The Limits of Literary Testimony: Understanding Levi’s Paradox

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Lucas Amaral de
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Arquivo Maaravi: Revista Digital de Estudos Judaicos da UFMG
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/maaravi/article/view/14406
• topic: Testemunho; Primo Levi; Experiência-Limite; Testimony; Primo Levi; Limit-Experience

Auschwitz has often been thought of as an indescribable event that is beyond all possible linguistic means of representation. Italian author Primo Levi (1919-1987) attempted to address this problem revealing the aporetic (and paradoxical) nature of the process of elaborating a literary testimony: impossible, but necessary. This article aims to analyse some of the ethical and epistemological issues that testimony of a traumatic event can raise for literature. The hypothesis is that the testimony, as Levi elaborated it, contains a lacuna or a void, which is in fact what constitutes it: while witnesses present the limit-experience out of obligation, they cease to convey others due to inability or incapacity. The argument here is that what makes a testimony on a traumatic event possible is its incomplete nature, which gives strength to the process of communicating limit-experiences.