ABSTRACT
My purpose in this book was to offer a reading of Levi’s work through the lens of his defi nition of the human being as the creator of containers, to explore human embodiment as an experience of negotiated containment, and to refl ect on the signifi cance of containers/containment for his thought more broadly. My approach has certainly been fl exible, but the sustained, multi-stranded discourses on embodiment and containment I have identifi ed have enabled me to suggest connections between Levi’s position on epistemological discourses, on language, on humanity and human instinct, on technology, on consciousness, and on the heuristic value of material embodiment. From the analyses gathered here, it transpires that bodies played a vital part in Levi’s imaginary, in his conception of the human subject as a thinking being, and in his understanding of humanity. There is not one narrative of embodiment but many, often consisting of contradictory, overlapping or divergent threads, which are frequently revealing of tensions and concerns within Levi’s thought. However, his work is characterized by a recurrent valorization of the link between mind and body, by an assertion, expressed both implicitly and explicitly, that autonomous, material embodiment is vital in order for human life to thrive. The body and the sense of existing through the soma rather than as Descartes’ res cogitans are constant points of reference in his refl ections, whether it is a question of describing his house, how he moves between the disciplines of science and literature, or hypothesizing about the impact of computers on social interaction. Yet this materially located self is supplemented by a more immaterial self, the social self, or the reifi ed unconscious, which Levi alternately dismisses and deliberately dramatizes in his work.
