Simone Ghelli

This essay investigates the nexus between memory and anti-fascism in Primo Levi’s non-fiction writings of the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the definition of fascism articulated in the 1975 essay Così fu Auschwitz, it reconstructs Levi’s evolving conceptualization of fascism as both a historical phenomenon and a recurring political possibility. The study argues that insights already embedded in Se questo è un uomo are reconfigured in light of the resurgence of neo-fascist movements during the 1960s. In his commemorative and journalistic writings of this period, Levi reasserts the constitutive link between the memory of crimes perpetrated by fascist forces during the Second World War and the ethical-political legacy of anti-fascism. This link is mediated through the allohistorical hypothesis of an Axis victory—the counterfactual spectre of a racial project of domination whose historical defeat does not neutralize its latent potential. The essay concludes with a reading of the short story Gold from The Periodic Table (1975), as a culminating moment in Levi’s reappropriation and reinterpretation of his partisan experience.

Simone Ghelli’s chapter reconstructs and examines Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Levi. Ghelli starts with a thematic and chronological mapping of the loci where Deleuze refers to Levi’s work, which highlights that the French philosopher was particularly interested in the notion of ‘the shame of the world’. Deleuze’s original reading of this concept, which integrates Levi’s work into a complex vitalist ontology, constitutes a sort of ‘Levi beyond Levi’ ante litteram. The second part of Ghelli’s essay shows how Levi’s materialist thought calls into question the appropriative reading operated by Deleuze. The point is not so much to ‘correct’ Deleuze’s forced interpretation but rather to show the limits of new materialism, a philosophical trend that has marked contemporary philosophy and that is characterised by a radical and consequential obliteration of the question of evil.

What do Primo Levi’s works tell us about our world? How can they help us to think about today’s global challenges? Levi Beyond Levi invites readers to rediscover Primo Levi as a thinker whose ideas continue to resonate far beyond the historical conditions in which they were written. Emphasising reading as a dialogic and creative practice, the volume shows how Levi’s reflections on violence, memory, ethics, science, and political responsibility speak directly to the world we inhabit today. Rather than treating Levi’s work as something fixed in the past, the contributors explore how his writings travel across time and culture, opening new perspectives on urgent issues such as rising authoritarianism, the ecological crisis, and the genocide in Palestine. They highlight how contemporary writers, artists, and theorists have drawn creatively on Levi’s insights, expanding and reimagining his questions for the twenty-first century. Through innovative and thought-provoking essays, Levi Beyond Levi positions Levi as a companion for thinking through moral and political challenges that remain unresolved. The volume invites readers to consider Levi not only as a survivor and witness, but also as a classic whose works continue to generate meaning, spark debate, and offer tools for navigating our ‘moment of danger’.

This essay examines the political-philosophical contents of Primo Levi’s reflection on the nature of fascism. First, I reconstruct the historical and political background of Levi’s «antifascist education» between 1938 and 1943. Second, I highlight the presence of a very effective inquiry into fascism within 1947’s If This Is A Man, the core of which is Levi’s discovery of the anthropological-political phenomenon that I name «voluntary inequality». The third section reconstructs the development during the 1970s of Levi’s original definition of fascism as «consecration of privileged and inequality». Based on Levi’s suggestions, the concluding remarks dwell on the genetic connection between the Memory of the Holocaust and antifascism.

This essay examines Primo Levi’s atheism. First, I reconstruct Levi’s reflection on chance in "If This Is a Man" as the core of his universalist understanding of the concentrationary experience. In Levi, fortune – a moralizing resignification of chance - represents the contingency that decides upon a human existence dramatically marked by the fundamental inequality between the drowned and the saved. This is the philosophical background of chapter October 1944, where Levi outlines his first attempt of anti-theodicy, from which he sketches the basis of his ethics of fortune. Second, by extending the chronological scope of my analysis up to the 1980s, I define Levi’s philosophical atheism in terms of social anti-theodicy. I show how the question of inequality, natural and political, constitutes the supreme contradiction for a theistic understanding of Providence, whose intervention in the human world tends to increase the onto-anthropological structures of political domination. Finally, I examine the 1971 short story “The brokers”, (“Procacciatori d’affari”) in which Levi outlines the conceptual frame of an ethics of fortune, in which the choice of chance constitutes the fundamental egalitarian act to deactivate the theological and political dispositive of privilege.

A partire dall’incontro con l’opera di Darwin agli inizi degli anni Trenta, Primo Levi eleverà le scienze naturali a incrollabile a priori ontologico della sua riflessione etica e politica. Ciò che si intende mostrare è quanto una solida e consapevole conoscenza del darwinismo abbia costituito il “filtro di lettura” principale della riflessione su Auschwitz compiuta in Se questo è un uomo. È in quest’ottica che il binomio sommersi-salvati, vero e proprio nucleo del pensiero di Levi, rivela tutta la sua portata concettuale. Quest’ultimo rappresenta infatti la risultante socio-antropologica delle leggi inegualitarie della vita, in opposizione alle quali Levi concepisce la disperata necessità della lotta umana contro i limiti dolorosi della materia vivente. Nelle opere della maturità, il naturalismo continuerà a fornire a Levi gli strumenti di base per l’elaborazione di originali soluzioni concettuali a problemi filosofici cruciali come l’origine della aggressività umana, la natura del male politico, il rapporto umano-animale e il nesso natura-civiltà.

