In his new book, Daniel Heller-Roazen 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? He is joined by critic and art historian Hal Foster for a many-faceted consideration of what it means for somebody to become a ‘nobody’ or a nonperson.
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. In a unique voice, Heller-Roazen’s thought and writing capture the intricacies of the all-too-human absent and absented.
Daniel Heller-Roazen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His many books have a devoted and interdisciplinary readership. They include No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming; Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers; and The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations.
Hal Foster is Professor of Art History at Princeton University and the author of many influential books, the most recent of which are Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg ; What Comes after Farce?; and Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency.
This event is cosponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Classics, and Department of Art & Archaeology