“One wonders whether he would manage to formulate readable reflections in which the following words never appeared: God, crowd, death, power, transformation, love, and fear.”1
The first years in which Elias Canetti was working out Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht) are those in which, after a stay in Berlin in 1928, he felt the menace arising from the “combustible character of the world,”2 as if “a catastrophe could occur at any moment,”3 all of which provoked in him an “immoderate fear.”4 The atmosphere of Berlin had “something harsh and biting (…) that excited and quickened,” but one received “the terrible coexistence of all things (…) like a slap in the face, as in the drawings of Grosz.”5 The word chaos recurs often to describe this world in which things took “contradictory directions” and in which facts “tended to fly apart from one another (…) at the greatest speed.”6 Even as Canetti went on reading everything he could lay hands on in order to elucidate, theoretically, the enigma of the crowd, no theory, no line of interpretation yet emerged from this chaos — but characters did, each one with “a silhouette of its own, which gathered up what was absurdly scattered and gave it body.”7 Back in Vienna, Canetti wrote, in the space of two years, his first novel (Die Blendung) and a play (The Wedding / Noce).8 Offering no consolation, no way out of the chaos, these two works are, according to Olivier Agard, “meant to open the eyes of the reader (and the spectator) to the surrounding madness.”9
The themes of the crowd and of power already obsessed Canetti, but it is in the major work of his life, completed in 1959 in England, that he would consider himself to have “seized this century by the throat,”10 Crowds and Power being “essentially an analysis of National Socialism.”11 The latter, along with “the twentieth century, its wars, its despotisms, its massacres,” Olivier Agard notes, is nonetheless present there only “in filigree,”12 for in Canetti’s view one cannot understand these phenomena without taking into account an “archaic ground” in which fear holds a central place. Indeed, Crowds and Power opens with the mention of a “phobia” that Canetti designates as “the fear of being touched by the unknown.”13 Its emblematic situation, we might say, could be the childhood fear of the dark, which is not a fear of anything precise but the dread of a danger whose coming cannot be anticipated and which would seize us before we had seen it come. The human body is fundamentally ambivalent, both seizable and seizing: on the one hand it is “naked and fragile; its softness exposes it to any aggression whatever,”14 its flesh can be pierced, penetrated from without; on the other hand it is alive, and the life-force within it manifests itself as a capacity to seize (by the hand) and to absorb (by the mouth). Being seizable, a great part of our energy is devoted to setting up arrangements that avoid physical contact with the other. It is thus that the crowd will allay the original phobia of touch, while paradoxically engendering a feeling of invulnerability. On the other side, the logic of power, whose source is seizing and not being seized, likewise inclines it to feel invulnerable, but fear always ends by catching up with it, which makes it no less dangerous.
I — Being Seizable: The Response Through the Crowd
a) From the crowd in flight to panic
Anyone who has ever taken part in a demonstration will recognize his own experience in this description:
“Nothing has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people. From all sides more come streaming up, it is as though the streets had only one direction. Many do not know what has happened, and have nothing to say if questioned; but they are in a hurry to be where most other people are. There is a determination in their movement quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity.”15
Once gathered, “one body presses against another, each is as close to the other as to himself,”16 without our feeling the least fear. What is it that we enjoy in such moments? Of what is made that which Canetti names a “crowd instinct”17 which, unlike many famous analyses of crowd phenomena (Le Bon, Tarde, for example), he does not approach from an elitist and unilaterally negative point of view?
The happiness the individual experiences within the crowd comes from an “immense relief,” a “discharge.”18 Ordinarily the “phobia of touch” elicits a great expenditure of energy, an “insidious vigilance (that) never relaxes (and) never leaves a man once he has settled, once and for all, the limits of his person.” We lock ourselves into our houses, and in the street or on public transport, even when “we stand quite close to others (…), we avoid their touch so far as we can.”19 Such constrained proximity does not, however, constitute a crowd in the sense that interests Canetti. To give oneself over to the crowd is, on the contrary, to accept physical contact with other unknown people and no longer to have to mobilize one’s energy in order to protect oneself from it. Distances are abolished, but so are hierarchies: even if it is only an illusion, within the crowd men feel equal. The individual and individualizing phobia of touch reverses into a compactness made of a liberating surrender to physical closeness with others — any others, the first to come.
