5:00 pm | Primo Levi: Anthropologist of Normality. Opening remarks: Dario Disegni (Compagnia di San Paolo and Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi, Turin) and Ernesto Ferrero (author of Primo Levi and former editor in chief of the Einaudi publishing house). The reception of Levi's work has been characterized, in Italy as abroad, by serious misunderstandings.
7:00 pm | Levi, Agamben, and the Era of Witness. With Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University), Chair and moderator, Debarati Sanyal (University of California, Berkeley), Thomas Trezise (Princeton University), Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem). In Giorgio Agamben’s reading, Levi’s mute witnesses of the concentration and extermination camps, define the impossibility of bearing witness to what Agamben insists on simply calling “Auschwitz.” In addition, they also become the exemplars of his notion of “bare life,” the basis for a “new ethics” and a new politics based on the concentration camp as permanent “state of exception.” The speakers in this session will challenge what they deem to be Agamben’s hyperbolic, ahistorical and sacralizing reading of Levi’s writings about the camps. They will question his allegorical deployment of the gray zone as a perpetual and transhistorical site of complicity between victims and executioners.
New York City, NY; NYC