FO Die Fackel im Ohr: Fritz Wotruba Fritz Wotruba. GU Das Geheimherz der Uhr: GW Das Gewissen der Worte: GZ Die gerettete Zunge: Marrakesch Die Stimmen von Marrakesch: MM Masse und Macht. Aus den Aufzeichnungen — PM Die Provinz des Menschen: Welt im Kopf Welt im Kopf. A Sephardic Jew, born on the fringes of Europe in Roustchouk, Bulgaria, in , he identified himself through European classical literature and the German language without forgetting his cultural roots.
In his magnum opus Masse und Macht , one of his prime examples of the survivor is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus 37—ca. Faced by war and genocide perpetrated by those who spoke the language of his choice and were members of the culture he had come to love, Canetti did not disavow the German language and culture.
Even while in exile in England he remained aloof, a cosmopolitan, and a critic of those who supported violence, regardless under which circumstances. Identifying with more than one society, Canetti remained impartial to causes, programs, and ideologies.
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He took sides only against death itself, the misguided who killed on behalf of demagogues, and others who killed for the sheer pleasure of it. Canetti was the oldest of three sons and the member of a minority among European minorities. In addition, his confrontation with raw violent passion in interwar Europe, notably Austria, a country that prides itself with the highest cultural achievements, is fundamental to his writing.
His mother was a descendant of one of the oldest and wealthiest Sephardic families in Bulgaria, his father the son of a merchant from Adrianople, whom the Arditti family considered a parvenu even though he was a well-liked and successful businessman. In the first volume of his memoirs, Die gerettete Zunge: Geschichte einer Jugend, he describes how he was instilled with an inordinate pride of his origins as a Sephardic Jew: They imparted their fascination to their young son by frequently reminiscing about Vienna and their uplifting cultural experiences in the Habsburg capital, most of all the Burgtheater.
Canetti reports that his parents had dreamed of becoming Burgtheater actors. After returning to Bulgaria, they continued to speak German in their intimate conversations or when they wanted to prevent their children from following their conversation GZ, 18, 37— His pronounced individualism often placed Canetti at odds with his contemporaries and the popular trends of time, most of which, like socialism, communism, fascism, and National Socialism, involved collectivist ideas and demanded the subordination of the individual.
His special position was challenged little by the birth of his brothers Nissim — and Georges — Emotionally and intellectually Elias was the child closest to his mother, and when she became a widow, he assumed the role of her confidant and supporter. In , when Elias was six years old, the Canettis relocated to England. She welcomed the opportunity to lead an independent secular life in England, a nation she admired because of its democratic tradition GZ, 49— In Manchester, Elias took English lessons and later attended the local school.
Shortly after her reluctant return to England, Jacques Canetti, a heavy smoker, died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of thirty. Canetti notes that during this time he went to school as usual without being treated like an orphan GZ, In the spring of , Mathilde began to make preparations for a move to Vienna, be it that she wanted to return to the city of her first love, be it that she considered Austria a safer place than Bulgaria, where the military conflict continued to escalate.
Mathilde and her sons first traveled to Lausanne via London and Paris and stayed in Switzerland for a few months. Here Elias received a crash course in German from his mother so that he would be able to enroll in Austrian schools. For example, listening in on a conversation between his mother and his English nanny, he hears the former referring to him as an idiot because she is dissatisfied with the progress he has made.
In Vienna, with only limited funds available, Mathilde rented an apartment in the Second District, the so-called Leopoldstadt, the quarter close to the Danube Canal and the Prater.
This affordable part of town was attractive to new arrivals from the provinces of the Danube Monarchy. Here, Elias attended elementary school, and his mother made plans to enroll him in a college preparatory school. However, the assassination of the Austrian heir apparent Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of the First World War, enthusiastically welcomed by the Viennese public, caused a change in plans. In , she moved with her children to Switzerland. Although he had to adjust to an entirely new educational system, Canetti began to attend a Zurich college preparatory school GZ, For the first time in his life, as he reports in his autobiography, Canetti had been confronted with anti-Semitism in Vienna GZ, She was proud of her Sephardic heritage and looked down upon Ashkenazic Jews, who constituted the majority of Austro-Hungarian Jews.
