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
Homer recounts how, trapped inside a monster’s cave, with nothing but his wits, Ulysses once saved himself by twisting his name. He called himself Outis: “No One” or “Non-One,” “No Man” or “Non-Man.” The ploy was a...
Dark Tongues constitutes a sustained exploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom, built from...
An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras invented harmony. It is said that one day, he wandered by a forge and, hearing a wondrous sound come from within, ventured in to investigate. He found five men hammering with five hammers. To...
This book presents the archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when, in his treatise On the Soul, he identified a sensory power irreducible to the five senses...
The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As...
Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost. Individuals can forget words, phrases, even entire languages, and over the course of time speaking communities, too, let go of the tongues that were once theirs, as languages grow...
“In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the...