The crowd is, according to Canetti, a universal figure of human sociality, which he analyzes by elaborating a complex series of distinctions: the open crowd, which tends to grow; the invisible crowd; the stagnating crowd; the closed crowd; crowd crystals, and so on. The last two types of crowd are constructions aimed at overcoming the crowd’s ephemeral character, its spontaneous tendency to disintegration. It is thus that Canetti accounts, in particular, for the function of rituals and ceremonies, and more generally for that of the great religions. His perspective is not, however, merely functional, for the crowd is a dynamic phenomenon: it has a direction, a rhythm, it engages affects and recognizes itself in symbols, it is active. Whatever its type, the crowd is a reality new with respect to the individual, and it arouses in each person sui generis emotions. To surrender to it brings about an enlargement of sensibility: one experiences the other against whom one’s body presses “as if it were oneself (…). Suddenly everything happens as though within one and the same body.”20 This is why this new body can itself be threatened by an external danger, which gives rise to new forms of fear — collective this time — as well as to new forms of crowd behavior.
The approach of a common danger concentrated at a determined point can give rise to a “crowd in flight”: all flee together and in the same direction, the goal is shared. Mass flight — which differs from individual flight — “draws its energy from its cohesion”: so long as the fear remains bearable, each keeps a place within the whole. Some, weaker, fall back or fall. But so long as the “crowd in flight” stays welded together, this reinforces “the incitement (of the others to) keep going.”21 Flight can be set off by a command, that definitive and indisputable utterance which comes from outside, penetrates us like a sting, and lodges within us “a hard crystal of resentment.”22 According to Canetti, the command in general derives from the command to flee, whose efficacy comes from a threat of death aimed at each person as a member of a collectivity. In flight, “the command given to a great number of people (…) seeks to make of this great number a crowd,”23 while binding the crowd to the one who utters it. Yet the issuer of the command to flee is not necessarily above the crowd; the command may propagate horizontally and be transmitted without delay from one to another: “In his fear he draws closer (to his fellows). In the twinkling of an eye the others are infected by it. Some begin to move, then others, then all. The instantaneous spread of the same command has transformed them into a crowd,”24 leaving it no time to turn into a sting.
The examples of mass flight are countless, and the contemporary era furnishes a great many as well. Among them, Canetti evokes the exodus that occurred when the Germans drew near Paris in 1940, and he likens its “intensity” and “extent” to those of the retreat from Russia more than a century earlier, even though it did not “last as long, the armistice having soon intervened.”25 There is a tenacity to flight, owing to the protective cohesive effect of the crowd. Along the way, if the attainment of the goal is too long delayed, the strength of the fugitives wanes, most give up, but the movement continues, borne by those who hold out, however few they may be: “People keep crawling forward when all hope of rescue is gone (and) stay grouped together until the very last moment.”26 Even in the most desperate conditions, mass flight and the crowd remain possible, provided a space stays open.
There are, however, situations in which a common fear, and even a command to flee, engender not a crowd in flight but a panic. When, for example, fire breaks out in a theater, one hears “Fire!” but the space is closed, all common movement is impossible: the crowd disintegrates violently. Each person sees “the door through which (he) must pass, (…) (he) sees (himself) there sharply detached from all the others.” There then occurs “a reversal (which) manifests itself in the most violent individual tendencies: one pushes, one strikes, one tramples savagely on everything around.”27
b) The disquieting euphoria of invulnerability in baiting crowds
If the discharge procured by being taken up into a crowd allows us to save the energy we expend in mastering our phobia of touch, it can also engender a disquieting “euphoria,” when a crowd reverts to the archaic form of the hunting pack, the “most primitive dynamic unit that men know,”28 the closest to the animal world. Engendered out of his seizable being, the crowd allows the frightened man to recover his seizing being and to frighten in his turn.
Characterized by its small numbers, the hunting pack is oriented toward “a goal quickly attainable,”29 a living being that must be killed. Humans too have hunted since the dawn of time, but whereas wolves hunt lambs — that is, species other than their own — men sometimes band together in baiting crowds against other men. From expulsions to stonings, from lynchings to collective murders and public executions, humanity teems with such dark episodes. The disquieting euphoria that then takes hold of the members of a baiting crowd comes from “the absence of danger in the undertaking,”30 which, on the basis of a designated target whose aggression is justified in advance, authorizes killing without fear of sanction — and this gives each person a feeling of invulnerability and makes the crowd extremely dangerous.
