Wartime Resistance and Republican Political Agency in Primo Levi's Partisan Novel

Abstract

Primo Levi is best known as a Holocaust survivor whose works are considered to be indispensable contributions to the literature of testimony about Nazi genocide. In trying to draw politically-relevant insights from Levi, readers have generally focused on his analysis of the extremes of human deprivation in his Holocaust writings. This article considers Levi more broadly as an analyst of the various forms of human agency and argues that his novel of partisan warfare, Se non ora quando? (1982), presents a vision of virtuous republican political agency. Levi's partisan novel dramatizes the fraught relationship between civil and military values in order to investigate what it takes for a republic to be founded and maintained in a world of risk. Considered against the backdrop of Levi's own short-lived experience as a partisan, relevant writings from republican theorist and fellow Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt, and the early Eighties presidency of ex-partisan Sandro Pertini, Levi's novel is revealed to be a text that speaks (however ambivalently) to a republican tradition of endorsing citizen soldiers and affirming the worth of political foundation.