ABSTRACT

Primo Levi is well known as a survivor of the Holocaust. Imprisoned in the Carpi Fòssoli concentration camp in Italy in 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz in February 1944, where he remained in the Monowitz Lager (Auschwitz III) until its liberation in January 1945. His internationally acclaimed accounts of his experiences have earned him the painful distinction of being recognized as ‘the privileged witness of one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century’ (Belpoliti 1997a, 6). He is also known as a chemist, or more precisely, as ‘a chemist who wrote’: a hybrid scientistauthor with an eye for innovative linguistic practices and a deep belief in epistemological cross-fertilization (Belpoliti 1997a, 6). Notably, aside from his testimonial works, in which his career as a chemist is spliced into his memories and experiences as a deportee, Levi was also a science fi ction writer who engaged with issues such as virtual reality devices, the cloning of human beings, and with phenomena that have now been theorized as posthuman subjectivity and cyborg bodies-that is, human subjects whose bodies and consciousnesses are aligned with and augmented by non-organic components, dissolving the boundaries between the biological and the technological.