Lipstick Vitalism: On the Beauty of a Different Modernity in Primo Levi's Periodic Table

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.