creatures with which we share
the planet. In doing so, he incorporates into his literature a meta-
interpretative aspect under the shape of a series of animal images and
hybrid figures. It is then very true what Levi tells in an interview about
his interest toward investigating “quanto c’è di animale in noi, quanto
c’era di animale nei nazisti” [how much animal there is in us, how much
there was in the Nazis]. As a matter of fact, the whole of Levi’s oeuvre
testifies not only to the inevitably paradoxical structure of such concep-
tual operation, but it witnesses threshold ethical experiences that force
readers to move beyond the question of the human and face what we
called “the question of the animal.”
264 D. Benvegnù
On the other hand, Levi’s literary creatures in effect embody what

Derrida has called the limitrophy between human and non-human ani-
mals. As we have remarked in every chapter of this book, in exploring the
limits of the human-animal through his animal imagery, Levi acknowl-
edges animality as a crucial element of our being human creatures. Of
course, he does not necessarily share the radical ideas about “becoming
animal” as expressed by both philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze or cul-
tural ecologists such as David Abram.8 Nonetheless, Levi’s cosmology is
grounded on a sense of common creature-ness that then becomes both an
element of reflection upon human technological hubris and an aspect of
a larger cosmological project that tries, through literary creation, to coun-
terbalance the destruction of Auschwitz and the (idea of ) humanity
responsible for that horror. This original aesthetic and ethic chaosmos, as
we called it, is populated by animals (both human and non-human) and
hybrid figures, and relocates human presence and significance on this
planet within a system of unheimlich wonders and asymmetrical relation-
ships. Therefore, Levi’s literary cosmology challenges rather than con-
firms the anthropocentric tradition of the kind of Humanism embodied
by Descartes and his disciples. In doing so, he envisions instead a more
relational universe that cannot but remind us of a lineage of different
“more-than-human-humanistic”9 authors, such as the previously men-
tioned Montaigne, Bruno, or Vico. As we have already pointed out, con-
sidering Levi within this alternative and critical humanistic tradition also
means overcoming the new-born polarity between the supporters of the
values of traditional Humanism, with its burden of instrumental reason
and exploitation, and those who instead would just jump into a posthu-
man history which at times seems only the optimistic epitome of the
liberal subject.10
I began this book maintaining that a thorough investigation of animals
and animality in Levi’s work would contribute to both Levi’s scholarship
and the contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. As for
the former, we have considered an epistemological movement that goes
from Levi’s attention to the material embodiment of human and non-
human creatures; through his use of animals to reflect upon human tech-
nology in general and his writing in particular; to finally unravel a
cosmology in which literary animals and animality are the representations
of a re-creational power, capable of offering new possibilities for human

identity and human relationships with the rest of the universe. What we
noticed is the production of an aesthetic and ethical comprehension that
refuses both the confident, consolatory, familiarity and the absolute
obscurity that have often polarized Western thought, especially after the
traumatic (self ) revelation offered by the Holocaust. Instead, through his
use of literary animals and his treatment of animality, Levi displays what
we have called the necessary doubleness of an impossible identification,
an unheimlich process which forces readers to dwell upon their own iden-
tity as problematic and indeed “impure,” namely, open to new life and
limitrophy. We also stressed how the double impossibility offered by
Levi’s animals functions as a literary device that is characteristic of testi-
monial literature. As his more canonical testimonial production is in fact
marked by the complementary necessity and impossibility of completely
identifying with what allegedly was below the human, so his other works
are marked by the hybrid, uncanny, sense of familiarity and estrangement
that only non-human creatures can offer. From this perspective, animals
and animality transform Levi’s oeuvre into what can be still considered a
testimony about the nature of humanity, only this from the unprivileged
and interspecific standpoint of the “question of the animal.”
For this very reason, our investigation has also manifested how Levi’s
literature engages contemporary scholarship on the human-animal
divide, literary animals, and posthumanism. We noticed, for instance,
how Levi’s more philosophical and apparently rational arguments about
the differences between human and non-human creatures seem to be dis-
turbed by the transformative strength of his own fiction and poetry, in
which often the clear-cut distinction offered by Levi the thinker is chal-
lenged by the problematic work of Levi the writer. From this perspective,
Levi’s literature teaches us that a philosophical approach to the question
of the animal is not sufficient. Actually, his fiction and poetry not only
counterbalance the possible danger of a purely theoretical attitude to ani-
mality and ethics, but also invite us both to put ourselves at stake as read-
ers and interpretative subjects, and to reflect upon the very mechanisms
of our comprehension of the world. Levi’s animals function indeed as
moments of friction in which the hegemonic, universal project of
Humanism and our usual interpretative habits based on symbolic
266 D. Benvegnù
identification encounter their limits and glimpse at the alterity that is

