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Descartes at War: Curzio Malaparte and Primo Levi

2024; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 139; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2024.a930288

1080-6598

Andréa Capra,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Abstract: In moments of crisis, René Descartes suggests maintaining a cool attitude of steadfast resolution to regain a vantage point of rationality over a given situation. Curzio Malaparte and Primo Levi's works, particularly through their self-proclaimed Cartesian protagonists, interrogate the feasibility of this stance during World War II. This unexplored Cartesian intertext shows how, despite these authors' differences, Malaparte and Levi both wrestled with overlapping epistemological, phenomenological, and aesthetic concerns as they attempted to make sense of the war's horrors. Unwinding this thread, I argue that Descartes's advice, while reasonable in theory, may not always be possible to follow in practice.