His self-identification as one coming from a position of privilege allowed him to experience Vienna and Western Europe from a point of view different from that typically expressed in the writing of Eastern European Jews. The experience of Hasidic Jews, Jewish Socialists, or Zionists is not reflected in his writings, but it is essential to the works of his Ashkenazic contemporaries, such as Roth, Martin Buber — , Sholem Aleichem — , and Gershom Scholem — In , Mathilde moved back to Vienna.
Canetti continued to live in a boarding house in Zurich, where he began to write. The experience of the economic crisis in the defeated country, the postwar trauma, and the horrors of unemployment and inflation made a deep impression upon him, and he later explored these phenomena in his writing. After his graduation he and his brother Georges moved to Vienna, again taking up residence in the Leopoldstadt. Canetti enrolled as a chemistry major at the University of Vienna.
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But his primary interests were literature and cultural criticism, which he pursued, spellbound by the charismatic critic, journalist, and satirist Karl Kraus, the legendary editor and author of the journal Die Fackel. He also studied twentieth century Viennese authors such as Otto Weininger — , Sigmund Freud — , and Arthur Schnitzler — In the summer of , he traveled to Bulgaria. Another problematic issue was his friendship with Veza Taubner-Calderon, of which his mother disapproved.
Even more than the nearby soccer field did the riots of reveal to Canetti fundamental aspects of mass events. Contrary to Veza Canetti, whose fictional works display a keen sense of politics and pro-socialist sentiments,10 Elias Canetti focuses on his own perceptions of and reactions to the initially spontaneous mass demonstration caused by an apparent case of injustice against the working class. He recalls the sense of being taken up into the protesting mass, of forging ahead without consideration for material goods, and what is worse for Canetti, human life FO, — Inspired by his friend, the lyric poet Ibby Gordon, frustrated by his studies, and still under the impression of the riot, Canetti traveled to Berlin.
Herzfelde suggested that Canetti undertake a biography of the Malik author Upton Sinclair — , whose social critical fiction about the United States sold in record numbers in Weimar Germany. Moreover, Herzfelde knew every writer of note and generously shared his connections with his guest, who was introduced to painter George Grosz — , Bert Brecht, and Isaac Babel — With a sense of alienation Canetti left Berlin to complete his studies. In he received the degree Doctor of Chemistry from the University of Vienna and thereafter went to Berlin for the second time.
Back in Vienna he worked on his own novel, a first draft of which he completed in Steadily expanding his own circles of friends and acquaintances, Canetti came in contact with Alma Mahler — , her daughters Manon and Anna, and her husband Franz Werfel — , developing an especially close friendship with the sculptors Anna Mahler — and Fritz Wotruba — Canetti reports that at the age of fifteen his friend had written Hebrew poetry under the name of Abraham ben Yitzchak. Until Canetti lived the life of a scholar of independent means in a circle of friends and foes, intellectuals, journalists, and scholars.
After , German exiles, including Brecht, fled to Vienna from National Socialism and brought new impulses to the Austrian capital.
At this time Elias Canetti finalized his novel and the drama Hochzeit, and he worked on his major project involving crowds and crowd behavior. The extraordinary insight and talent obvious from the small number of her publications place her alongside the most respected 17 authors of her time, including Canetti. Yet, she did not succeed in publishing any of her works after she and Canetti, whom she married in , took exile in England. Only in the late s did her husband start to edit and publish her works. Benedikt had to relinquish his position as editor and his share in the paper in due to the antiJewish climate.
Interestingly, it is the proximity to the Benedikts, rather than the progressive radicalization of the public sphere and the problem of fascism, that Canetti problematized in his autobiography. The book had been translated into Czech, and H. Adler — , who after the Shoah made a name for himself because of his incisive studies about the ghetto Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, invited Canetti to a reading in Prague in The beauties of the ancient bohemian city made a deep impression on Canetti.