Yet not every crowd unites in order to kill; the impulse may come from a revolt against injustice, as on that memorable day of July 15, 1927, when, “without the assent of their leaders,”31 the workers of Vienna set fire to the Palace of Justice after the court had just acquitted three members of a right-wing militia, the Heimwehr (Home Guard), who had killed two people, one of them a child, during a clash with the left-wing Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection League) in Burgenland. Swept up himself in this demonstration, Canetti describes the way in which the watchwords of anonymous people propagate within an open crowd: “Someone must indeed have shouted the watchword ‘To the Palace of Justice!’ It is not very important to know who, for this watchword communicated itself to all who heard it and was received without hesitation, without reflection, without one’s thinking about it, without delay or any wish to wait, and it drew everyone in one and the same direction.”32 “I understood,” Canetti writes, “that the crowd needs no Führer to form, despite the theories advanced on the subject.” Within a crowd of the kind found in revolutions, a multiplicity of improvised orators draws people this way and that, “speaking in the crowd’s own sense,” but, Canetti adds, “any account of the events that assigns them an essential place is a falsification.”33
That a crowd should form out of a legitimate revolt against injustice does not prevent it, as a crowd, from giving rise to destructive conduct. Thus, on that July 15, 1927, just as someone cried “All to the Palace of Justice!” someone must also either have cried “Fire on the Palace of Justice!” or have set the fire himself. Canetti discovers here a deep affinity between fire and the crowd, the spectacle of fire contributing to reinforce its cohesion while inspiring in the crowd a feeling of invulnerability — one found in various instances of baiting crowds, beyond the motives that animate them.34 But this feeling does not last, and the balance sheet of July 15 was dramatic, for the mounted police, who “made a particularly terrifying impression, perhaps because they themselves were afraid,”35 fired on the crowd. The crowd resisted, persevered for a time, but the toll was terrible: 90 dead, hundreds wounded, marking the exit from the stage of the socialist revolutionary crowds in Austria — a prelude to the entrance of other enthusiastic crowds, far more sinister.
Evoking that day fifty-three years later, Canetti writes: “It is the closest thing to a revolution that I have ever experienced in person.”36 A contemporary of the Soviet revolution, he understands how the rigid stratification of a society makes a multitude of stings weigh upon the dominated classes, stings that underscore their powerlessness and their humiliation. And the dominant are quite wrong not to understand that “men who receive many commands and are filled with such stings feel a strong tendency to rid themselves of them.” Revolutions begin with a movement of reversal such that “a great number find themselves in a crowd (and succeed in) what was individually forbidden to them”: freeing themselves “collectively from the stings they have suffered.”37
It is true that this reversal often includes episodes of baiting crowds: “Men who act on commands (…) are capable of the most terrible actions,”38 even as they revolt against those commands. When they band together, they turn on the individuals they regard as symbols of their oppression: “once one is caught, we are all together to kill him, whether we form a tribunal or whether there is no judgment at all.”39 The sting of the command, which they situate as external to them, remains lodged within them; and even though they claim victims, they continue to feel themselves victims: “They do not feel guilty, they regret nothing. They have not been penetrated by their actions.”40 In other words, they are not freed from the stings that made them act under constraint.
But Canetti refuses to identify the revolutionary aspiration with the punctual unleashing of baiting crowds. If the process continues, it “unfolds slowly, (…) rises from the depths and goes from upheaval to upheaval.”41 Its stake might be to break the infernal dialectic of resentment out of which new oppressions come to replace the old. One would have to “shake” the dominion of the long history of the command itself, “have the courage to oppose it,” and “find the means to keep what is essential in man free of it. It must not be allowed to scratch more than the skin. Its stings must become burrs, easily shaken off with a light gesture.”42
c) Hitler’s instinct
If the crowd “needs no Führer to form,” the privileged bond Hitler maintained with modern crowds leaps to the eye. Hitler, Canetti writes in the text inspired by his reading of Speer’s Memoirs,43 had “an instinct for everything connected with the crowd, he will have sensed it (…). The crowds that, excited by him, carried him to power must always be capable of being excited anew.”44 To have an instinct for everything connected with the crowd is to have grasped the various processes that constitute it and that are the object of the analyses in Crowds and Power — first of all the process set in motion by the relief due to cohesion, which Miguel Abensour names “the compactness effect”;45 or again the tension between the crowd’s tendency to grow and its tendency to disintegrate,46 a tension to which Speer’s architectural projects, putting Nazi monumentality into effect, respond.
