With regard to the difficult events and situations presented in recent times in Latin America and other parts of the world, it would be well to revisit the work of certain leading authors of contemporary Western thought. One of them for me is Elías Canetti, thinker and writer (essayist and narrator), born in Bulgaria in 1905 and died in Switzerland in 1994.

Ever since I began reading it years ago, I have always imagined him gravely dressed in his dark coat, clothed in his Kafkaesque mist and little speech, elusive and overwhelmed by his Jewish ancestral memory. Canetti, who in 1981 received the Nobel Prize for Literature, for many long years had forged a writing in which density and lucidity became the narrative of thought, or where narration gave way to memorable and forewarned reflection. An autobiographical thread, almost proustian, warped his writing, be it fiction, essay or research.

The innocence and cruelty of childhood, the threatening presence of death, the "love and terror of words" (to say it with the phrase of the Venezuelan Briceño Guerrero), the dispersed voices of the collective conscience configured the ferment and breath of works such as The voices of Marrakesh (1968) or The absolved language (1977), the latter form initiates his autobiography that consists of four volumes. Added to this is the testimony of the suffering he experienced as if in his own flesh, witnessing the tragedies of this century - the "great" tragedies of history, such as the two world wars and the holocausts of humanity generated by the aberrant products of humanity itself (Nazism and Stalinism); or the "small" tragedies that make up the life of the modern and civilized self.

_{Editing The Other Kafka Process Source}

It is no coincidence that he returned to Kafka and assumed the influence of this outsider of literature; hence his extraordinary book The Other Kafka Process (1969), an essay in which, from the letters of the Czech writer, he contrasts the figure of power represented by the father and the awareness of the limitations of the individual himself. Also, more distantly, that masterpiece entitled Auto de fe (195), the only novel written by the author, in which he returns to his obsessive vital reflection on the "heart of darkness" that inhabits the human being, that dark presence of power and evil.

The awareness of the fear and destruction that power entails is precisely one of the constants that permeate Canetti's work. A tale of power that often borders on delirium and sleep, built on a moral and almost metaphysical tension, in which power is seen as an evil that corrodes human nature. The result of this profound awareness is his book Mass and Power, the capital work of Canetti's production, conceived as the mission of his life, which began in 1925 and ended in 1960. In this book, with its interpretative and narrative brilliance, he delves into the somatic, anthropological and pathological entrails of power as an individual and social phenomenon.

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When we open Mass and Power we are surprised by a stinging phrase: "Nothing man fears more than to be touched by the unknown". Canetti, the man who lived in strangeness, inaugurates with this assertion his aqueous exploration in the hidden geography of power, for which this supposes as drives against the other: fear, indifference, paralysis, aggression... For this reason he will say: "Only immersed in the mass can man redeem himself from this fear of contact". The mass is undifferentiated, and in that trap or illusion of equality, he feels at ease.

When he tackles the case of Hitler (and National Socialism), which relied on the mass feeling of the Germans at the time, he managed, in turn, to make the Jews into a mass: "he directed his activity against the Jews as a whole," says Canetti. And he adds:

First they were attacked as bad and dangerous, as enemies; then they were devalued more and more; (...); in the end they were literally regarded as bugs that could be exterminated by the millions. Even today one is stunned that the Germans have gone so far, that they have carried out, tolerated or ignored a crime of such proportions.

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Although the meditation and interpretation of power presented by Canetti in this work are not part of the conceptions on this question that came into vogue in the 80s and 90s developed by authors such as Michel Foucault or Jean Baudrillard, his vision penetrates areas of human behaviour that have not been addressed much, constituting what could be called a "phenomenological archaeology of power".

Let us read an extensive quotation from this book:

Whoever has climbed too quickly to the summit, or who has otherwise managed to appropriate the supreme command over such a system, by the nature of his position lives overwhelmed by the fear of command and must try to free himself from it. The continuous threat, which he uses and which constitutes the very essence of this system, finally turns against himself.

To discover in the mythological, historical and clinical account the veiled keys of the traditional experiences of domination, their symbolic behavior, the archetypes of their avatars, is undoubtedly a fundamental contribution that our current reflection cannot ignore. An expression such as the following referring to our time: "Power is greater, but it is also more fleeting than ever", brings it closer, without proposing it, to the most radical theses of the end of the century, such as those supported by Foucault in Microphysics of Power: "Power is everywhere".

_{From "Conceptual Photographs" by Misha Gordin Source}

Canetti, the Sephardic-Bulgarian-British, "disciple" of Franz Kafka and Karl Krauss, has bequeathed us a work and a consciousness that recovers for our sensibility the nourishing force of memory and encourages our dissidence in the face of power.

Bibliographical references

Canetti, Elías (1977). Mass and power. Spain: Muchnik Editores.

Written by @josemalavem