Abstract
“Techne” investigates how Levi uses animal representations and references to animality to reflect upon his own writing, initially understood as a specifically human technology. This chapter begins such exploration analyzing one of Levi’s articles, “A Bottle of Sunshine,” in which he positions the human-animal divide along the lines of technological ability. Levi’s own position is first contextualized within the contemporary Italian cultural milieu, and then compared to two thinkers who both dwell upon the issue of human technology and animality, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The uncanny similarities between Heidegger and Levi compel a search in his fiction for clues about this ambiguous issue. The chapter ends with a close reading of The Monkey’s Wrench, focused on how Levi represents both human and non-human hands.
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- 1.
Cf. for instance E. Morante, Pro e contro la bomba atomica (1987) and P. Volponi, Corporale (1974). For Calvino, see especially his job as editor for the Notiziario Einaudi; cf. Martino 19–20.
- 2.
According to a very broad definition, science is a systematic knowledge base, where a series of steps is followed to reliably predict the type of outcome, while instead technology is applying the outcome of scientific principles to innovate and improve the manmade things in the world. Several essays have been written on the general importance of science and technology in Levi’s work, and some of them will be properly quoted. However, on this topic see also Klein (1990), Borri (1992), Cicioni (1996), Battistini (2004), Guagnini (2009) and Di Meo (2011).
- 3.
Levi (1986), then RS and OII 993.
- 4.
The “cobra” can be also seen as a link to the monstrous as described by Harrowitz (2001), 51–64.
- 5.
Levi (1985); then RS and OII 958–961.
- 6.
Carole Angier, for instance, claims that in “Una bottiglia di sole” Levi’s depiction of the human-animal divide is “semi-seria” [half-serious]; see Angier (2007), 5.
- 7.
Horace, Sermonum I, 1, 3, 28–35: sicut/parvola—nam exemplo est—magni formica laboris/ore trahit quodcumque potest atque addit acervo/quem struit, haud ignara ac non incauta futuri.
- 8.
In 1974 Levi arranged to go into semi-retirement; the last chapter of La chiave a stella describes Levi’s last activity as an employee at SIVA.
- 9.
Arendt is actually quoting here Aristotle’s Politics, 1254b25.
- 10.
Cf. also Arendt 1973, 474–475: “Isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives (…) is destroyed (…) Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary ‘metabolism with nature’ is of concern to no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness (…) Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.”
- 11.
Cf. Arendt (2008), 300: “Processes, therefore, and not ideas, the models and shapes of the things to be, become the guides for the making and fabricating activities of homo faber in the modern age.”
- 12.
Cf. Zinato (2001).
- 13.
Bergson (1907). Needless to say, the original Latin expression is also in the famous passage attributed by Sallust (or the Pseudo-Sallust) to Appius Claudius Caecus’ Sententiæ: “Homo faber suae quisque fortunae.”
- 14.
Antonello—who also tells that Frisch’s book was published in Italy two years later by Feltrinelli—points out how the protagonist of Frisch’s Homo Faber is influenced by Hannah Arendt’s critique of technology. According to the scholar the difference between Frisch’s approach and Levi’s lies therefore in the lack of ideology in the Italian writer. We agree that Levi works instead deductively, but Antonello seems to generalize a bit too much when he writes that Levi always avoids “di formulare dei giudizi perentori sul mondo, cosciente per concreto esercizio della realtà che il caso, l’errore, il dubbio, sono sempre in agguato” [to judge peremptorily the world, made aware by the concrete experience of reality that chance, error, doubt are always lurking]. One of the goals of this section is to demonstrate how some of Levi’s non-fiction works, as exemplified by “Una bottiglia di sole,” actually formulate sharp judgments that are instead complicated and challenged by his fiction production.
- 15.
Salvatorelli’s articles on Tilgher are available on the Archivio Storico de La Stampa website. The correspondence between the two, revealing a relation that goes beyond their jobs, is instead available on the website of Fondazione Luigi Salvatorelli (http://www.fondazionesalvatorelli.org [accessed on November 2016]). The link between Tilgher and Salvatorelli might have been Ernesto Buonaiuti, important figure of the so-called “modernismo teologico,” with whom both Tilgher and Salvatorelli were in touch.
- 16.