In Crowds and Power, Canetti had also insisted on Hitler’s will to constitute the people as a war crowd,47 and had noted that other form of “disquieting cohesion” accompanied by a euphoria recalling that of baiting crowds, when a declaration of war is greeted with enthusiasm to cries of “We’ll get them all!” To declare war is to authorize an army to kill. Now, whether one is attacked or, above all, the attacker, the justification for going to kill others is most often that it is they, the enemies, who threaten you all indiscriminately and individually, provided you belong to a “particular people.” As though a “collective sentence” had been pronounced “at the same instant” upon every individual of that people: “You must die,” activating in each the fear of his own death which yet “no one wishes to look in the face.” It is this fear that the enthusiasm accompanying mobilization, the mass levy at the outbreak of a war, seeks to ward off: since the threat is collective, by staying grouped together one can, together, fend off death — “one need only be quick enough and not hesitate for a single instant in one’s work of death.”48
Even before the declaration of the Second World War, the Nazis had extended mobilization into peacetime, regimenting the crowds in interminable parades, or constantly marching uniformed troops through the streets. But in order to mobilize a crowd without yet having declared war, it was necessary to detect the “susceptibility” and the “irascibility” peculiar to it, which make it interpret everything “as proceeding from an unshakable hostility, (…) from a premeditated intention to destroy it openly or insidiously.” The threat is internal, the enemy is “in the cellars.”49 In this passage Canetti does not name the Jew directly, any more than Hitler does, but one recognizes in it the characteristics of the crowd upon which Nazi antisemitism knew how to play so effectively.50
II — Seizing and Surviving: The Roots of Power
Granting that Hitler is an extreme case of despotic power, one must dig still deeper to reach the source of the constitution of power. Like the crowd, it engages anthropological capacities that we all share. Even if it can make itself seizing, the crowd derives all the same from the seizable part of our being, whereas power proceeds from its seizing part, to which is joined an archaic affect common to us all: “the satisfaction of surviving.”51 Canetti does not pause to distinguish the various kinds of political power according to whether or not they are limited by rules or counterpowers. He directs his gaze straight to the power of a single man, sovereign or despot — that is, to what Nicolas Poirier calls “the tendential logic proper to all power,” every power keeping “the trace of the original bond it concretely maintains with death.”52
a) Seizing and fixing: toward the transformation in reverse
In some highly suggestive pages, Canetti reconstitutes a kind of primitive animal scene in which one can glimpse at once the original prototypes of the crowd — “the most archaic dread”53 at the approach of a contact — and of power — seizing, its “capital act.”54 He describes how the hunter draws near, little by little, to his prey, to lay hold of it, immobilize it, and kill it; he dwells on our capacity to crush or to grind, reflects on the act of eating, in which we absorb after having bitten, digest, assimilate, all these functions constituting “the entrails of power.”55
The crowd in flight thus proceeds from the animal reaction of the prey before the predator. But this situation also reveals other possible escape routes for the prey, routes that belong to a capacity that fascinates Canetti as much as do those of the crowd and of power: transformation, or rather the various forms of transformation (Verwandlung) of which man is capable, thus complicating the original scene on both the prey’s and the predator’s side. While the fugitive knows how to invent ruses to deceive the predator — like Proteus escaping Menelaus by transforming himself into a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a boar, or a tree — the hunter “enters exactly into the role of the animal he pursues. He knows so well how to go about it that the animal is taken in.”56
Canetti collects myths and dreams in which scenes of this kind abound. All this is imaginary, one will say. No doubt, but if Canetti multiplies the accounts of myths, it is not to make us believe that what they recount really happened, but to remind us of the existence of a fundamental human capacity — better, “the original gift of man,”57 of which, in the end, the poet is the guardian:58 transformation. By contrast, power — above all when it is that of a potentate or a despot — aims to abase, and “in abasing, it fixes,” which is why it struggles permanently against “spontaneous and uncontrollable transformations (which) leads to a reduction of the world. One then grants no value to the richness of its forms; one disdains all its multiplicity.”59 Canetti names the means invented by potentates to paralyze transformations: “transformation in reverse” (Entwandlung).60
b) The passion to survive and the feeling of invulnerability
