The passion of the spirit, which is the focus of Susan Sontag's two essays on Artaud and Canetti, was the reason that led us to present them.

Subsequently, of course, the correlation and parallel reading of them highlight the differences rather than the similarities of these two eccentric writers of the 20th century.

The element that seems to unite them, the passion of the spirit, led each of their writings, the theatrical, essayistic, and poetic endeavor of the former and the narrative of the latter, down different paths.

Artaud sought, through his own, peculiar surrealism, with which he maintained a lifelong problematic relationship despite his renunciation, to reach full embodiment - in universalization, that is, in abolition - of art, while Canetti, conversely, with a highly pronounced Jewish (that is, essentially intellectual) sense of his Enlightenment heritage, arrives through an exacerbation of the spirit to a Don Quixote-like denial of physicality, as represented in the protagonist of his novel Blindness.

"Rarely has anyone felt so comfortable with their spirit," Sontag writes, "as Canetti."

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[Excerpt from a text by the publisher or publication presentation]