This essay aims at inspecting the question of evil within Gilles Deleuze’s thought, focusing especially on his historical-philosophical works. I will attempt to show how, for Deleuze, the question of evil represented the most difficult issue to overcome in the construction of his vitalistic materialism, the latter established on the complete overlapping of ontology and ethics. By reconstructing the gradual composition of such «pure ontology» through Deleuze’s interpretations of Hume, Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, I will eventually define his vitalistic materialism as a biodicy that makes the question of evil ethically irrelevant for the sake of individuals’ freedom to express their vitality. The main consequence of such a biodicy is the definition of a dichotomous relationship between suffering and freedom that risks justifying natural inequalities subsisting among living beings.

This book provides a critical and innovative reassessment of contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. Starting with a critique of the “official philosophical narration” of animal studies, and then a reassessment of Descartes' animal-machine paradigm, Simone Ghelli tracks down the conceptual coordinates of what he calls “the paradigm of the suffering animal.” The suffering animal is a materialist thesis on the condition of the living, which, while contesting the metaphysical and anthropocentric structure of western axiology, eventually redefines and re-establishes ethics on the experience of suffering, that is on the mutual compassion sentient beings feel before the unjust sight of their finitude. The suffering animal paradigm shows how, within our philosophical tradition, the animal question has been always intertwined with the questions of atheism and of materialism. The ultimate aim of this research is to define the “ethical equilibrium” between aspects of the living, such as weakness and power, joy and suffering, life and death, which our philosophical tradition largely tends to consider as mutually excluding. To overcome such oppositions means avoiding opposing, in our ethical and political discourse, the defense of the vulnerability of the weak and the freedom of the powerful.

Durante le celebrazioni per il centenario della nascita di Primo Levi del 2019 anche importanti riviste cattoliche, come "Civiltà Cattolica" e "Vita e Pensiero", sono tornate a riflettere sull'opera, il pensiero e la testimonianza dello scrittore torinese. Questo contributo cerca di ricostruire pertanto la ricezione di Primo Levi nel mondo cattolico . Dopo un breve inquadramento storico del complicato rapporto tra Chiesa e Shoah, si evidenzieranno le strutture interpretative che hanno caratterizzato la lettura delle opere di Levi in ambito cattolico in un arco temporale che va dal 1963 al 2019. Letture che operano un'interessante movimento di appropriazione non privo tuttavia di importanti problematicità che meritano di essere evidenziate e meditate. La parte finale del saggio ricostruirà l'ateismo di Primo Levi, mettendo in luce come il rapporto tra Primo Levi e la cultura cattolica sia caratterizzato tanto da comunanze fondamentali, quanto da una distanza irriducibile.

This article aims to deepen the question of atheism within Primo Levi’s work from a philosophical point of view. Taking into account the current debate on the «sacred» in Levi’s moral reflection, instead I propose an opposite perspective, according to which atheism stands for both the conditio sine qua non and the landing place of his ethics. At first, I aim to reconstruct the way in which Levi articulates the disassociation between God and Evil, underling how, according to Levi, the concept of Providence is not only illogical, but particularly immoral. Such a perspective evokes a certain affinity with the atheistic tradition which opposed to Christian theodicy over modern philosophy. The conclusion is devoted to an in-depth analysis of the meaning of «Luck» as the only plausible ethical reason for survival.

La questione antropologica è sicuramente uno dei temi più dibattuti all’interno degli studi filosofici attorno all’opera di Primo Levi. L’obbiettivo del presente contributo è quello di offrire una lettura darwiniana del modo in cui lo scrittore torinese ha definito il complesso rapporto tra umano e non-umano. A mio parere, analizzare il pensiero antropologico di Levi a partire dalle tesi psicologico-evoluzioniste esposte da Darwin in The Descent of Man permette infatti di risolvere le contraddizioni e le aporie in cui sembrano cadere alcune interpretazioni post-umaniste e umaniste. L’ipotesi di un Primo Levi ‘lettore di The Descent of Man’ verrà qui indagata sia dal punto di vista filologico sia da quello argomentativo e concettuale.

(Dall'introduzione del volume) Nel terzo capitolo Simone Ghelli si lancia nell’impresa di ipotizzare un percorso di lettura leviano di cui non è dato trovare riscontri filologici precisi, ma che è tuttavia percepibile “nell’aria” e nelle opere del torinese. Si tratta di una risonanza con il pensiero filosofico di Pierre Bayle e della sua riflessione sulla sofferenza nell’orizzonte speculativo di Levi, il quale tornò sovente a meditare sul problema del male e sulla spinosa questione dell’assenza di Dio e dell’impossibilità di fornire una giustificazione della vita e del mondo. Ghelli arriva così a sostenere che «la posizione di Levi esprime una profonda consapevolezza filosofica, una concatenazione non casuale di concetti e argomenti riconducibile a una tradizione ben precisa: quella dell’ateismo moderno»

This article is devoted to the analysis of the passion of self-love. The first part aims to retrace some of the main landmark cases within the history of modern philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes and the Jansenists), highlighting how the distinction between self-preservation and pride becomes the main explanatory model of human agency. We find a meaningful case of such an anthropology in Mandeville’s categories of self-love and self-liking. We consider the theory of self-liking the attempt to establish a fully-fledged ‘philosophy of vainness’. The second part deals with the contemporary use of self-love. We stress how it can be considered not only as the proper theoretical background for the current debate on recognition. It is also an anti-dualistic analytic tool which contests any Manichean understanding of power. We conclude with an interpretation of Primo Levi’s testimony which ideally stands for an extreme confirmation of modern theories on self-love.