Yet the exploration of the “entrails of power” does not suffice to grasp its constitution. The primitive scene of the hunt presents us with a force (Gewalt), a strength exerted upon a being who is present, whereas power (Macht) is “more general and vaster (and) contains far more.”61 It takes root in one of the least avowable affective reactions a human being experiences when standing, alive, before a dead man stretched out, disarmed, “who will not rise again”62 — a reaction that combines with, indeed is overlaid by, grief when the dead man is a relative. Here there is another primitive scene, by which the fear of our own death — “the dread (…) before the fact of death” — becomes truly concrete, for “the human being never quite believes in death so long as he has not experienced it,” not as his own death but as that of another. There, “what succeeds the dread before the dead man lying there is a satisfaction: one is not oneself the dead man. It could have been the case.”63 The authenticity of the grief is not at issue here, but it is very difficult for us to acknowledge — and one feels it in writing it — that grief is accompanied by a satisfaction “which one admits to no one, perhaps not even to oneself,”64 which is why the conventions of mourning are happily there to keep it from being expressed. From such an experience, for everyone, to live is to survive, and this instant of satisfaction is, despite the shame, an “instant of power”65 with respect to the radical powerlessness of the dead.
There are circumstances in which this satisfaction is more intense: when a man not only triumphs over an adversary after a combat and survives him, but begins to seek out the occasions to feel it. Henceforth “the satisfaction of surviving (…) can turn into a dangerous and insatiable passion”:66 the accumulation of triumphs procures for him a “feeling of invulnerability.” It is not so much the mere fact of not having been beaten that procures it for him, but the fact that the other — or rather the others — are dead and not he, which makes him experience “the ever-renewed pleasure of surviving.”67 In drawing our attention to this feeling that a soldier who has come out of a war alive may experience, Canetti arrives at what truly interests him in understanding power: the “most active form of living,”68 the pleasure bound to survival in proportion to the number of those one outlives. Now this pleasure is not attained by fighting oneself (“No one alone can kill enough people”69), but by appropriating the result of the combat waged by others — like the general to whom is attributed the victory on a battlefield. What exactly do we mean when we say that Napoleon won the battle of Austerlitz? Nothing other than: his army inflicted more deaths than the enemy armies, and it is Napoleon who appears invulnerable. As Nicolas Poirier writes, Canetti challenges “the very type of the hero celebrated by historians through the figure of the conquerors, of whom it is wrongly believed that it was moved by the lure of danger that they accomplished their work, when their principal motivation was to kill en masse”70 in order to feel the satisfaction of surviving.
c) The delirium of wanting to be the sole survivor, and the omnipresence of fear
No one is more possessed by the passion to survive than the tyrant or the despot, and, like the general, he satisfies it not by multiplying the occasions of single combat but by obtaining from the largest possible crowd that its members die for him — whence the predilection of tyrants for war and their art of mobilizing the crowds by representing to them a danger that threatens them. But not all are soldiers, and so the power of a single man establishes itself by maintaining the threat otherwise: on the one hand, the sovereign’s essential prerogative is the right of life and death; on the other, the most common form of his speech toward others is the command, which, as we have seen, derives from the command to flee — that is, from a collective sentence of death — while the refusal to obey is subject to sanctions that may go as far as death itself. The counterpart is that the sovereign “is never sure of the obedience of his subjects (…) it is enough that one of them escape his judgment for the prince to be in danger.”71
But the despot’s passion to survive becomes truly very dangerous when, unlike the general, he is possessed by an intention “as grotesque as it is incredible: he wants to be the only one. He wants to survive everyone so that no one survives him. He wants to escape death at any price, and this is why there must be no one, absolutely no one, who can put him to death. So long as there are human beings, whoever they may be, he will never feel safe.”72 This is why the tyrant, forever fearing he will be attacked, always keeps an empty space around himself and develops all sorts of surveillance techniques to anticipate the least danger. Everything that transforms itself independently of him conceals a danger, and so he is always preoccupied with unmasking, with tracking down appearances. Pushed to its conclusion, the logic of power is paranoid, and Canetti finds its purest expression in Schreber’s Memoirs, whose “delirium, beneath the disguise of an outmoded worldview presupposing the existence of spirits, is in reality the precise model of the political power that feeds on and constitutes itself from the crowd.”73 Let us retain two important elements of this delirium: he sees himself as the sole human being to have survived while all of humanity has perished — through epidemics of leprosy or plague, or through immense earthquakes; and if it has perished, it is because it was against him, which is why he was protected by healing rays. From then on, all the people with whom he is in contact are mere appearances of men, and it matters to him to unmask them constantly: “he finds his enemy again in the most diverse figures,”74 who threaten him like so many enemy packs.
