프리모 레비의 자살과 현대적 의미

Primo Levi’s Suicide and Its Modern Meaning

This essay aims to explore into Primo Levi's suicide and its modern meanings. Levi, the best-known writer among all the Nazi camps survivors, devoted his life to bearing witness to Nazis' brutality and their victims' pains. His self-imposed task of writing in order to testify against Nazi made his life worthwhile and bearable. As such, his suicide should be understood in terms of the success or failure of the task of bearing witness. To testimony is to memorize and then report the past. The problem with Levi is the fact that his memories of Auschwitz are extremely humiliating. During imprisonment, most of all the prisoners cannot help putting aside their humanity in an effort to stay alive. Survivors like Levi are reduced to hollow men, who are deprived of their humanity and become animals, unable to assume responsibilities for their action. The Nazis numbed their victims' moral responses by depriving them of the elementary quality of respect for their own and other's dignity. It is in such a context that Holocaust testimony should be understood as a moral response to the past in which the survivors attempt to belatedly assume responsibilities. However, the act of testimony can be paradox: in giving testimony, a witness reencounters his or her radical abjection, which they must then work through to provide a more successful testimony. Levi has a particular term designating such a paradox produced by the act of testimony: shame. In his narration of the shame episodes, Levi has to reexperience shame in order to be fully human: his humanity cannot be separated from his sense of shame. Shame is both a necessary precondition for the creation of a successful testimony and a curse he has to exorcise out. Here lies Levi's predicament: he writes in order to erase shame out of himself, but the absence of shame will forfeit him not only of his ability to testify, but of his identity itself. Levi's testimony combined with his terrible experiences of shame forced him into committing suicide.