A fabricação de uma forma pervertida de humano: Primo Levi e os rumores da memória

Abstract

The writer and chemist Primo Levi created one of the strongest testimonies of the second half of the twentieth century. In this text, I try to convert the questions that appear in two of his most striking autobiographies about the extermination camp in problems of sociological character. I wish to interpret his testimony as a documentary source, where it is possible to apprehend informative aspects on violence and death denunciation, things that have signed our era with blood. In these terms, I will try to verify the limits to the construction of a testimony on the barbarism and the possibilities found by Levi in the representation and reflection on his experience. After all, to address Levi’s work parting from a set of elements that find in the notion of memory its decisive axis makes his testimony not only an object of historical analysis, but also a prime source to reflect on an urgent political challenge: «not to repeat the past».