Anthropology as Memory

Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah

Michael Mack

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9783484651340
• eBook ISBN: 9783110965964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Whereas many other post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers - including Derrida - have concentrated on a refusal of totality and celebration of 'otherness', the poet and intellectual Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-1952) combines this emphasis with an equal stress on the 'need' for certain collectively acknowledged limits. Next to the wider significance of this book for discussions of Holocaust studies in relation to current theoretical and social issues, it will also offer a new interpretation of Elias Canetti's work. This is the first detailed examination of Steiner's anthropology and philosophy and its relation to the work of his close intellectual friend Canetti.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Holocaust, Literature, Anthropology and History
• Part I: Elias Canetti – Anthropology as Literature
• 1 Science, Power, Literature and the Holocaust
• 1.1 The Lack of an Intellectual and a Historical Context: The Holocaust and the Symbolic Exertion of Power
• 1.2 Canetti – A Ruler?
• 1.3 Canetti – A Scholar or a Writer?
• 2 Auto Da Fé as a Negative Poetics
• 3 Canetti’s Literary Devices for the Exertion of Power
• 3.1 Canetti’s Thinking in Images
• 3.2 Canetti’s Use of Philosophical and Anthropological Literature
• 3.3 Metamorphosis and Totemism
• 3.4 Death
• 3.5 Authority and Power
• Part II: Franz Baermann Steiner – Anthropology and Totalitarian Terror
• 4 Anthropology and the Perception of Non-Western Peoples
• 4.1 The German Background
• 4.2 The Influence of Marcel Mauss’s Conceptual Approach
• 4.3 The Context of British Anthropology
• 4.4 Steiner’s Relationship to British Anthropology
• 5 An Oriental Undermines Orientalism
• 5.1 Steiner’s »A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery« and Said’s Orientalism
• 5.2 Taboo
• 5.3 Civilization
• Part III: Style, Law and Danger
• 6 Elias Canetti’s and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Notion of Literature as Scholarship
• 7 Coincidences Between Steiner’s Anthropology and Poetry
• 8 Law, Myth and Danger
• Conclusion: Steiner’s and Canetti’s Contribution to Debates About Postmodernity
• Bibliography
• Index