Narrating Evil by Lara Maria;

Author:Lara, Maria;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

PART II

The Judgments

CHAPTER 6

What Remains? Language Remains

Levi the Jew—ebreo di ritorno—acquired the ability to narrate directly from the hell of Auschwitz, and, once he had returned to life, the ability to purify his mouth of that contagion using the gift of the story, an inheritance which, like all divine or magic gifts, soon proved to be a double-edge sword.

—Marco Belpoliti1

Building a Model for Moral Judgment

In this chapter, I will use my model of reflective judgment to show that is it possible to connect the work and stories of Primo Levi to this moral type of judgment. I will then show the two different ways in which judgment is used—first, the reflective, then the determinant—the former in Levi’s work, and the latter in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. The reason to focus on Levi’s and Agamben’s work is to show what makes a judgment a reflective one, out of specific contexts and situations, whereas the determinant judgment in Agamben’s work helps clarify how easily one can turn the disclosiveness of a judgment into a generalization of a determinant perspective, which blurs the final outcome of the work of judgment. I will argue that it is the connection between these two authors—the concrete conceptualizations of Levi’s experience and then the way in which his categories are turned out to be the basis of a generalization—that allows me to better explore what really constitutes the hard work of reflective judgment as a way of understanding past catastrophes.

By testifying about his experience at Auschwitz, valid essentially in and of itself, Levi uses important conceptual constructions to provide us with clues to make sense of the kind of evil he describes.2 With those conceptual elements in hand, Agamben first develops his own judgment by using the two most important and striking categories from Levi’s narratives (the concept of the “gray zones” and the concept of the Muselmann) and then he transforms them into a new schema to understand modern politics. By critically examining Agamben’s case, I wish to provide clues into what makes reflective judgment an important tool to understand evil, but when it is used as a general theory of the political, its moral scope is obscured. In the account Agamben gives of Auschwitz, a bloody reality emerges out of the idea of the homo sacer and the camp and it is transformed into the biopolitical paradigm of modern politics.3

I have insisted since the first chapter that stories are good vehicles that can lead to the construction of reflective judgments. In previous chapters, I have dealt with historical narratives and theoretical works derived from historians’ accounts as good examples that triggered reflective judgments. Until now, we have not seen the way narratives affect readers and public opinion or the impact they have on other people’s ideas and judgments. Clearly, the dimension of spectators and of public opinion relates to the public sphere, but I need to clarify that what we are dealing with in this chapter is the literary public sphere.

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