Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table: Chemistry as Posthumanist Science

Abstract

This essay positions Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table as an entry point into a larger discussion regarding representations of chemistry as a humanist or posthumanist science in twentieth and twenty-first century culture. In contrast to ideal models of material behavior, which Levi associates with physics, experiments in The Periodic Table do not reach neat conclusions, and these failures call attention to the limited and inevitably inadequate ways that humanist, universalist frameworks model the object world. Levi’s maturation as chemist, I argue, enables him to establish a posthumanist narrative and an accompanying ethics rooted in irregular, material conditions of particularity.