She died in her small apartment in the Rue de la Convention with Canetti and his brother at her side A, In March Nazi Germany invaded Austria. The Canettis stayed in Grinzing until they received the necessary documents to leave the country. They departed for Paris in and then London, where they arrived in January They took up residence in a modest place in the London suburb of Hampstead. The Aufzeichnungen of that time reveal that he was preoccupied with the war, the devastation and suffering caused by it, and the consequences, about the extent of which one could only speculate at the time.
Canetti, who so closely identified with German culture clearly faced a double bind. An exile from Nazi-controlled Austria living in Great Britain, he felt that he owed loyalty both to his country of residence and to the culture to which he owed much of his creativity and his language. Canetti, who had learned German under almost traumatic circumstances, became the self-proclaimed protector of the German language. In his Aufzeichnungen he wrote: Die Sprache meines Geistes wird die deutsche bleiben, und zwar weil ich Jude bin.
Auch ihr Schicksal ist meines; aber ich bringe noch ein allgemein menschliches Erbteil mit. Unlike other exiles from German-speaking countries, he did not publish during the war years let alone get involved in propaganda — doing so would have compromised his position as a neutral arbiter, which he struggled to establish for himself. He was preoccupied with death, paranoia, and the figure of the pathological leader of masses in universal rather than specific terms. Yet Canetti avoided addressing the topics of Nazi antiSemitism and the Holocaust directly even though aspects of both are implied in his crowd studies and his writings about the paranoid leader.
In Canetti became a British citizen, but his primary publishers were prominent West German companies, the Hanser and Fischer publishing houses, As his reputation grew, scholars and journalists from German-speaking countries, including Marcel Reich-Ranicki and John Patillo-Hess, who organized the annual Canetti symposium at the Vienna Urania in the s, were among his guests in Hampstead. So were British scholars and intellectuals. His circle of friends and associates included the British scholar Idris Parry, and the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch — , who was the later wife of the Oxford professor and writer John Bayley —.
The experience of a North African Arab society with a rich Sephardic history and subculture proved highly productive. Aufzeichnungen nach einer Reise As his monumental study Masse und Macht neared completion, Canetti traveled to France and Italy Finally, in after more than three decades of work, Hamburg publisher Claassen published Masse und Macht. Canetti went on a tour to Greece in and published a selection of his essays and literary works through the small Viennese Stiasny publishing company in the following year.
Her death during one of the most prolific and successful periods of his life affected Canetti deeply. Suddenly Canetti, a representative of the prewar generation, became as controversial as the postwar avant-garde, Peter Handke — , and the Vienna Actionists. Considered an Austrian author by the Austrian literary establishment, Canetti was awarded the Literaturpreis der Stadt Wien in , the year that he also received the Deutscher Kritikerpreis.
A similarly charismatic reader of his own texts as Karl Kraus, his former idol, Canetti released successful recordings of his readings through the Deutsche Grammophongesellschaft in In , following the publication of Alle vergeudete Verehrung, his Aufzeichnungen of —, Canetti began writing his autobiography. Additional volumes of short prose, aphorisms, essays, and satires appeared in the following years: Die Provinz des Menschen: Aufzeichnungen — , Der Ohrenzeuge , fifty satirical physiognomies, and his collected essays titled Das Gewissen der Worte , and Der Beruf des Dichters That same year, he was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by the universities of Munich and Manchester.
This work, which was devoted to his experiences between to , earned him the Gottfried Keller Prize. In the second volume of his autobiography, Die Fackel im Ohr, a narrative of the years to , was published. In spite of the many distinctions and honors he had received, Canetti remained relatively unknown up until this point.
Thomas Hobbes and his concept of the natural state
In he published Das Augenspiel , his autobiography dealing with the years to In Elias Canetti died in Zurich, where he had maintained a second residence since the s. His grave is close to that of James Joyce, who as a writer stood similarly apart from the crowds as did Canetti. Throughout his career Canetti had never been a part of the intellectual mainstream. Rather than being carried by a group or school of intellectuals, he relied on his observations and inspirations from other outsiders to the literary scene, including his mother, Mathilde Canetti, an avid reader although not a writer, and his wife, Veza Canetti, a powerful but virtually unknown author.
