ABSTRACT
Soon after his entry into Auschwitz-Birkenau Primo Levi came to the realization of exactly what defined this realm that in turn defined the Nazis. “Then for the first time,” he writes, “we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man” (Levi 1996: 26). This demolition of a man is the outcome not only of twenty centuries of anti-Semitic Christian doctrine but of an even longer tradition of ontological speculative thought. There is no word for this offense because the demolition of a man entails the demolition of the word. In the twentieth century this evil finds its most heinous expression in the Nazis’ calculated creation of the Muselmann, as discussed in Chapter 9-the ones Levi describes as “the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them” (Levi 1996: 90).