beyond these limits. Paraphrasing once again Walter Benjamin, we might
say that through his literary animals Levi displays for the reader a series of
dialectical images in which what is usually mute and extraneous (real,
non-human) comes together with the linguistic and familiar (symbolic,
human) to form a constellation.11 In this animal constellation human
and non-human, real and symbolic, muteness and language, are kept in a
state of productive tension, capable of offering both a critique of the sta-
tus quo (i.e., traditional anthropocentrism and human dominion) and
new patterns of relationship and knowledge beyond exploitation and
appropriation. Our analysis of Levi’s animal imagery thus suggests that
the question of the human and the question of the animal must be
approached as one. First on a literary level: to be effective, literary animals
must both deconstruct the ordinary, and usually derogatory, representa-
tion of animality, and engage the specificity of all the animal species,
including the human one and the ways we mirror our identity and epis-
temology with our reading and interpretative habits. Second, on a more
ethical, and political, ground: as Marco Maurizi has recently pointed out,
“the human is an animal enslaved by the same civilization that has subju-
gated non-human nature” (Maurizi 2011, 27). Therefore, any action
toward animal liberation must engage the circularity of dominion on
both human and non-human animals. As Claire Jeane Kim has noted,
we, the animals, do not need to broaden the category of beneficiaries of
humanness, but, “through a critical and transformational politics, to rad-
ically restructure our relationships with each other, animals, and the earth
outside of domination” (Kim 2015, 21). This is also why Levi’s literature
is so powerful and meaningful when it comes to animals and animality. If
Adorno was right in pointing out that the very mechanism of any possi-
ble atrocity is at work any time we push away the gaze of a mortally
wounded animal thinking “it’s after all only an animal” (Adorno, §68),
then we must indeed ponder the (animal) testimony of a man who expe-
rienced that kind of gaze upon his own body.
Yet, Levi’s literary animals are not just about suffering and compassion
toward human and non-human animals; they also suggest an original
way to look at the world after the devastation of Auschwitz. We acknowl-
edged in fact that his animal imagery functions also as a way of
re-enchantment, capable of mixing together the anti-anthropocentric

attitude of zoology with the creative imaginative power of myths and
religions. The result is an almost encyclopedic chaosmos of wonders and
fears, of suffering and beauty, an intertwined universe of intensities and
limitrophy in which new communities between different beings are pos-
sible once the need for sterile purity and human dominion is
eliminated.
As I wrote in the introduction, the last word on the possibilities of this
powerful more-than-human cosmology—both as theory and praxis, as
an interpretive enterprise and as an ethical proposal—should be left to
readers. In his books, Levi often presents literature as a transformative
encounter, and I hope my own book has shown how Levi’s fiction and
poetry indeed challenge readers neither to appropriate passively another’s
knowledge and experiences, via an easy identification, nor simply to
resolve acrobatically mere hermeneutic or philological problems, as in
some experimental literature. Instead, Levi’s oeuvre compels us to put our
very selves at stake as material creatures and ethical subjects, with prob-
lematic identities and often controversial epistemological assumptions. It
would seem only fair, then, to conclude this volume by recalling that for
Levi the function of testimony is to “preparare il terreno al giudice. I
giudici siete voi”12 (SQU, OI 175) [prepare the ground for the judge. You
are the judges].
Yet, there is one final remark I would like to make before concluding
this exploration of Levi’s literature.
The long and intricate track that connects autobiography and testi-
mony, subjectivity and animality, that has characterized what I wrote so
far can in fact be followed also in one more of Levi’s texts, this time
canonically entitled “Autobiografia” [Autobiography]. Although the
autobiographical genre has been usually associated with prose,
“Autobiografia” is a relatively short poem (twenty-eight lines) written in
November 1980 and then collected by Levi in Ad ora incerta (AOI, OII
558). The epigraph—a famous fragment from the pre-Socratic and
Agrigentian philosopher Empedocles—sets the tone of the whole poem,
which presents the speaking subject (“io che vi parlo” [I who speak to
you; CW, 1935]) going through a series of different identities and trans-
formations which allude to Empedocles’s idea of metempsychosis. The
268 D. Benvegnù
first twenty-six lines thus tell a story of metamorphoses and interchanges