There is also little information to be found about the much admired Abraham Sonne. Canetti deliberately steered clear of the trends of his age and literary and ideological movements. Even his early works, e. Instead, he trusted on his own observations and assessments and chose his friends and role models not by the acclaim they achieved in the general public but because of how they appealed to him. In addition, Canetti watched the phenomena that shaped his time closely: For this reason he was far from celebrating the individual and individualism in his writings.
He recognized the frailty of the individual person as well as the lack of character and integrity in the majority of those around him. He was keenly aware of the innate cruelty and ruthlessness of homo sapiens, which he watched coming to the fore after the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, and during Stalinism. Contrary to Marxist, humanist, and Christian authors, Canetti did not believe in the good, let alone, the perfectibility, of mankind, and he never championed man as the crown of creation.
For that reason he rejected the concept of revolution or the notion of a just war, even if this war was directed against Nazi Germany. Familiar with numerous languages and cultures, Canetti looked beyond the claims of greatness on the part of any given civilization or person and rejected the complacency of nationalism or national pride, regardless of which nation or ethnic group. He subscribed to no dogma offered to him by thinkers and politicians ancient and modern, endorsed no culture or political system, aware of the pitfalls and merits of each, and he became ever more attached to the language of his choice, the German language, because it was shunned by the international community and Jews worldwide.
To be sure, there were some other notable exceptions such as Berthold Viertel — and Ernst Waldinger — , German-speaking Jews in exile, who expressed their love for their German mother tongue despite the negative associations it had acquired during the Nazi regime.
A companion to the works of Elias Canetti
Die Leute dort werden sehr bald nach ihrer Sprache suchen, die man ihnen gestohlen und verunstaltet hatte. This love for the German language is the reason that in his writings on power, crowds, killing, survival, gender relations and divisions, humans and non-humans, Canetti avoided touching on certain topical subjects. In the s and s he did not comment on National Socialism and the Holocaust, even though his works Masse und Macht and his notebooks are clearly informed by these events.
Neither does he tackle the issue of Stalinism and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, or enter into an explicit debate with authors who do, for example Hannah Arendt — Undoubtedly familiar with the phenomenon of the authoritarian personality discussed by Wilhelm Reich — , author of Massenpsychologie des Faschismus and Theodor Adorno — , he refrains from applying this knowledge to proponents of war and violence and the criminals of his time such as Hitler and Eichmann but rather contextualizes his own theses about the paranoid leader personality with a historical figure such as Daniel Paul Schreber — The large number of obituaries in leading journals and by well-known critics attest to the growing fascination with an author who, at the time he received the Nobel Prize, was considered an outsider and an oddity by critics worldwide.
For many who seek validation from the point of view of their vastly different tenets and attitudes, Canetti provides a fertile ground, indeed. Donahue points out that Canetti was a self-critical moralist, a skeptical and flawed system-builder, a mystical secularist, and a poet, who turned to literature for social analysis. Reiss maintains that Canetti deliberately placed himself into the tradition of classical literature, tracing his own intellectual lineage all the way back to Homer.
Reiss is also interested in establishing which authors Canetti rejected and why, for example Thomas Bernhard. Being a Jew, Canetti was unable to remain in the cultural sphere he had chosen for himself. Mieder holds that, similar to his great precursors Lichtenberg and Kraus, Canetti was concerned with the proper use of language, and as was also the case with them, the correct term is at the heart of his moral messages.
Scheichl demonstrates that Canetti considered his aphorisms a central part of his work and shows them to be great works of art. Kraft argues that Canetti challenges social systems that hold everyone in bondage, whether the persons in question are victims or victimizers. By refusing to present solutions to uncomfortable problems such as the preeminence of property over the individual, the conflict between personal and collective interests, and the question of what society is able to do to bestow meaning upon life even though human beings are aware that they will die, Canetti brought new, radically unsentimental perspectives to the world of theater.
