This article compares the anthropological and political discourse of Canetti with that of the authors who belong to the tradition of «philosophical anthropology», as defined by Joachim Fischer. With these authors (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen), Canetti shares an approach to politics that could be described as existential and vital, and that is what makes his interest for contemporary political thought. For Canetti, as for the authors of philosophical anthropology, Man must be resituated in the continuum of life, but at the same time, Man introduces a rupture in this continuum. Man appears in Canetti as an open and unstable creature without an own identity, which explains his taste for the metamorphosis which prolongs and reproduces the creativity of life itself. Politics is for Canetti determined by irrational forces: mass instinct and metamorphic capacity. The Problem of politics is to control this anarchic archaic fluidity. Politics must set itself the task of mastering these instincts, although it needs their energy and instrumentalizes it. Stabilization is necessary, but it is clear that for Canetti, Western modernity has gone too far in the direction of the prohibition of metamorphosis and the channeling of archaic fluidity. Canetti obviously does not believe in the utopia of a humanity fully emancipated from any binding political authority, but in his view, there are political regimes that are preferable to others, which are those who, while not ignoring the dynamics of the mass, do not use death as a political tool. This is the case with English parliamentary democracy. However, if Canetti is an eminently political thinker, he does not place himself exclusively on this political terrain. In reality, Canetti’s solution to the antinomies of mass and power is also metapolitical or ethical. For Canetti, literature practices metamorphosis and elaborates an ethic alternative to the logic of power.