Barbarism and exception: discovering the paradigm of law through the witness literature novel by Primo Levi

Abstract

This article aims at presenting a debate about the paradoxical state of exception, as a meaning structure of governance law, in an approximation between Law and Literature made by deductive method, with the source of theoretical research supported in bibliographic research. To do so, the analysis begins with the testimony of Primo Levi, an Italian literary survivor of Auschwitz, in order to demonstrate to what extent his witness literature novel illustrates the existence and condition of the concentration camp and its dwellers in a normatively paradoxical situation, capable of providing even the complete destruction of human subjectivities. In this perspective, following the reading of Giorgio Agamben, this paper presents a genealogy of the Law supported by the institution of the “gang”, in opposition to the social contract theory, as a theoretical matrix and paradigm of Law. Thus the concentration camp, in the form of an exception, reveals itself in an original structure in which the Law refers to life, and includes it in itself through its own suspension, concluding that the “camp”, in a spectral form, is the result of Law and politics operation via capture device.