“Against a Present that Places the Incomprehensible in the Cold Storage of History”. The Representation and Experience of Limit in Jean Améry and Primo Levi

“Only when we fulfill the law of enlightenment and at the same time transcend it do we reach intellectual realms in which ratio does not lead to shallow rationalism […]. Enlightenment is not the same as clarification […]. Clarification would also amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can be placed in the files of history”. These words of winter 1976 end Jean Améry’s Preface to the second edition of Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, a reflection on the failure of all “monocausal” attempts to explain Auschwitz and what the name represents symbolically. During the same years Primo Levi was working on the design of the “Italian Memorial” at Auschwitz (built in 1980 in Block 21 of Auschwitz I). In complete and conscious contrast to the other national pavilions, Levi and his colleagues chose to produce an artistic rather than an archival or museum-style display. In Levi’s own words, the Italian Memorial appears as “a place where each person’s imagination (fantasia) and feelings will be able to evoke the atmosphere of a great and unforgettable tragedy, much more so than would be the case with images and texts”.
The paper intends to analyse the specificity of the respective epistemic approaches of Améry and Levi, considered in terms of their shared belief that any prospect of “archive-bound”, intellectualized factual explanation must be abandoned. Levi speaks of the “evocative” and “phantasmal” element, while Améry invokes an “empathy” that exceeds “logical deduction and empirical verification”, coming close to the “limits of reason”. Both insist on the essential role of a symbolic-representational dimension as the setting for an effort not of knowledge but of “thought” equipped to find precisely in the mediated and limited condition of re-praesentatio the very opening to sense and recognition that was destroyed under the “hyper-representative” (J.-L. Nancy) regime established at Auschwitz. This common effort provides an insight into the relation between the two writers, to be understood not as mere contrast but as the inverse reflection of the thought of each in that of the other.