between the subject and the environment that cannot but recall two
other stories written by Levi, that is to say “Carbonio” in Il sistema peri-
odico and “Il fabbro di se stesso” in Vizio di forma. Even these two stories
describe in fact from a more-than-human perspective the adventures of a
subject who not only continuously changes and becomes something else,
but also persists throughout all the mutations as an entity which is part
of the world, within the environment, in relation with the material uni-
verse rather than his observer or master. Even the “I-character” of
“Autobiografia” has been a “pesce, pronto e viscido” [a fish, sleek and fast]
which swarmed through the sea’s blind pits; a dinosaur-like creature
which was higher than a tower, whose “mole bruta ostruiva le valli” [brute
bulk obstructed the valleys]; a “rospo” [toad] who sang to the moon; a
“cervo impetuoso e timido” [impetuous timid deer] running through
woods; a “cicala ubriaca, tarantola astuta e orrenda, / e salamandra e scor-
pione ed unicorno e aspide” [drunk cicada, astute horrendous tarantula,
/and salamander and scorpion and unicorn and asp]. As an “asino alla
mola” [donkey on the millstone], they suffered “la frusta/e caldi e geli e la
disperazione del giogo” [the whip/And heat and cold and the desperation
of the yoke], but they were also “fanciulla, esitante alla danza” [girl, hesi-
tant in the dance] and finally, at lines 26–28, even a “geometra” [geome-
ter] who has known tears and laughter and many loves (“Ho conosciuto
il pianto e il riso e molte veneri”).
This long list of different creatures has two main features. First, its
progression does not match the common understanding of evolution—
namely, a linear development from simplicity to complexity—as the
mention of the cicada after the deer proves. The fact that the human
beings are at the end of the poem, then, does not necessarily mean that
they are the last, perfected stage of a progressive continuum, as instead a
misinterpretation of Darwinism, probably influenced by the hierarchical
order of the “scala naturae,” seems still to believe nowadays. Instead, and
more in keeping with what Darwin’s theories allege, a regime of fortune,
a destiny of chance is what really determines the different mutations of
the autobiographical subject.13 Second, some of the transformations and,
more generally, the overall atmosphere of incessant mutation recall, as
Usher has pointed out, also two other short stories we have already
explored, that is to say “La grande mutazione” and “Disfilassi.” Although
we have noticed a certain ambivalence in these two stories, I do not find
the series of transformations and identifications as presented in
“Autobiografia” a sign of sadness or mere suffering, as instead Usher sug-
gests when he writes that “in a long life [the autobiographical character]
has, unfortunately, been everything” (Usher 2004, 108; emphasis added).
Rather than misfortune, I read instead in “Autobiografia” an understand-
ing of the self that is grounded on the concept of the chaosmos I have
proposed in the previous chapters. Therefore, although suffering is pres-
ent—with a donkey image that inevitably recalls our analysis of “Se
more”—the subject seems enriched rather than annihilated by the inter-
connections between a certain persistence of the “I” and the different
animal identities of this “I,” his diverse animal incarnations, whether they
are human or not. It is on this very process of interferences and conver-
gences that the subject’s complex identity is based, and the autobiography
testifies to this interplay of singularity and multiplicity, animal life and
human specificity.
Yet, the last two lines after the series of transformations seem instead
to pose the possible danger of such interconnected subjectivity. We get to
know, in fact, that the autobiographical character is asking his fellow citi-
zens of Agrigento not to mock him, “se questo vecchio corpo é inciso di
strani segni” [if this old body is engraved with strange marks]. As those
scholars who have engaged with this poem have almost unanimously
underlined, the reference to the strange marks immediately recalls the
tattooed number from Auschwitz that Levi refused to erase from his left
arm. Therefore, even “Autobiografia” would be another moment of the
very process we have also observed in the story of Innaminka, namely, a
search for identity that is difficult and problematic. We must in fact
remember that, as the “I” in the poem, even Levi struggled to be accepted
by his fellow human beings after having gone through a transformative
process that, violently in his case, altered forever his alleged humanness.
The final lines of “Autobiografia,” then, force us to realize that “the sci-
ence, the technology, and the reduction of the human kind to a number
that made the Nazi camps possible” (Lollini 2004, 87) are part of a
270 D. Benvegnù
normative, biopolitical discourse that is both recalled and challenged by