Hitler is par excellence the survivor in power, he who literally exists only through the crowd of victims he has murdered and whose number must grow as much as possible. This bursts forth in particular at the very end of the history of the Third Reich, when defeat is inevitable and the Germans are no longer intoxicated with victories: Hitler is completely indifferent to “the fate of his people, whose greatness and prosperity he had long passed off as the very design and object of his life.”75 This people too must perish, even if he himself must destroy it. “His deepest motive,” Canetti writes, “is that he does not want to be survived.”76
Recalling, in his autobiography, the last years he spent in Vienna, Canetti notes that “there was catastrophe in the air.” But he does not find himself in the way it is apprehended: first in the cafés, where he deplores “an inflation of egocentric discourse, of protestations and self-assertions,” then in the public space in general, so “polluted with slogans (…) that it was hard to find a space free of them.” It is only by assiduously frequenting Doctor Sonne77 that Canetti meets a man with whom one could review the things that “threatened to come about,” seeking to discern not “his (own) peril, but that of all,” and that “without schematism” and in detail. But Canetti also praises a quality fundamentally absent from the posture of the prophet of doom78 — a quality found in the eras (such as our own?) in which there is catastrophe in the air: “The indictments, of which there was certainly no lack, gave him no pleasure. He foresaw the worst, stated it with the greatest precision, but did not rejoice when it actually came to pass (…). He took pains not to show how much all these things he sensed in advance tormented him. He refrained from using them to threaten or punish you (…). More than forbearance, it is of tenderness that one would have to speak in this connection, and I marvel to this day at this mixture of tenderness and inflexible rigor.”79
Notes
Elias Canetti, Le Livre contre la mort (The Book Against Death), trans. B. Kreis (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018), p. 96.↩︎
Elias Canetti, “The Torch in My Ear” (Le Flambeau dans l’oreille), trans. M.-F. Demet, in Écrits autobiographiques — hereafter EA (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), p. 674.↩︎
Elias Canetti, “The Play of the Eyes” (Jeux de regards), trans. W. Weideli, in EA, p. 678.↩︎
Ibid., p. 677.↩︎
“The Torch in My Ear,” EA, p. 611.↩︎
Ibid., p. 626.↩︎
Ibid., p. 628.↩︎
Die Blendung (in English Auto-da-Fé, in French Auto-da-fé) was completed in 1931 and published in 1935; Noce (The Wedding) was written in 1933–34, published in 1950, and first performed in Germany in 1965.↩︎
Olivier Agard, Elias Canetti (Paris: Belin, 2003), p. 86.↩︎
E. Canetti, “The Human Province” (Le Territoire de l’homme), trans. A. Guerne, in EA, p. 962.↩︎
Ibid., p. 1197.↩︎
Gérald Stieg, “Questions à Elias Canetti,” Austriaca, November 1980, no. 4, p. 20. O. Agard, op. cit., p. 113.↩︎
E. Canetti, Crowds and Power (Masse et puissance) — hereafter MP — trans. R. Rovini (Paris: Tel, 1986), p. 11.↩︎
Ibid., p. 242.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 12–13.↩︎
Ibid., p. 15.↩︎
“The Torch in My Ear,” EA, p. 474.↩︎
MP, p. 15. The italics are in the text.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 11–12.↩︎
Ibid., p. 12. The italics are in the text.↩︎
Ibid., p. 54.↩︎
Ibid., p. 329.↩︎
Ibid., p. 330.↩︎
Ibid., p. 329.↩︎