She scrutinizes his approach to a foreign culture in Die Stimmen von Marrakesch, a travelogue, which thematizes, as she maintains, the clash between East and West. Canetti views social structures as the products of the drive to survive and dominate and, Robertson argues, he endorses none of the great political systems of his era: In his autobiographical writings, he renders more subtle descriptions of women than he does in his dramas and in his novel. In the literary works he plays with types and stereotypes because his primary interests are abstract issues and abstract problems.
Lorenz presents a reading of Canetti in light of discourses questioning the Cartesian view of the world and human supremacy. The essay evokes a vivid impression of Roustchouk, a multicultural, multilingual place apt to inspire a young author with the ideals of cosmopolitanism and pacifism, and it reveals the importance of site and geography in the works of a self-declared cosmopolitan.
Note that the Aufzeichnungen in the Werke edition are not in all cases identical with the earlier versions. From one edition to the next Canetti made slightly different selections and occasionally changed the wording. The editions referred to and the abbreviations used to cite them in this volume are found in the Works Frequently Cited list preceding this introduction. Claassen, , — Das Gewissen der Worte Munich: Kafkas Briefe an Felice Munich: Hanser, , Metzler, , 99— Falk, Elias Canetti New York: Twayne Publishers, , 10— Cited hereafter as FO.
Originally published sequels in the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung in Hanser, , was first published by Wieland Herzfelde in the anthology Junge deutsche Autoren Berlin: Malik, , Das Geld schreibt Berlin: Malik, , and Alkohol Berlin: I, Die Schlafwandler, ed. Hanser, , and her collected short prose under the title Geduld bringt Rosen Munich: Colloquium Verlag, , Harper, by Theodor W.
Levinson, and Newitt R. Sanford also focused on more general traits and psychological profiles. Hanser, , 57— Viking Press, to Canetti. Quoted by Petersen, Hanser, ; Alle vergeudete Verehrung: Hanser, ; Der Ohrenzeuge Munich: Hanser, ; Das Gewissen der Worte Munich: Hanser, ; Der Beruf des Dichters Munich: Hanser, ; Das Geheimherz der Uhr Munich: Hanser, ; Die Fliegenpein Munich, Hanser, Lorenz, Verfolgung bis zum Massenmord New York: Peter Lang, , — Hanser, , 87— See also Dagmar C. Canettis Reaktion auf Exil und Krieg.
Daviau and Ludwig M. Camden House, , — Hoffmann und Campe, Die englischen Jahre, eds. I was headed to the Stuttgart train station, where one can easily find a whole array of European papers. But in Europe his death had made the front pages, not to mention fairly extensive coverage in the arts and culture sections, of virtually all the major papers.
Yet I was also familiar with the rumors about his vaunted love of privacy, his reclusiveness, and sometime misanthropy. Erich Fried and Claudio Magris both tell how Canetti, before the age of the answering machine, would screen his Hampstead phone by mimicking the voice of the housekeeper. I was determined to try my luck, but to no avail: I remember thinking what a coup this was: Very quickly one concludes that there are competing views of Canetti abroad, and that these disparities can hardly be resolved by referring to the obituaries, which themselves are responsible for some of the confusion.
To the extent that is possible, it would clearly be the task of the critical biographer, rather than that of the sometimes partisan obituarist, and we now have reason to believe that this fundamental desideratum of Canetti scholarship may soon be met. Indeed, the Canetti of academic criticism is rather a different creature — and Canetti would not have minded the animal nomenclature — than the one presented in the more popular feuilleton. Subsequent to an overview of the obituary corpus, I want to propose three points that arise from this reading. Finally, while the obituaries clearly perpetuate some fantasies about Canetti — such as his improbable embodiment of a grand era in European letters — they form on balance an instructive and intriguing guide to his viability.
There is something inescapably ironic about turning to obituaries to get a better picture of Canetti. Not only that, but by someone — and I trust I am not alone in this — curiously addicted to obituaries? In combing through what has become a fairly exhaustive collection, including every German-language newspaper or magazine of note as well as a rich sampling from the British, American, French, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, and Israeli press, I do not pretend to have escaped the inevitable snares of reception criticism.
