Absentees

On Variously Missing Persons

By: Daniel Heller-Roazen

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Hardcover | 23 March 2021

At a Glance

Hardcover
320 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.6 x 16.3 x 3.1

Hardcover

$95.99

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An intellectually adventurous account of the role of nonpersons that explores their depiction in literature and challenges how they are defined in philosophy, law, and anthropology.

In thirteen interlocking chapters, Absentees explores the role of the missing in human communities, asking an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death? Only somebody can become a 'nobody,' but, as Daniel Heller-Roazen shows, the ways of being a nonperson are as diverse and complex as they are mysterious and unpredictable. Heller-Roazen treats the variously missing persons of the subtitle in three parts: Vanishings, Lessenings, and Survivals. In each section and with multiple transhistorical and transcultural examples, he challenges the categories that define nonpersons in philosophy, ethics, law, and anthropology.

Exclusion, infamy, and stigma; mortuary beliefs and customs; children's games and state censuses; ghosts and "dead souls" illustrate the lives of those lacking or denied full personhood. In the archives of fiction, Heller-Roazen uncovers figurations of the missing from Helen of Argos in Troy or Egypt to Hawthorne's Wakefield, Swift's Captain Gulliver, Kafka's undead hunter Gracchus, and Chamisso's long-lived shadowless Peter Schlemihl.

Readers of The Enemy of All and No One's Ways will find a continuation of those books' intense intellectual adventures, with unexpected questions and arguments arising every step of the way. In a unique voice, Heller-Roazen's thought and writing capture the intricacies of the all-too-human absent and absented.

Industry Reviews

"Absentees bristles with fresh readings. . . . In fact, it's a fundamental inquiry into the disposition among bodies, language, and politics."---Brian Dillon, 4Columns
"I read Absentees in such a lax state, and it snapped me out of it for a while. With all its case studies it reads like a gripping (trans)historical docudrama."---Hal Foster, London Review of Books ???????
"Absentees offers a framework for seeing the world from the viewpoint of those who are only partly in it, as well as for those who've recently left."---John Washington, The Baffler
"Unexpected leaps across archives, through centuries, and from one text to the next are a compelling characteristic of Heller-Roazen's scholarship. . . . Such virtuosic effects remain an intellectual pleasure in Absentees. . . . There is much dazzlement and fascination along the way, as some of the many masks of nonpersons flash by."---Julie Orlemanski, Modern Philology
"Daniel Heller-Roazen's Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons picks up these concepts and conversations and makes an intriguing, singular contribution to 'absence studies.' . . . Probing culturally rich sources such as ancient myths, and popular culture items such as children's games, Absentees makes a provocative and compelling argument about how we classify existence and experience the loss of another.""---Jolene Zigarovich, Critical Law Analysis

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