those strange marks impressed on the body of the “I-character.” If the
citizens of Agrigento would mock the “I-character,” it is perhaps because
they embrace the same discourse, according to which becoming animal is
indeed a sign of degradation and, thus, a trigger for exploitation and
violence. However, if we accept the overlap between the “I-character” of
“Autobiografia” and Primo Levi, the series of animal transformations pre-
sented by the poem cannot be read exclusively as an allegory of the aber-
rant life Levi experienced in Auschwitz. Instead, just as Lollini writes
about the earlier poem “Il canto del corvo,” I believe that the animal
metamorphoses of “Autobiografia” do “create the possibility for an impos-
sible encounter, (…) a place for that impossible encounter with the other
(…), the other that we will never be able to reduce to our parameters and
paradigms” (Lollini 2004, 80–81). Although Lollini specifies that by
“other” he means “the survivor and the disappeared” (i.e. human beings),
the natures of Levi’s testimony as we have articulated it in this book allow
us to read Lollini’s “other” as animal others, whether it is our own animal-
ity at stake or proper non-human animals. The animal images and the
consequent animal limitrophy evoked by “Autobiografia” reveal, there-
fore, the impossible possibility of a more-than-human identity, with
which we are encouraged to identify but also warned about its radical
incomprehensibility. This incomprehensibility might lure us into a regime
of denial as attributed to the people of Agrigento, who do not recognize
in the marks on the body of the “I-character” the signs of also their own
animality. The poem reveals instead the urgency to experience this ani-
mality through a different kind of “strani segni,” those written on paper,
and recognize that the impossible possibility of the autobiographical ani-
mal is our own interconnected doubleness of plurality and singularity,
sameness and alterity. From this perspective, then, “Autobiografia” is both
a real animal autobiography and a true testimony, which expresses a
shared, complex, asymmetrical universe composed of suffering and com-
passion, techne and poesis, hybridity, communities, and creation. I have
sought to demonstrate that we can read not only “Autobiografia” but
Levi’s entire oeuvre in this way, and I believe that this is indeed his mes-
sage of overwhelming but joyful responsibility for us and for future
generations.
Notes
1. On Levi’s reading of The Call of the Wild, see Belpoliti and Gordon
(2007), 54.
2. For the relations between Levi and Rosny’s novel, see RdR, OII
1393–1395.
3. For Derrida on Lacan, see Derrida (2008), 119–140.
4. On the general reception of Holocaust memoires in Italy after WWII,
see Gordon (2012).
5. Primo Levi dies on April 11, 1987, as a consequence of having fallen
over the third floor railing of his apartment stairwell. According to his
two most recent biographers, at the time of his death Levi was working
on another book tentatively called The Double Bond (Angier 2002, 80;
Thomson, 485). No excerpts of this new volume have been published or
made public, and therefore the six imaginary interviews remain indeed
the last large literary project published by Levi.
6. This suggestion is also made by Belpoliti in “Animali e fantasmi” (after-
word to UNG 141). It is however worth noting that the only author
who collected in a volume the imaginary interviews with dead protago-
nists of human history he wrote for the radio was Giorgio Manganelli (A
e B, 1975). That is to say, a writer with whom Levi had in 1976 a public
controversy following the publication of his article entitled Dello scrivere
oscuro, quite ferociously criticized by Manganelli in the Corriere della
Sera. Nobody can obviously say whether Levi’s imaginary interviews are
also a direct response, ten years later, to Manganelli, or this is just a coin-
cidence. On this controversy cf. Poli and Calcagno, 108–109.
7. Mario Porro has pointed out that in Levi—as well as in Calvino and in
Gadda—“pensare all’umano nella sua ecologica partecipazione a una
casa comune, significa chiamarlo a un’assunzione di “cura” che si allarga
al di là del nostro egoismo di specie” (Porro, 31) [thinking about human-
ity in its ecological participation to a common house, means call humans
toward an ethics of care that goes beyond the egoism of our species].
8. The concept of “becoming animal” is developed by Gilles Deleuze in sev-
eral of his works, written in collaboration with Felix Guattari, such as A
Thousand Plateaus, or by himself, such as Essays Critical and Clinical. On
this topic see especially Bruns (2007) and Beaulieu (2012). The American
philosopher, cultural ecologist, and performance artist David Abram rec-
ognizes his debt to but also his distance from Gilles Deleuze’s theories in
his 2010 book devoted indeed to “Becoming Animal” (Abram, 3–12).
272 D. Benvegnù
9. I borrow the concept of “more than human Humanism” from Lollini

