Testimony, extimacy, and Primo Levi’s writings

Abstract

This paper discusses some issues concerning the literature of testimony, particularly Primo Levi’s writing. We start from the hypothesis that writing about the experience of the concentration camp and becoming a writer because of that experience seems to have made it likely to be lived, with its gaps and its impossibilities. To clarify the relationship between writing and the experience of the concentration camp in the context of the work of Primo Levi, we employ Jacques Lacan’s concept of extimacy. This concept allows us to infer that the relationship between rational writing and poetic writing is inscribed in the work of Levi, less in a dual relationship of binary and linear opposition than from the perspective of internal exclusion. Primo Levi’s testimony, read in light of the concept of extimacy, may elucidate the differences between the testimony as an experience of victimization and the testimony as an experience of extimacy.