ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

On numerous occasions Primo Levi —survivor, writer, practicing chemist— frames his understanding of the concentration camp experience in terms of a “laboratory”. Assaying that metaphor and catalyzing its permutations, Levi states that the limit experiences brought to light there are “pregnant, full of significance…[ask] more questions than…[they answer]…sum up…the entire theme of the grey zone and…[leave] one dangling”. In such limit experiences “it is possible,” he claims, “to recognize in an exemplary form the almost physical necessity with which political coercion gives birth to that ill-defined sphere of ambiguity and compromise,” what he calls a “terrible” but “indecipherable” world which must be, “if possible, understood”. Hypothesizing the validity of Levi’s metaphor, our panel proposes to examine the nature of the knowledge that arises out of such “experiments” and experiences of the limit. Examinations of these grey zones raise a series of profound epistemological, ethical, representational and linguistic questions: what can be known of such experiences; how can they be articulated; what are our needs and obligations with respect to them? Since we deem knowledge to be primarily an effect of retroaction, we do not seek to limit the panel’s discussion to the Shoah; rather, we believe that the conditio inhumana made manifest there constitutes a lens, albeit grey, for every articulation of knowledge of the human condition confronted with the non-human of a limit situation.

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