Often caricatured as mere bean-counting, this distinctly unfashionable critical pursuit certainly does not supplant our need to interpret. I do not stake a major claim on their representative status. For my purposes, their value lies more in the challenge — and sometimes the solution — they pose to the academic agenda.
To fundamental questions of method, some obituaries, precisely in their attempt to come to grips with what is worth holding on to in the Canetti oeuvre, offer productive answers. And even when they fail — they are, for example, notoriously unreliable and inconsistent on certain facts — these weaknesses can be turned to the good; for we thereby learn what needs to be set aright.
Canetti himself warned against a static, mechanistic positivism: Of course, not all obituaries are equal or of equal interest. The New York Times, which typically publishes well-researched and wellwritten obituaries, reported that Masse und Macht was published in , an error repeated here and there throughout the North American press.
The obituaries of substance are without exception European. Le Monde gave Canetti full front-page coverage, including fairly detailed discussion of his works. With few exceptions, these authors — obituarists, as I will dub them here — evince an intimate and impressive familiarity with the Canetti oeuvre and at this level alone are more compelling than many derivative academic articles. The Austrians were hard put not to claim Canetti as one of their own. Approaching Canetti from beyond the grave, so to speak — with neither gratuitous animus nor obsequious affirmation — is a distinctly salutary critical practice strongly associated with the obituary phase of critical response.
To put it a bit polemically, one could say that Canetti scholarship divides, at its worst, into two parties: We know these two groups: The latter can easily be found between the pages 18 of that unfortunate book Experte der Macht. Surely such a thought is anathema to orthodox Canetti disciples — how could the arch Feind des Todes approve such a notion? Yet I find it confirmed in my own experience. My lack of distance, at least in the early drafts, caused me to sacrifice critical nuance for what now appears to be an obviously misguided notion of loyalty.
To deal adequately with Crowds and Power one would have to be, like its author, a mixture of historian, sociologist, psy21 chologist, philosopher and poet. If a novelist and philosopher of the caliber of Murdoch felt outflanked intellectually, how much more so many of us. This volume depended primarily, as the author reveals in her introduction, on interviews and correspondence with her subject, and I think this shows in what today appear to be rather cautious if not uniformly affirmative assessments of the individual works.
In her post work, however, one notices a more sovereign, less reverential attitude. One can trace this development logically enough to the obituaries. Claudio Magris, professor of literature and philosophy, and long-time Canetti friend, wrote eloquently in of the fundamental break between the formally more radical early works — he especially loves the novel — and the later best-selling autobiography.
At this juncture Magris appears almost ready to baptize the autobiography as modernist: At the center of the [autobiography] is a void, a vortex, an implosion that sucks up its own innards and that appears to destroy the ordered material of the narrative. In a splendid passage from The Torch in My Ear Canetti remarks that in the face of reality we all resemble Samson, blinded and shattered, as he looks upon the world for the last time, a world that is fading and sinking.
Perhaps Canetti also feels 26 this fear, but he masters it brilliantly in his autobiography. Indeed, they evince a laudable and balanced sovereignty in considering the relative merits and potential future of the novel, dramas, aphorisms, and social thought. They honor Canetti by taking him seriously, rather than uncritically. Whereas it appears to be taken as an article of faith among academics that Masse und Macht fell upon deaf ears when it appeared in 30 , the obituaries paint a more differentiated picture. Of course both parties may be correct to some extent since it depends greatly upon whose attention is deemed to count.
Masse und Macht has indeed failed to gain a 34 bridgehead among mainstream sociologists and anthropologists, yet it has garnered the fascination and admiration of journalists and cultural commentators. Peter von Matt, writing for Die Zeit, explains that this inverse rela35 tionship is perhaps no accident. For von Matt the true measure of Masse und Macht lies not in its ability to conform to established academic inquiry, but precisely in its capacity to challenge the over-specialization and effeteness of these disciplines.
