If This Is a Man • The Truce by Primo Levi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Idolatry of Power

Levi reports a recurrent dream that he and many others had in the camp: He is at home among close family and friends to whom he is speaking about his life in the camp; but no one is listening. A realisation perhaps that his experiences, the intensity of his suffering, are not merely inhuman but ultimately uncommunicable or at best inexpressible. No one who hasn't been present could appreciate the extent of loss of oneself, the reduction of a person to a consciousness of utter hopelessness, pure pain in its infinite variations of distress, hunger, exhaustion.

Nevertheless these two books are protests against this very hopelessness of the incomprehensible. In this they are paradoxical. How can his cool description of the atrocities that he endured do anything but provoke despair for humanity while simultaneously demanding admiration of Levi's immense personal humanity?

There is no heroism here - no one could willingly undergo such torture - but there is some sort of life-persistence (it cannot be accurately called courage) as pure as the pain that it accompanies. The fundamental instinct to survive as it confronts what is an absolute, opposing power, a universe composed of only these two essentials.

The camp becomes then a sort of theological enactment of the idolatry of power. Theological because absolute power is how God is defined in all Western religions; idolatrous because if this is so, the only response possible is relentless (and ultimately futile) participation in the hope of stealing the smallest bit of this power in order to survive.

The camp creates, or merely shows, an ontological reality from which there is no escape so long as power is the essence of being. Getting and keeping power is all there is. To refuse participation - if indeed that verb isn't too active a description of the act of withdrawal - is to become an unresponsive 'musselman', one merely awaiting death.

This is a system of enacted metaphysical nihilism. The title of the piece therefore becomes ironic. It could equally aptly be 'If This Is God'. Could it be that our idea of God as absolute power creates the idolatrous ideal of the deification of man through power; and through that ideal fosters the camp as its apotheosis?

Mankind as the object of infinite power to which submission (in form but not an impossible substance) is required. To become part of this society is to accept death; to refuse is to merely accept a quicker death. Which could be called more courageous?

If there is any hope within the hopelessness of the universe that Levi describes, and he makes this our universe if we can overcome the indifference of his dream-characters, can it be other than the rejection of the quest for power, the ability to coerce, by those who are without power as well as those who have it?

Of what use is Levi's witness unless we appreciate not just his condition in the camp but our own as trapped by a system of power that we impose and have imposed on us? What would the world be like if God were weak, weak to the point of complete passivity to human action? (This is, I suggest precisely the point of John Caputo's theology which is also reviewed on GR; see The Weakness of God: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

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