A Silver Martian – Normality and Segregation in Primo Levi’s Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge

Description

In A Silver Martian, psychoanalyst Paola Mieli examines Primo Levi’s short story, Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge. She argues that Levi uses a surreal scenario to reveal how past horrors, such as Nazi experiments, quietly shape our present reality. The story explores how modern technology and science create a sense of alienation, while comfortable modern life is built on political and social norms that we accept without questioning their troubling origins.

About the Author

Paola Mieli, PhD, is a psychoanalyst based in New York City. She is the founder and president of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association and an honorary member of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis. She is also affiliated with several Paris-based psychoanalytic groups, including Le Cercle Freudien and Insistance, and serves as an editor for journals such as Che Vuoi? and Insistance: Art, psychanalyse et politique. Mieli has published extensively in Europe and the U.S. on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and culture. Her books include Sobre as manipulações irreversíveis do corpo(2002) and Being Human: The Technological Extensions of the Body (co-editor, 1999). She holds doctorates in psychoanalysis and philosophy from the University of Paris Diderot–Paris VII and the University of Milan.