Abstract

Daniel Heller-Roazen’s recent work, Absentees (2021), gathers literary figurations of the absent(ed) or missing to consider the personhood of ‘nonpersons’ from antiquity to the present. With reference to contemporary analogies of virtuality, this critical review highlights the ghosts – or absences – in Heller-Roazen’s book, and proposes the discipline of art history as its spectral afterimage.

Highlights

  • In the age of indelible digital traces, the case of the ‘absentee’ may appear at once faded and extraordinarily vivid

  • ‘Regrammed’ appeals for missing persons; divisive ‘cancel’ cultures; and respects paid to deceased in uencers via their nal social media posts: each of these virtual phenomena reproduces distinct ‘nonpersons’ of the kinds set forth by Princeton Comparative Literature Professor Daniel Heller-Roazen in his most recent book, Absentees

  • As the preface to Absentees makes clear, Heller-Roazen is interested in the ‘nonperson’ not as the negation or contrary of the person, but rather in the same sense as the nonstarter is still a starter, or the nonentity an entity

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Summary

Introduction

In the age of indelible digital traces, the case of the ‘absentee’ may appear at once faded and extraordinarily vivid. ‘Regrammed’ appeals for missing persons; divisive ‘cancel’ cultures; and respects paid to deceased in uencers via their nal social media posts: each of these virtual phenomena reproduces distinct ‘nonpersons’ of the kinds set forth by Princeton Comparative Literature Professor Daniel Heller-Roazen in his most recent book, Absentees.

Results
Conclusion

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