“There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.” (p. 312)

Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, displays his intellectual prowess in I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole. This volume captures key aspects of Canetti’s life and thought. I would say it’s the definitive introduction to a writer whose books and essays interpreted world-historical changes while being skeptical about the knowability of the Self.

Born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti later lived in Austria, England, and Switzerland. Canetti was drawn to politics, identity, mortality, and power. I consider Canetti’s Crowds and Power, an analysis of authoritarianism and mobs, to be one of the Great Books of the 20th Century. The events of January 6th provide a vivid demonstration of Canetti’s ideas of mob behavior in action.

I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen (Book of Numbers, The Netanyahus). Cohen supplies a clear summary of Canetti’s life and thought. The selections in I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole start from memories of Canetti’s polyglot childhood to his friendships and rivalries with Hermann Broch, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil.

I like the aphorisms and diary entries sprinkled in this volume that reveal Canetti’s range of interests and his writing style. Canetti–reacting against Freud’s obsession with the Self–with arguments that reveal the the instability of Identity, provides one of the great critiques of Psychology. Canetti sums up his ideas on the Self with this observation: It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.

“Prophecies have lost all value ever since we entrusted them to machines; the more we chip away at ourselves, the more we place our trust in lifeless objects, the less control we have over what happens to us.” (p. 356) Canetti’s I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole brings plenty of ideas to think about. GRADE: A

Table of Contents

Introduction
A Note on the Contents

Part I: Notes and Memoirs
1. From Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes, 1954–1971
2. From The Tongue Set Free, Part I: “Ruschuk, 1905–1911”
3. From Notes from Hampstead
4. From The Tongue Set Free, Part II: “Manchester, 1911–1913”

Part II: Auto-da-Fé
5. From Auto-da-Fé, Part I: “A Head Without a World”
6. From Notes from Hampstead
7. From Auto-da-Fé, Part II: “Headless World”

Part III: Memoirs and Senses
8. From The Torch in My Ear, Part II: “Storm and Compulsion” (Vienna, 1924–1925)
9. From Earwitness: Fifty Characters
10. From The Play of the Eyes, Parts III and IV: “Chance” and “Grinzing”
11. From The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

Part IV: Crowds and Power
12. From The Torch in My Ear, Part III: “The School of Hearing” (Vienna, 1926–1928)
13. From Crowds and Power: “The Crowd”
14. From Crowds and Power: “The Entrails of Power”
15. From Crowds and Power: “The Survivor”
16. From The Human Province, The Secret Heart of the Clock, and The Agony of Flies: Notes, 1942–1993

Part V: Death and Transformation
17. “The Profession of the Poet”
18. From Das Buch gegen Tod [The Book Against Death]