October 27
5:00 pm - 8:00 pm - FREE
CUNY Graduate Center

The day on "Primo Levi in Translation" features two important panels on the German, Arabic, and Farsi translations of Levi's memoir. With: Franco Baldasso (NYU), Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University), Ernestine Bradley (The New School), Ernesto Ferrero, Boualem Sansal (author, Algeria); Abraham Radkin (Aladdin Project, France); Clifford Chanin (The Legacy Project); Talal Asad (CUNY Graduate Center); Ammiel Alcalay (CUNY Graduate Center)  more


Follow our Fall 2009 program through I-Italy.org
The outreach for the program is made possible through the generous support of Regione Piemonte

OCT 26 | Primo Levi, Anthropologist of Normality

NYU | Casa Italiana Zerilli-Mariṃ | 24 West 12th Street | FREE

5:00 pm | Primo Levi: Anthropologist of Normality

Opening remarks: Dario Disegni (Compagnia di San Paolo and Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi, Turin).
Ernesto Ferrero (author and director of the Turin Book Fair))

In this rare New York appearance, Ernesto Ferrero, longtime editor of Levi's work at Einaudi, offers new insight into Levi's intellectual and moral concerns and visions:

"The reception of Primo Levi's work has been characterized, in Italy and abroad, by serious misunderstandings. In the United States, If This Is a Man  was published in 1961 by Collier Books with a different, and misleading title: Survival in Auschwitz.
A title that makes it sound like a war report, which emphasizes  the protagonist's trials and tribulations and concludes with a happy ending. Apart from the fact that the book ends with a scene of death and desolation, the new title avoids the question implied by the whole book: Is this a man? The German, the good family man who belongs to the most civilized country in Europe, the country which produced Bach and Goethe, yet plans the extermination with bureaucratic rigor? Is it the Jewish prisoner who becomes a kapo, collaborating to gain a few more days of life? Was Auschwitz an accident in history, and as such cannot be replicated? Or is Auschwitz the rule rather than the exception?" more
OCT 26 | Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben

NYU | Casa Italiana Zerilli Mariṃ | 24 West 12 Street | FREE

7:00 pm | Levi, Agamben, and the Era of Witness

Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University), Chair and moderator, Debarati Sanyal (University of California, Berkeley), Thomas Trezise (Princeton University), Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

One of the central elements in Agamben's readings of Levi's work is the reflection on the "Musulmann" and the paradoxes of bearing witness. "This word," Levi explains, "I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection." The figure and meaning of the Musulmann has evoked a multifaceted debate ranging from ethics, to biopolitics and orientalism. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) drew extensively on Levi's writings in his work on biopolitics and the relation between human life and sovereignty. A diverse panel of scholars will discuss various aspects of Agamben's reading of Levi on the Musulmann; the term's currency; the notion of "true witness"; and whether Levi's text sustains Agamben's interpretation.   more
Links of Interest

Tzvi Avni and Primo Levi

The newly published translations of If This Is a Man into Arabic and Farsi raises a complex spectrum of issues and debates.
Here are some related items of interest.

Books:
Meir Litvak, Esther Webman. From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009 | H-Net Review

Boualem Sansal, The German Mujahid. Europa Editions, 2009 Book | Review | Join Boualem Sansal at the French Institute in New York on October 28th

Talks and conferences:
Confronting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. An exploration of their socio-historic and theological roots and similarities | November 10th - University of London | Info

Thinking of Religion, Secularism, and Politics. Berkeley's Conversations with History, Talal Asad | Video

The Jew, the Arab: An Interview with Gil Anidjar