Figurações de sobrevivência em Primo Levi. Diálogos com Norbert Elias

Abstract

Amongst social figurations which shape the life of individuals, the Italian writer Primo Levi, deported to Auschwitz in 1944, asked himself: “Is this a man?”. Levi managed to survive in the work of writing testimony, although he did not escape the speech that incorporates the individual in the evil consciousness. Nor the historical practices of enunciation that create the figure of the jew in the sphere of moral condemnation as a person who has a price, therefore, is enslaved. Nor the impacts of creed and Nazi propaganda in the human psyche. He chose another possible way to end his trauma. In this article, we invited the German sociologist Norbert Elias, as well as others social thinkers, to unfold the survival figurations in the narrative of Primo Levi. The analytical categories of eliasian sociology used in the interpretation of The Periodic Table, the interweaving of relations in the existence maps offer decoding clues of what the body and the heart of a scientist writer were not able to escape.