Ibid., p. 55.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 54–55.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 24–25.↩︎
Ibid., p. 49.↩︎
Ibid., p. 48.↩︎
Ibid., p. 49.↩︎
“The Torch in My Ear,” EA, p. 562.↩︎
Ibid., p. 564.↩︎
Ibid., p. 568.↩︎
Take two extremes: the Nazi book-burnings of 1933, the burning of the City Hall during the collapse of the Paris Commune… What matters here is to bring out the feeling of invulnerability, precursor of a rise to power in one case, desperate in the other — the last moment of a history of the defeated.↩︎
MP, p. 565.↩︎
Ibid., p. 562.↩︎
Ibid., p. 59.↩︎
Ibid., p. 351.↩︎
Ibid., p. 60.↩︎
Ibid., p. 351.↩︎
Ibid., p. 60.↩︎
Ibid., p. 353.↩︎
Cf. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Au Cœur du Troisième Reich) (Paris: Fayard, 1971).↩︎
E. Canetti, “Hitler, According to Speer” (Hitler d’après Speer), in The Conscience of Words (La Conscience des mots), trans. R. Lewinter (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), p. 207.↩︎
M. Abensour, “Architectures et régimes totalitaires,” in La Part de l’œil, no. 12, 1996, p. 18.↩︎
“Leaving war aside, there are only two means of acting against the disintegration of the crowd. One is its growth, the other its regular repetition. As an empiricist of the crowd, of whom there have been few, he knows its forms and its means. On colossal squares, so vast that they are filled only with difficulty, the crowd has the possibility of growing; it stays open” (The Conscience of Words, op. cit., p. 205). Cited by M. Abensour, ibid.↩︎
The war crowd is akin to the hunting pack, with a few transformations or reversals: the hunted animals may defend themselves at the last moment, but above all they flee, possibly constituting a crowd in flight, whereas in war two human crowds oppose one another “with the same intention: to obtain as many dead enemies as possible” (MP, p. 104).↩︎
Ibid., pp. 74–75.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20. This point is developed in this very volume by Hélène Oppenheim.↩︎
The representation of the Jews as rats is very frequent in Nazi iconography.↩︎
MP, p. 244.↩︎
Nicolas Poirier, Les métamorphoses contre la puissance (Paris: Michalon, 2018), pp. 50 & 71.↩︎
MP, p. 216.↩︎
Ibid., p. 218.↩︎
Ibid., p. 213.↩︎
Ibid., p. 216.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Cf. E. Canetti, “The Writer’s Profession” (Le métier du poète), in The Conscience of Words, op. cit., pp. 319–331.↩︎
MP, p. 401.↩︎
Ibid., p. 400.↩︎
Ibid., p. 299.↩︎
E. Canetti, “Power and Survival” (Puissance et survie), in The Conscience of Words, op. cit., p. 32.↩︎
Ibid., p. 33.↩︎
Ibid., p. 34.↩︎
MP, p. 241.↩︎
Ibid., p. 244.↩︎
“Power and Survival,” op. cit., p. 34. The italics are in the text. MP, p. 244.↩︎
“Power and Survival,” op. cit., p. 40.↩︎
MP, p. 245.↩︎
Nicolas Poirier, Les métamorphoses contre la puissance, op. cit., p. 61.↩︎
MP, p. 247.↩︎
“Power and Survival,” op. cit., p. 42.↩︎
MP, p. 468.↩︎
Ibid., p. 481.↩︎
“Hitler, According to Speer,” op. cit., p. 215.↩︎
Ibid., p. 216.↩︎
Abraham Sonne (1883–1950) was a poet writing in Hebrew, a literary critic, and a Jewish scholar. A Zionist activist — which Canetti never mentions — he lived for the most part in Vienna and took refuge in Palestine at the time of the Anschluss, where he wrote under the name Avraham Ben-Yitzhak.↩︎
In this instance, for Canetti the prophet of doom or the “prophetic zealot” (ibid., p. 802) is none other than Karl Kraus.↩︎
“The Play of the Eyes,” op. cit., pp. 791–792. The italics are in the text. Ibid., p. 802.↩︎