Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Canetti, Elias

  • Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti

    From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me.  It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.' The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and…

  • The Deep Thinker

    Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations (Die Fliegenpein: Aufzeichnungen), Noonday 1994, tr. H. F. Broch de Rothermann, bilingual ed., p. 25: His thoughts have fins instead of wings. It flows better in German: Sein Denken hat Flossen statt Flügel. The title is my creation. Many of Canetti's notations express insights; others, however…

  • Elias Canetti and Greta Thunberg

    The former has the latter's 'number.' Zwei Tendenzen, die sich nur scheinbar widersprechen, kennzeichnen die Zeit: die Anbetung der Jugend and das Absterben der Erfahrung. Two trends, which only apparently contradict each other, epitomize this era: the worship of youth and the extinction of experience. (The Agony of Flies, Noonday, 1994, p. 168/169, emphasis in…

  • Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death

    An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti: . . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up…