3 reasons to reread Mass and Power, by Elias Canetti

4/14/2020, 6:55:19 PM

In this labyrinth, now a classic, the Nobel Prize in Literature 1981 analyzes the relationships between the individual and the group.

A labyrinth structure

"It is nothing that man dreads more than contact with the unknown." It is under this premise that the essay by Elias Canetti, Mass and Power , published in 1960, unfolds. How can we overcome this obsessive phobia? he wonders. By gregariousness and grouping: "It is only in the mass that man can be freed from this phobia of contact."

In this labyrinth, now a classic work, the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature analyzes the relationships between the individual and the group, in the light of social phenomena, historical upheavals, mythological representations, figures of art or literature . The titles of the different chapters speak for themselves: "The funeral pack", "The passion to survive", "Mace and Catholicism", etc.

An analysis of epidemics

Magistral, Canetti writes: “An epidemic of plague acts by summons, at the beginning only a few are caught, then the cases increase; we see dead everywhere, soon we see them