In the book’s final chapter, “Messages from Within,” Serenella Iovino analyzes the work of the Italian writer Primo Levi, particularly the short story “Man’s Friend,” which imagines a genetic poetics produced by a tapeworm infestation. Iovino then uses the story to explore the emergent field of biosemiotics. The chapter traces a genealogy of biosemiotics in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Jakob von Uexküll, Denis Noble, and Wendy Wheeler (to whom the chapter is dedicated). Iovino also connects Levi’s writing to his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp – a dehumanizing experience that deprived him of his freedom as well as his ability to communicate. Framing the chapter within reflections on the novel coronavirus pandemic, Iovino posits semiotic freedom as a fundamental imperative of all life.

As it goes with God, so it goes with the human being: The assault on God, then, entails a radical refashioning of the human being created in the image and likeness of God. Hence Chapter 11 examines what Emil Fackenheim calls the Nazis’ “most characteristic, most original product,” in order to see how and why the Muselmann embodies the essence of the Holocaust. The chapter opens by examining Primo Levi’s remark in Survival in Auschwitz that the Muselmänner have no story. Here I show that the human being who harbors a trace of the divine image is a human being with a story and a name. Having a story entails telling a story. The Muselmänner embody a stark, faceless silence, without a story, without a name, “the divine spark dead within them,” as Levi says. The chapter explains that the Muselmann is not the product of starvation, exhaustion, and brutality. No, the Muselmann is the Jew who has been forbidden to pray,the tohave children, to marry - the Jew who has been robbed of his name, his soul, and who has seen his children and his parents murdered before his eyes.