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.

Friday, March 24

Alexander Gelley, University of California, Irvine
‘The propre of “Man”‘
Rebecca Karni, UCLA
‘Textual Testimonies: Possibilities for Poetics and Critique after Auschwitz’
Marta Marín-Dòmine, Wilfrid Laurier University
“Human Condition and the Grey Zone”
Soren Triff, Brsitol Community College, University of Miami
“Knowledge, representation, and power in early modern Europe: The Jewish of Spain”

Saturday, March 25

Colman Hogan, University of Toronto
“Representation at the limits: Goya and the Death of Neo-Classicism”
Justin Neuman, University of Virginia
“Post-Secular Agency and Bare Life in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee”
Zoe Norridge, School of Oriental and African Studies, Univ. of London
“After such knowledge? Holocaust legacies & perceptions of racial pain in two Southern African novels”