Contributor

Elias Canetti

(1905 - 1994)

A Sephardic Jew born in Bulgaria, Elias Canetti was inspired to write Crowds and Power after being caught in a battle between workers and police on a Viennese street in 1927. In 1935 he published his only novel, Auto-da-Fé, about a reclusive scholar. “The picture that he had of his body was scanty,” writes Canetti, but “had he acted according to his present thirst for knowledge, he would have undressed stark naked and reviewed his body in detail, inspecting and encouraging it bone by bone.” Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981.

All Writing

He who is afraid of his own memories is cowardly, really cowardly.

—Elias Canetti, 1954

Miscellany

A hand’s primary function, Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power, is as “a claw to grasp whole branches” while climbing; both hands partner in “grasping” and “letting go.” This is like trade, he argues: “one hand tenaciously holds on to the object with which it seeks to tempt the stranger” while the other “is stretched out in demand.” Trading, then, offers “profound and universal pleasure” as “a translation into nonphysical terms of one of the oldest movement patterns.”

Secrecy lies at the very core of power.

—Elias Canetti, 1960

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.

—Elias Canetti, 1960

Issues Contributed

Flesh

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Disaster

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About Money

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