Thus, Canetti���s hatred of injustice is intrinsically braided with his hatred of death. For death is the ultimate injustice; it violates the right to life, which is the right not to die. Mortality, Canetti reminds us, was the first punishment, doled out by God (���the founder and guardian of death���) in the garden, a punishment whose term can never be served, imposed by a power that can never be disestablished. If one cannot overcome death, then one can at least rebuke it, despise it. ���For me it is not about abolishing [death], which is not possible,��� Canetti writes in an entry from 1980, ���It���s about condemning it.��� In The Book Against Death, the author assumes the role of a Roman orator, marshalling words against death the way one would a tyrant, as if one could banish it with speech, ridicule it out of existence.

Canetti approaches his subjects of attack as if they will eventually yield by virtue of sheer insistence (as Sontag points out, for Canetti, ���to think is to insist���). He is always thinking against the grain of his subject, butting up against its unjust actualities. ���One should not think away the wall that we smash our head against,��� he wrote in 1972. He is always in defiance against seemingly eternal forces: power, society, religion, God, death. And it is not enough simply to think about something������all thoughts are enlisted in the conquest of their subject. Canetti���s pens��e amounts to an act of protest, a great refutation, culminating in the ultimate refutation of death.

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