Becoming a Nonperson: Conceptualizing the Departed, Missing, and Absent

Abstract

Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Absentees impressively demonstrates the global treatment of personhood and legal bodies. Probing culturally rich sources such as ancient myths and popular culture items such as children’s games, Heller-Roazen makes a provocative and compelling argument about how we classify existence and experience loss of others. Heller-Roazen theorizes that while the legal state of the missing has temporal limits, and disallows perpetual absence, literature provides a space for the missing to speak for themselves, to testify to their disappearances, and to recount the troubled conditions of their return. In its philosophical inquiry into nonpersonhood and the literary journeys of the missing, Absentees produces a splendid journey of its own through the marginal and at times hauntingly poetic spaces created by the temporarily absent body.