How can science work both as a positive (even dangerously utopian) discourse positing human perfectibility and the order of Nature, and as a dangerously impersonal, dehumanizing discourse that allowed for millions of human “specimens”to be experimented on, and then exterminated during the Holocaust? What does it mean for Levi to turn to science to tell his story, and to tell aspects of THIS history?
Does the science, like the carbon atom, give us hope, or does it act as a God-
substitute, where God has failed us, or some interesting combination of effects? How do theories of Nature complicate our theories of human nature? How does a focus on
the concrete help put the lie to systems of ideas, like Nazi ideology? How does the abstraction necessary to doing complicated science, e.g. studying the invisible world of atoms, call us to look below the surface of received History and complicate that too? If science suggests linear progress, how does the 20th Century complicate THAT myth? Can history be used to complicate what we mean by science, which is afterall, conducted by scientists – fallible people?
The novel The Periodic Table by Primo Levi needs to be cited as a source as well as If This a Man
