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.
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