(2011a).
10. For the adjective “critical” in “Critical Humanisms” see Halliwell and
Mousley (2003).
11. Walter Benjamin develops the concept of “dialectical image” in several of
his works, but mostly in his Arcades Project. On this topic see at least
Jennings (1987).
12. As Mirna Cicioni has pointed out, this sentence does not invoke the
neutrality of literary authors, of course, but rather seems to incarnate
Levi’s hopes that his work would “encourage younger readers to under-
stand as well as to know, and to avoid ‘moral indifference,’ making
informed choices in all areas” (Cicioni 2004, 35). Although our reading
of the whole of Levi’s literary production problematize the meaning of
that understanding and expand the concept of testimony, the encourage-
ment against “moral indifference” is still valid even in the case of “the
question of the animal.”
13. On the concept of “fortune” in Levi, see Gordon (2010).
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Index1
A and interspecific community, xiv,

“Ad ora incerta,” 38, 102, 219, 10, 22, 35, 64, 122, 133, 194,
239n15, 267 198, 212, 217, 226, 230, 231,
“Against Pain,”, see “Contro il 233, 234, 236, 237,
dolore” 239–240n20, 252–254
Agamben, Giorgio, 26, 27, 43n20, and moral imagination,
43n25, 78, 86n20, 109n8, 21–25
133–134, 148, 162, 222 muteness, 96–108
“Angelica farfalla,” xiii their suffering in comparison to
Animale-uomo, xi, xii, 12, 42n16, the Holocaust, 9–12
75–77, 95, 105–107, 188, Anthropocentrism, xiv, 11, 21,
228, 232 45n37, 125, 132, 185, 220,
Animality, 11, 12, 18, 21, 26–29, 31, 222, 225, 236, 259, 266
34, 35, 68, 113, 118, 125, 134, Anthropomorphism, 22, 35, 55, 61,
138, 153, 166, 171, 184, 186, 89, 181, 185, 211
199, 214, 217, 236, 247, 251, Arendt, Hannah, xiii, xiv, 31, 117,
261, 262, 264, 265, 267, 270 118, 125, 140n9, 140n10,
Animals 141n11, 141n14, 147, 148,
friendship, xv, 2, 136, 167, 197, 198, 212
192–194, 212, 217 Aristotelianism, 2, 17, 40n3
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes

1

Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71258-1
294 Index
Auschwitz, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 1, 3, Chiavacci, Enrico, 64–72, 75, 76,
7–10, 12–14, 16, 30, 37, 38, 78, 196, 222
56, 57, 75–78, 81–83, 86n19, “Contro il dolore,” xii, 53, 63–84,
90, 92, 95, 97, 100, 102–104, 86n15, 87n22, 87n28, 90, 92
107, 109n10, 112, 114, 117, Creation, xii, xiii, 2, 11, 27, 29, 30,
118, 121, 125, 138, 147, 149, 34, 44n29, 57, 70, 72, 74, 98,
150, 157, 159–161, 163, 166, 100, 138, 139, 168, 172,
170–172, 181, 187, 188, 190, 184–188, 190, 191, 194–198,
191, 193, 195, 211, 214, 216, 201, 203, 205, 211, 212, 218,
218–220, 226, 228, 229, 219, 222, 224, 227, 229, 230,
232–236, 240n20, 244, 232–237, 240n20, 243, 258,
246–248, 253–255, 258, 263, 264, 270
262–264, 266, 269
“Autobiografia,” 267, 269
D
Dante, 28, 40n3, 156, 158, 160,
B 173n9, 173n11
Bare life, 43n20, 62, 95, 96, 102, Darwin, Charles, xiv, 28, 130, 131,
107, 117 133, 182, 219–237, 239n10,
Belli, Giuseppe Gioacchino, xii, 245, 258, 268
98–108 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 29–30
Belpoliti, Marco, xv, 5, 8, 9, 41n11, Derrida, Jacques, xii, xiv, 10, 15, 20,
51, 85n12, 86n18, 108n2, 27, 31, 60–63, 75, 85n10, 89,
134, 135, 143n30, 150, 171, 94, 103, 105, 108n6, 109n14,
196, 206n5, 208n32, 215, 128–130, 139, 198, 199, 201,
226, 255, 259–262, 271, 202, 212, 258, 264, 271n3
271n1 De Sanctis, Francesco, 28–29
Benjamin, Walter, 10, 171, 174n18, Descartes, René, 3, 83, 84n8, 90, 94,
266, 272n11 264
Bentham, Jeremy, xii, 56–63, 67, 80, “Disfilassi,” xiv, 234, 236, 237, 244,
83, 84n4, 84n5, 89 269
Bestialization, 77, 84, 191, 235
Buck (The Call of the Wild), see
London, Jack E
Eaglestone, Robert, 15–18, 43n19,
43n20
C Enchantment, xiv, 35, 223, 234,
Celan, Paul, 102 237, 267
“Cena in piedi,” 248, 250, 252, 253, Enlightenment, xi, 1, 39n3, 46n37,
255–258, 261, 263 56, 89, 91, 120
Index
295
Esposito, Roberto, 26, 43n25, 236 Human hubris, xiii, 40n3, 171, 173,
Ethology, 4, 5, 143n33, 179, 181, 264
186, 224 Humanism, ix, xi, xiii, 1, 2, 14, 18,
Evolution, 4, 13, 21, 39, 130, 151, 20, 25, 26, 35, 40n3, 43n20,
181, 202, 222 45n35, 90, 134, 148, 154,
196, 265
Hurbinek, xii, 98, 102–107, 109n16
F Huxley, Aldous, 118, 151, 181, 182,
Farrell, Joseph, 1–4, 7, 8, 13, 31, 185, 188
39–40n3 Hybridity, x, xiii, 33, 36, 139, 151,
Feder Kittay, Eva, 136 152, 161–163, 165, 166,
171–173, 184, 226, 234, 235,
237, 252, 253, 256, 257,
G 263–265
Gehlen, Arnold, 135, 136, 143n33
Genesis, xiii, 195, 212, 219
Gordon, Robert, xiv, 2, 8, 42n18, I
54, 90, 94, 108n2, 150, 159, Identification, 15–18, 21, 22, 34,
167, 186, 193, 271n1, 271n4, 40n3, 40n8, 75, 86n19, 97,
272n13 100, 107, 118, 134, 137, 148,
Gray zone, see “Zona grigia” 151, 156–159, 168, 172, 180,
186, 226, 232, 233, 246–248,
256, 257, 262, 265–267
H If This Is a Man, see Se questo è un
Heidegger, Martin, xiii, 3, 31, 94, uomo
109n11, 119, 124–129, 135, Il sesto giorno, xiv, 203, 205,
139, 142n20, 142n21, 142n24, 208n32, 212, 226
143n25–27, 148, 151, 152 Il sistema periodico, 12, 32, 33, 129,
Holocaust, ix, x, xvn3 7, 9, 14, 15, 138, 143n29
33, 39, 66, 93, 94, 103, 107, I sommersi e i salvati, 11, 16, 38, 39,
108n3, 109n11, 109n13, 123, 75, 86n16, 90–96, 107, 215,
142n20, 161, 162, 177, 193, 246
196, 207n22, 208n28, 211,
216, 227, 232, 240n21, 248,
255, 262, 265, 271n4 J
Homo faber, xiii, 118–123, 130, 131, Jemolo, Carlo Arturo, 64, 67, 68,
135, 136, 139, 140n10, 142n17
141n11, 142n17, 142n18, Job, xiii, 99, 195, 212, 220,
147, 148, 151, 156, 162, 165, 227–235, 237, 239n17,
171, 173, 197 239n18, 243
296 Index
K as a humanist, 3
Kim, Claire Jeane, 37, 41n13, 58, and literary identification, 16, 17
266 rejection of purity, 31
Klein, Ilona, 9–11, 140n2, 154 and the suffering of squirrels, 51
and witnessing by proxy, 95, 105,
107, 171, 255
L Lilith e altri racconti, 3, 40n11, 60,
La chiave a stella, 87n22, 115, 131, 64, 66, 69, 73, 82, 87n24,
132, 134–138, 143n30, 165 87n28, 98, 113, 132, 138,
La grande mutazione, 226, 227, 237, 142n17, 142n19, 143n34,
269 163, 165, 173n3, 179, 180,
L’altrui mestiere, 53, 64, 84n1, 188–190, 192, 200, 202, 212,
87n28, 118, 122, 155, 157, 216–218, 234, 240n22, 243,
178, 181, 186, 206n9, 251, 260, 262
208n27, 208n32, 224, Limitrophy, xiii, xiv, 54, 62, 63, 107,
239n12–14, 240n22 132, 134, 139, 151, 154, 173,
La ricerca delle radici, xiv, 98, 100, 198, 230, 236, 237, 247, 250,
106, 109n10, 154, 177, 180, 253, 264, 265, 267, 270
220–223, 228, 232, 237, Linnaeus, Carl, 132
240n22, 251, 255, 271n2 L’intolleranza razziale, 3
La Stampa, xii, 33, 51, 64, 65, Lippit, Akira, 25
67–69, 71, 76, 81, 85n13, Literary animals, xi, xii, 11, 21, 25,
86n14, 87n22, 87n26, 111, 28, 30, 171, 237, 259,
112, 119, 141n15, 142n17, 262–266
142n19, 143n30, 155, 173n7, London, Jack, 244, 247, 257
178, 180, 202, 224, 243, 248, Lorenz, Konrad, 4–7, 40n6, 42n14,
250, 252, 258 79, 86n21, 183, 225
La tregua, xii, 12, 94, 97, 102–104,
106, 108n3, 180, 188, 233,
238n5 M
Leopardi, Giacomo, 81, 87n27, 181, Marchesini, Roberto, 26, 43n25
224, 225, 227, 237, 239n17 Maurizi, Marco, 27, 266
Levinas, Emmanuel, 15, 18, 124 Montaigne, Michel de, 90, 264
Levi, Primo Musulmänner, 95, 96, 107
as a centaur, 33, 36, 138,
149–151, 162, 163, 167–169,
171, 234, 248, 253 N
and Heidegger, 124 Nussbaum, Martha, 17, 21
Index
297
O Se questo è un uom, x, 1, 7, 8, 12, 14,