- 17.
Interestingly, another collaborator of La Stampa, who has been already mentioned in the previous chapter, A.C. Jemolo, wrote an article in 1975 entitled L’homo faber e le sue colpe (La Stampa, August 15, 1975, 11) in which he alerts his readers about the danger of the contemporary technical development.
- 18.
It is worth noticing that a version of this very idea became popular after the war via another Piedmontese homo faber, Adriano Olivetti (1901–1960), and its factory in Ivrea which gathered workers as well as artists and writers.
- 19.
This article has been published first with the title L’uomo senza bussola in La Stampa, July 8, 1984. It was then collected in L’altrui mestiere, with the different title Eclissi dei profeti.
- 20.
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on April 21, 1933. On May 1 he joined the Nazi Party. Although he resigned as rector a year later, Heidegger remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi Party until the end of the war. Notably, after the war and the “denazification” of Germany, Heidegger never apologized nor expressed regret for either his affiliation to the Nazi Party or the atrocities committed by the Nazis, except privately in the famous 1966 Der Spiegel interview that was however published, at Heidegger’s explicit request, only posthumously ten years later. As Heidegger was probably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, it is indeed relevant to understand to what extent his philosophy is organically linked to Nazi ideology and the history of the Holocaust.
- 21.
The two editors also add that “an ecological postmodernist of sorts, Schirmacher [see Technik und Gelasenheit (Freiburg: Alber, 1983), 25] cites the passage, not to criticize Heidegger but to underscore the need to take a step beyond modernism.”
- 22.
In the relevant endnote Neske and Kettering add: “Unpublished typescript of ‘Die Gefahr’, 25”.
- 23.
On this topic, see also R. J. Sheffler Manning (1996).
- 24.
As Calarco pointed out, the first formulation in Heidegger’s oeuvre that “demise and dying are modalities of the finitude to which animals simply do not have access” (Calarco, 17) is in Being and Time, ∫∫ 46–53.
- 25.
For a different understanding of Heidegger’s thought on the same issue, see Mitchell (2011).
- 26.
Now in Heidegger (1971).
- 27.
- 28.
Cf. the story of Levi’s academic formation in SP, OI, 758 and ffll.
- 29.
In the chapter entitled Acciughe (II), Levi tells that his character was once stopped by the Russian customs because he had a suspicious book (in English) about the life of dolphins (CaS, OI 1098). As Belpoliti in his Levian Bestiary (Belpoliti 1997, 175–176) attests, in one article about what we can expect from the future appeared on La Stampa ‘Tuttolibri” in 1970, “Vediamo un po’ quali cose si sono avverate,” Levi shows a particular ethological interest toward dolphins’ behavior and language.
- 30.
Levi’s knowledge of Linnaeus is testified by his first published poem, ‘You Don’t Know How to Study!’, a “pretty dreadful poem” according to one of Levi’s biographer, Ian Thomson, in which the very young Levi provided “a spoof of Petrarch’s famous love sonnet VII, as well as the work of the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus.” Cf. Thomson, 60; Angier (2002), 102–103.
- 31.
On this subject, see also the special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities devoted to animals and technology, and especially Ron Broglio’s Editorial Introduction (Broglio 2013).
- 32.
The original German edition of this fundamental work of philosophical anthropology was published in 1940 (Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt). Although Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) is considered one of the fathers of the modern Philosophical Anthropology, his name has been marked by his early (1933) enrolment into the Nazi party. Although his main ideas were very far from the kind of social Darwinism applied by the Nazis, his thought has been then gazed with suspicion and almost forgotten. For a comparison based on the concept of “techne” between Levi’s “human ethology” and Gehlen’s “philosophical anthropology,” see Porro, 153–154.
- 33.
Cf. some essays in L’altrui mestiere, as for instance “Il salto della pulce” (OI, 725) or “Gli scarabei” (OI, 790).
- 34.
Although Cavaglion claims that Levi uses “dissimulation” scarcely, he also shows how Il sistema periodico, and “Argon” particularly, are actually based on this “stylistic device.”
- 35.
The sex changes that occurred to Tiresias are told in Ovid, Metamorphoses 3, 316–388.
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Benvegnù, D. (2018). Techne I. Animal Hands. In: Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71258-1_4
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