Abstract
In the reading of Primo Levi, the theme of the foreigner presents the polarization between hostility and exchange. The intertwining of barbarism, totalitarianism and anti-Semitism stands out in several texts, allowing a dialogue with intellectuals such as Arendt, Todorov and Bauman. The writer starts from the Enlightenment premise of an original barbarity that only reason could contain in a linear human evolution. However, in many narratives, Levi represents the encounter with the foreigners, or his own condition of foreigner in Auschwitz, in opposition to any conflict. The perception of the foreigner, therefore, oscillates between two poles that Paul Ricoeur identifies as sympathy and struggle, but after all the clash with strangers, even when problematic, develops in episodes where the idea of hospitality (Derrida) as a model of human relationships prevails. Contrary to a positivist view, the enemy's perception and ethnic-religious divisions are mainly shaped as a political construction internal to our "civilization."
Keywords
Barbarian; foreigner; literature; Primo Levi