Orangutan, 21, 133, 134, 136, 148 15, 39, 39n3, 42n16, 75–77,
90, 94, 101, 106, 109n15,
149, 150, 156–159, 170, 172,
P 178, 187, 189, 195, 204, 214,
Peter Singer, xii, 19, 26, 31, 59, 218, 246, 248
85n8, 89 Singer, Peter, 10, 19, 41n12, 41n14,
Pugliese, Stanislao, 3 43n21, 59–61, 67, 83, 85n8
Squirrel, 51–55, 89
Storie Naturali, 80, 153, 159–161,
Q 168
“Quaestio de Centauris,” xiii, 163, Subhuman, 69–71, 95
164, 167, 170–173, 234
Question of the animal, xi, 11, 12,
19, 34, 56, 60, 263, 265 T
Techne, xii, 30, 76, 116, 123,
127–130, 139, 149, 151, 162,
R 169, 171, 173, 184, 197, 232,
Racconti e saggi, 86n16, 112–114, 257, 270
117, 140n5, 200, 226 Testimony, 14–25, 90–98, 212–220,
Racial intolerance, 3–6, 13, 79, 260 243–272
Raglon, Rebecca, 22, 23 Truce. S., see La tregua
Regan, Tom, 60, 79, 85n9 Tilgher, Adriano, 120–122, 136,
“Romanzi dettati dai grilli,” xiii, 180, 147, 148, 151, 162
183, 185–188, 195, 196, 211, Todorov, Tzvetan, 2
219, 225 Toni Morrison, x
Ross, Charlotte, 2, 40n9, 53, 116, Trauma, 14, 24, 216
173n1, 206n8, 226, 235 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 24, 33
Ruesch, Hans, 64–67, 85n11–13, 93 Turin, ix, xiv, 3, 12, 119, 224, 245,
261
S
Sax, Boria, 7, 40n6, 41n13, 86n19 U
Scholtmeijer, Marian, 21–23, 43n24, “Una bottiglia di sole,” xiii, 112,
101 115–119, 122, 124, 126, 147
Science fiction, x, 7, 8, 36, 94, 139, “Uno scrivere nuovo,” xiii, 180–195
149–152, 154, 160–162, 172, “Un testamento,” 81
173n1, 221 Useless violence, 90
298 Index
V W
“Versamina,” 80, 81 Wolfe, Cary, 20, 21, 34, 43n23
“Vilmy,” 213–215, 217, 218, 236,
250, 258
Vizio di forma, 87n22, 122, 130, Z
214, 238n1 Žižek, Slavoj, 134
Vulnerability, xii, 35, 51, 53, 61, 62, “Zona grigia,” 90, 246
75, 81, 97, 105, 107, 136, 257

Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work

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ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY

IN PRIMO LEVI’S WORK

More information about this series at

The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930018

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Printed on acid-free paper

posts, in Animal Ethics, Animal Welfare, Animal Rights, Animal Law,

The new Palgrave Macmillan Series on Animal Ethics is the result of a

We invite academics to visit the Centre’s website www.oxfordani-

Oxford, UK Andrew Linzey

In their introduction to Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western

double career, both as a professional chemist in the paint industry and as

boundaries between human and non-human in Primo Levi’s work

To provide a representative and comprehensive—but inevitably not

goes my gratitude as well. My thanks go also to Enrico Cesaretti, Serenella

Hanover, NH, USA Damiano Benvegnù

1 Introduction. Primo Levi and the Question of the Animal 1

2 Suffering I. Shared Vulnerability 51

3 Suffering II. Muteness and Testimony 89

4 Techne I. Animal Hands 111

5 Techne II. Hybrids and Hubris 147

6 Creation I. A New Writing 177

7 Creation II. Re-Enchantment 211

8 Conclusion. Animal Testimony 243

Individual works by Primo Levi, and the English translations, are

If This Is a Man ITIM

Since the first edition of Se questo è un uomo published by De Silva in

The only philosophy or current of thought to which [Levi] owed allegiance

© The Author(s) 2018 1

This Aristotelian and almost statuesque interpretation of Levi has been

theology, from Descartes to Heidegger, and arrives at our contemporary

animalization and degradation and on whether it is carried throughout

Nei libri di Konrad Lorenz, premio nobel fondatore dell’etologia, che ha

This passage is remarkable for several reasons. For instance, we become

Although a widespread controversy arose around Lorenz’s past when

for Lorenz such homology “was proven:” as animal domestication leads to

conclusa La Tregua (…) mi è parso di essermi completamene bruciato

Although the difference between inumano and disumano is not as clear

as they write, animals “are present as metaphors, models and myths—in

relies on a renowned statement made by the 1978 Nobel Prize Laureate

Se non si comincia da bambini, imparare a rubare non è facile; mi erano

As Cicioni has pointed out, in this passage a certain Darwinian posi-

aporias and philosophical melancholia. Specifically, LaCapra has pointed

seems to become comprehensible, Levi reminds us that instead one

many forms of prose writing encourage identification and while testimony

Inevitably, this very process creates a “doubleness” which is thus central

terms—man and animal—shared in common revealed what differenti-

with the larger problematic of posthumanism, not in the sense of some

returning us precisely to the thickness and finitude of human embodiment

The conclusion is simple: if the Animal Studies wants to overcome the

1. To “deconstruct reductive, disrespectful ways of presenting nonhuman

the roots of Literary Animal Studies lie in reminding us of the power of

special power to “generate a process of destabilization” that affects the

stretch to the limit questions of language, epistemology, and ethics that

Weil’s comment emphasizes how both animal studies and trauma

Tsing, in fact, “our categories and discriminations always produce zones

1.2 Animal Studies and Italian Literature

scholarship on the similar topics.25 We might recall here, just to name a

volume belongs to a “trilogy” in which the other themes are respectively

attempt made by the subject to incorporate their otherness through natu-

1.3 Suffering, Techne, Creation

1. Levi’s approach to non-human animals and animality moves from an

Oxford, UK Andrew Linzey

Hanover, NH, USA Damiano Benvegnù

1 Introduction. Primo Levi and the Question of the Animal 1

2 Suffering I. Shared Vulnerability 51

3 Suffering II. Muteness and Testimony 89

4 Techne I. Animal Hands 111

5 Techne II. Hybrids and Hubris 147

6 Creation I. A New Writing 177

7 Creation II. Re-Enchantment 211

8 Conclusion. Animal Testimony 243

1.2 Animal Studies and Italian Literature

1.3 Suffering, Techne, Creation

2.1 “Can They Suffer?”

2.2 “ Contro il dolore” and the Debate

3.1 Useless Violence, Bare Life, Testimony