abstract:

In his inaugural presidential address at the 1898 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, William Crookes called upon scientists to solve the “Wheat Problem”—that is, the threat of global scarcity—by inventing processes to fix atmospheric nitrogen to produce fertilizer. This project became a driving force of modernity and seemed to realize its promise: that humanity would use inventive genius to triumph over scarce material resources. Nitrogen is the element of life and of death, of the timeless cycle of waste and rebirth and of modernity. Why, then, this essay asks, does Primo Levi devote the chapter on nitrogen in his 1975 memoir The Periodic Table to the manufacture of lipstick, a paradigmatically inessential luxury good? The answer, I argue, can be found in a second intervention delivered at the very same meeting by the incoming president of the Chemistry Section, Francis Robert Japp. His paper, which sparked lively debate among prominent scientists, proposes a scientific vitalism in the form of some “directive force” proper to life that is evinced in molecular asymmetry. In the chapter “Nitrogen,” Levi narrativizes the clash between the philosophical underpinnings of the two interventions to reclaim an aesthetic vitalism that neither conflicts with nor is reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics.

摘要：

威廉·克鲁克斯（William Crookes）在1898年英国科学促进会年会上的就职演说中，呼吁科学家通过发明固定大气氮的方法来解决“小麦问题”，即全球稀缺的威胁。生产肥料。这个项目成为现代性的驱动力，并且似乎实现了它的承诺：人类将利用有创造力的天才来争夺稀缺的物质资源。氮是生命和死亡的要素，是浪费和重生的永恒循环以及现代性的要素。那么，为什么这篇文章问普里莫·列维（Primo Levi）为何在其1975年的回忆录《元素周期表》中专门论述了氮这一章。对口红的制造，范式无关紧要的奢侈品？我认为，答案可以在即将召开的化学科新任主席弗朗西斯·罗伯特·贾普（Francis Robert Japp）的同一次会议上进行的第二次干预中找到。他的论文引发了著名科学家之间的激烈辩论，提出了一种科学生命力，以分子不对称性所表现出的某种适合生命的“指挥力”的形式提出。在“氮”一章中，李维对两种干预的哲学基础之间的冲突进行了说明，以期恢复一种既不与化学和物理定律冲突也不可还原的美学生命主义。