Introduction to Jean-Jacques BléVis's “Remains to be Transmitted: Primo Levi's Traumatic Dream”

I have been asked to write a brief introduction to Jean-Jacques Blévis's “Remains to Be Transmitted: Primo Levi's Traumatic Dream,” in order to provide some background for what may be unfamiliar to some readers. Blévis's paper is an intense, allusive, and controversial piece of psychoanalytic writing coming from an author who uses Jacques Lacan's concepts to reflect upon Primo Levi's writing, his status as a witness to the Holocaust, and his death by his own hand. The style of writing is reflective, almost novelistic at times, and follows the writer's itinerary in the landscape of the Holocaust, after what he refers to as a period of voluntary withdrawal. What may be transmitted to us from Levi's life is taken up in relation to a recurrent dream, a nightmare described by Levi in his book The Reawakening (1993). Blévis's reflection on the traumatic core of the dream leads him to make a linguistic connection between Hurbinek, a child of the camps described by Levi, and a child of another kind of destitution, Robert, who was discussed by Lacan. Both children existed at the edge of language.

Blévis uses the writings of Levi, Agamben, and Lacan to describe the most primal relations of humans to language. Levi's writings remind us, in the most vivid prose, of his capacity to hold and record what had befallen him and his fellow prisoners. My remarks to follow on Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben's work show the nature of Blévis's disagreement with Agamben over the philosophical and psychoanalytic status of the “Muslim” or “Muselmann”,