Interestingly, he not only defends Canetti, but is equally eager to demonstrate his full knowledge of the epistemological issues at stake. Obese rebels do not make any sense in the face of the typical conception of revolutionary motivation deriving from the French Revolution and taught in the standard Western school curriculum. And thus we are forced to rethink fundamental assumptions about society and power: Scholars have long wrestled with the tension between Canetti the poet and Canetti the intellectual. The feuilleton writers suggest that this kind of warning misses the 45 mark.
That Canetti takes considerable liberties with academic procedures and collides with accepted leftist social critique as, for example, represented by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research comes as no surprise to 46 them. Here Canetti compares himself to the great theorist of power, Machiavelli, commenting: His catalogue of national symbols — the German forest Wald as intrinsically militaristic, for example — lays claim to this same privileged semiotic status. For Canetti they demonstrate but also extend in some inexplicit manner a prior thesis; as such, they do not simply supply explanation, but also demand interpretation.
Writer Hugo Loetscher confesses in a reminiscence: Es blieb ein Buch einzelner Kapitel. It can serve as a corrective to the needless compartmentalization and arid reductionism characteristic of some Canetti scholarship; but it cannot replace scholarship at its best. One could conceivably make progress toward overcoming this dichotomy simply by keeping this broader cultivated feuilleton readership in mind as the target audience of our own scholarly pursuits.
Furthermore, we can not credit the obituaries exclusively with this more capacious approach to Canetti. There are also encouraging signs on the academic horizon: If this is a sign of things to come — that is, of a fundamental paradigm shift away from current insular practices — then Canetti scholarship has reason indeed to rejoice. The Europa Myth Canetti was remembered in many ways, but above all for possessing a perhaps idealized image of the feuilletonists themselves.
Zurich city president Josef Estermann was moved to assert: In their efforts to make Canetti the avatar of European culture, some writers seem however to have forgotten the author of Masse und Macht, who 61 so mercilessly took this culture to task. But globalization was already then afoot, the bipolar world already dissolved, and a united Europe already high on the political agenda.
So the image of Canetti as the enlightened European may belong as much to the future as to the past. Whatever illusions and self-gratifying images contained in the obituaries, one finds among them a Canetti who was cherished for who he in fact was: Notes My sincere gratitude to Geoff Baker and Daniel Skibra for patiently and relentlessly gathering these many obituaries and related materials from disparate sources and for providing many crucial translations.
The bulk of the Germanlanguage essays were provided by the Innsbrucker Zeitungsarchiv. Canetti, in a interview with Swiss writers Paul Nizon and Ippolita Pizzetti, denied the possibility of any direct influence; he would not read Joyce until later. Nevertheless, one senses the possibility that he is flattered by the comparison. Joyce makes an appearance in volume three of the autobiography, Das Augenspiel: The interview is reprinted along with the obituary in Corriere della sera, August 19, , Adrian Stevens and Fred Wagner Stuttgart: Elegy for Iris refers to the affair but remains fairly coy.
A Life New York: After this article went to press, Hanser published the posthumous Party im Blitz Munich: Hanser, , in which Canetti gives among many other things his account of the affair with Murdoch, including a rather harsh judgment of her intellectual accomplishments. I never received an acknowledgement. Of course Canetti may have had other reasons for disregarding this essay.
David Darby New York: Hall, , — Magris also expresses some of the same ideas in an interview with Antonio Gnoli of La Repubblica, August 19, , 26; this interview appears in English in Salmagundi. August 19, , 1. Corriere della sera, August 19, , Kunert goes on to compare Canetti with Walter Benjamin, though in the process his remarks regarding Jewish intellectuals may generalize too greatly: Dismissing all analytical approaches to the process of remembering — especially the psychoanalytic version — as some kind of unnecessary surgical operation, the narrator makes the case for the integrity of all memories.
The site of this battle between mother and son is the German language that — as we will see — is in quite a literal sense his mother tongue. Canetti dramatizes this battle in his three-part autobiography, which consists of Die gerettete Zunge , Die Fackel im Ohr , and Das Augenspiel In this process the German language is turned from a site of love into the site of a contest that concerns the boundaries between the self and the other, the mother.
