Through the biographical and literary narrative produced by a concentration camp survivor, the Italian Jew Primo Levi, describing the strategies of interaction and representation he adopted in order to go on living, this article engages in some reflections on Erving Goffmann's sociology. It seeks to apprehend processes of the production of subjectivity and individuality within a 'total institution' through looking at the role of social spaces in the construction of particular interactions, such as those that took place within a concentration camp, as described in Levi's book, If this is a man. This analysis leads to a reflection on the micro and the macro in Goffman's sociology, as well as an inquiry into the existence of a theory of institutions within it. Thus, in looking at this dimension of Goffman's work, through the prism of Levi's description of his experience in a total institution, we seek both to access a diversified narrative on one particular social space and to raise some questions regarding Goffman's views, particularly with regard to the ways in which his sociology gives dynamism to particular interactions, history and social structures that go beyond the terrain of interaction. Thus it seems that an analysis of interactions that are immanent to particular places does not enter into contradiction with the perception and analysis of wider social processes. The concentration camp, for example, instituted and produced its own sociabilities, although understanding the latter also includes the need to understand the emergence of Nazism, the history of persecuted groups and the meaning of the Holocaust in its relationship to the "civilizing process" or a particular form of modern rationality.
symbolic interaction; literature; total institutions; Erving Goffman; Primo Levi