Primo e ‘eu’: uma montagem de risco

Abstract

A central issue in all of Primo Levi's work, human labor is what simultaneously constitutes us as social beings and what, in the anthropocene, can destroy or reinvent us. Defining himself as a writer who works with “the assembly of words just as the chemist works in assembling molecules”, it is through this experience that he seeks to shed light on Lager's “grey zone” and its developments, as well as to cross them through a dizzying imagination, which is the counterpoint to the “serene study” with which he examined Auschwitz's personal and collective experience – in his words, an “enormous biological and social experiment”. Emulating Levi's method and allowing the author/translator to speak, this essay proceeds to assemble, by analogy and metonymy, a variety of his texts that touch on many of his obsessions, all of them translated and reflected by me in the last twenty years.