In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Modern Judaism 23.3 (2003) 306-310



[Access article in PDF]
Michael Mack, Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah, Conditio Judaica 34 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001). 230 pp.

In studies far more numerous than I care to recall, critics flatten out the multifarious work of Elias Canetti, constraining him to move within a few well-worn concepts (e.g., "the acoustic mask," "metamorphosis") that they have cherry-picked from the author's complex oeuvre and then tirelessly recycled. What makes Michael Mack's new study so refreshing is his likeness to the subject of his study. It is not that he slavishly or uncritically reiterates the master's ideas—far from it. But in his broad intellectual ambition, in his independence of mind and love of the unlikely comparison and irrepressible digression, Mack does indeed remind one of Canetti. However, this book aims not only to offer a new interpretation of Canetti's oeuvre but equally to introduce the anthropology and poetry of one Franz Baermann Steiner. It succeeds on both counts.

Though not well known today, Steiner, who died in 1952 at the tender age of forty-one, was a precocious and accomplished poet, linguist, [End Page 306] social anthropologist, and ethnologist. He corresponded not only with the Canettis (both Elias and Veza) but also with numerous European intellectuals from diverse fields and taught for a while at Oxford University. Jeremy Adler recently edited a collection of Steiner's poetry that includes pieces that were admired by contemporaries such as Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, Johannes Brobowski, and Erich Fried, as well as many heretofore unknown poems (Am Stürzenden Pfad: Collected Poems [Darmstadt, 2000]). Part of Mack's design is to revive interest in this Renaissance man who, in his interdisciplinary interests and insatiable intellectual appetite, is indeed Canetti's kindred spirit. For both Steiner and Canetti, ethical engagement in the post-Holocaust era required more than the traditional "dispassionate" approach typical of academic anthropology. Thus, the "literary" became pivotal for both thinkers, though Steiner, who was a trained anthropologist (unlike Canetti, who only dabbled), was apparently better at observing the distinction between scholarship and literature that Canetti intentionally blurred. Plausibly, Mack reads Canetti's modernist novel Auto-da-Fé as a kind of "negative poetics," that is, as a satire on academic positivism that had been elevated to the status of the religion it replaced. "Kien indeed identifies with Christ," Mack observes, "though as a savior of books rather than man. His martyrdom testifies exclusively to the absolutism of specialist scholarship."1 Mack rightly places his whole discussion, including that of Crowds and Power (where he offers his most original insights), within this larger context of the critique of "objective" scholarship.

Recently, this has tended to take place under the auspices of deconstructionism (or what Mack prefers to call "deconceptualization") and postmodernism, though Canetti's particular impatience with "disinterested" scholarship, he rightly notes, owes more to Hermann Broch. Whereas Derrida and his disciples focus on the epistemological limits of thought and language, they overlook, Mack argues, the necessity of social engagement, which Steiner, with his "sociology of danger," and Canetti, with his dogged attention to empirical social facts, preserve. In a productive (if far too brief) clash with deconstructionist Drucilla Cornell, who advocates "the infinite responsibility" of "indecidability," Mack argues: "To refrain from making a decision may leave the philosopher untouched by violence, but it also leaves him or her detached from a carefully thought-out form of social behavior."2 ThoughCanetti and Steiner both deploy "primitive" cultures in their critique of contemporary society—a perilous undertaking in any case and certainly in light of postcolonial sensitivities—they in no way idealize native cultures. And, as one might well expect, they share a palpable disdain for the evolutionary model of anthropology that makes Europe qua Europe a superior culture. [End Page 307]

Whereas Canetti seeks to defamiliarize modernity by insisting on a consonance between the primitive and the modern (in the spirit, as Mack points out...

pdf

Share