The son must free himself from the mother to develop a proper sense of self. Language, particularly the German language, becomes the battleground in this painful struggle for selfhood. Focusing on shifting images of orality and reading in Die gerettete Zunge, the essay explores first the eroticization of the German language.
Language as a veritable battlefield where self and other thrash it out enmeshes not only mother and son but all representatives of divergent social forces. We will see how Das Augenspiel portrays a compromise between maternal demands on the one hand and the need for independence on the other. Sonne can transcend social and linguistic antagonisms. Against the backdrop of the social satire of Karl Kraus, which is a central theme in Die Fackel im Ohr, the narrator now conceives the voice of the other as the domain of alterity and reciprocity.
In contrast to the Canetti of Die Blendung and the early plays who uses the human voice for satirical purposes, the Canetti of the autobiography celebrates the elusive quality of the pure voice as a way of transcending battles for power, success, and knowledge. Toward the end of the trilogy he envisages a utopian kind of orality that is devoid of all desire, in other words a new language that transcends the deadly battle between mother and son.
What amounts to a split between Stimme and Schrift allows the son to continue to serve his mother and, at the same time, create a space that is other than mother. The fact that this is at best a precarious compromise that is divorced from concrete reality makes Canetti a complex modern writer whose works display the very cracks and fissures that they attempt to cover up. That the tongue is a dominant leitmotif in Die gerettete Zunge is so selfevident that many critics have stopped short of a more detailed analysis of its symbolism.
The opening scene, which, with its powerful iconography, reenacts the existential threat of castration, a threat that is even more powerful by virtue of its deferral, is the first in a series of childhood memories that deal with sexual aggression and the fear of being devoured. The narrator tells us that the red tongues of the wolves come so close to her that the mother is haunted by this memory for years 6 GZ, And so is the son who, only a little later, is terrified when a wolf appears at his bedside with his red tongue hanging dangerously out of his mouth.
For weeks, we are told, the wolf returns in his sleep. In all three episodes the red tongue is clearly associated with a male threat that is deferred from the boy to the mother and then back to the boy. The scenario is, however, further complicated by virtue of the complex cross-stitching of opposing functions of the tongue: As both target and agent of the threat, the tongue is a highly libidinized object, a site of desire that, however, paralyzes its speech function: In clear contrast to the aggressively sexualized images of the early passages, the narrator depicts the relationship between husband and wife as a magical discourse that is only temporarily interrupted by the demands of the mundane world.
We are told that when the father came home from work, he would instantly speak to his wife in German. These talks revolve around their happy school days, the world of the Vienna Burgtheater, and their unfulfilled passion for acting GZ, Feeding their secret love at first through endless conversations in German, their marriage eventually legitimizes this continuous role-play. The narrator even implies that their marriage was an act of compensation for their missed careers on stage. Auf Reisen nach Paris und Pisa lernt er u.
Descartes, Galilei und Mersenne kennen. Der Leviathan gilt bis heute als Hauptwerk der politischen Theorie in der erstmaligen Formulierung des Gesellschaftsvertrages. Er stirbt im hohen Alter von 91 Jahren in Hardwick. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Read more Read less. Here's how restrictions apply. About the Author Thomas Hobbes wird in Westport geboren.
Felix Meiner Verlag January 1, Language: Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Felix Meiner Verlag, S. Politik - Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte. Jura - Rechtsphilosophie, Rechtssoziologie, Rechtsgeschichte. Politik - Internationale Politik - Allgemeines und Theorien. Philosophie - Philosophie des Philosophie - Philosophie des Mittelalters ca.
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A companion to the works of Elias Canetti - PDF Free Download
Conclusion and outlook Sources I. Hobbes accepts two basic axioms for human nature as given and constant. The way a quad consists of equilaterally and right-angled squares, human beings consist of the characteristics "reason-talented" and "animated body" [2]. The second important axiom supposed by Hobbes is the human striving for well-being in all patterns of life, e. Anthropologie bei Thomas Hobbes. Der Mensch im Naturzustand.
Der Naturzustand bei Thomas Hobbes. Das Problem der Konstituierung des Gesellschaftsvertrages am Beispi Thomas Hobbes und sein Menschenbild.