Primo Levi and the genre of testimony

Abstract

Following on from spectral geographical studies of the disruptive aspects of memory, this paper further develops recent interest in the nonrepresentational and paradoxical dynamics of witnessing by drawing out the possibility of a historiography based on the capacity of testimony to interrupt and suspend representational closure. This possibility is posited in relation to the specific historiographical challenges posed by places and events of atrocity, whereby the extreme nature that makes these events so real threatens at the same time to render them the product of a self‐enclosed, alien and absolutely distant world. Through a close reading of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, I argue that the genre of testimony is predisposed towards generating disruptive encounters that force the reader of such works to take co‐responsibility in making sense of the text. Focusing upon Levi’s famous distinction between ‘the drowned and the saved’ of the camp, and the multiple possible interpretations of this distinction, I further argue that by establishing a space of uncertainty in which audiences must make an interpretive decision about the text without authorial guarantee, the disruptive form of memory that characterises witness testimony has the capacity to cultivate a fleeting recognition of a shared world between witness and reader, past and present.

Rethinking the camp: On spatial technologies of power and resistance

“…Charlesworth (1994) has instead discussed Auschwitz as a contested place of memory and has interrogated from a geographical perspective the landscape of Holocaust sites (see Charlesworth and Addis, 2002; Charlesworth, 2004a, 2004b; Charlesworth et al, 2006). Through a series of interventions, Carter-White (2009, 2011, 2013) has investigated the spatialities of the Nazi concentration camps and their representation in literature, films and the social media. Minca (2006, 2007) has applied an Agambenian perspective on the nomos of the concentration camp in two interventions in which he reflects on the ‘spatial’ in Agamben’s work and, in particular, on his theory of the camp in relation to the foundations of the modern state and its biopolitical geographies.…”

Spacing the subject: Thinking subjectivity after non‐representational theory

“…In this work, bodies (and so subjects) are recast, moving from being the generative sources of meaning and signification or that which is active in the disclosure of worlds and instead are reclined, have suspended their comportment or disposition, or hold no focus or reflexive attention (Harrison, ). Taking up these concerns, a range of work has emerged on bodies which are in pain, sleeping, troubled by alterity or events that befall them, and so on (Bissell, , ; Carter‐White, ; Harrison, , ; Harrison, ). One key feature of this is the challenge of relating these experiences; sleep and death, for example, distinguish themselves through the way they extend beyond the realms of human consciousness and so knowing.…”

Witnessing the witnesses: Responding to the testimonial spaces of the camp

“…What remains to be accounted for in camp methodologies, however, is the tendency of testimony to challenge, disrupt, and suspend this interpretive process. The literature on witnessing has established that testimony is more than a stable repository of mimetic representational data, and that fundamental to its work is how testimonial texts compel readers to engage with a world that is radically outside of their own experience (Laub & Felman, 1992; Trezise, 2014; within geography, see Carter‐White, 2012, 2018; Harrison 2007; Pratt, 2009). Accordingly, this paper argues that camp methodologies are impoverished if their engagement with testimony only extends to isolating and extracting observational data from these texts; and that the complex literary dimensions of testimony, particularly its often contradictory interactions with reader positionality, offer insights into the geographies of the camp that are not available through the reporting of facts.…”