Daniel Heller-Roazen delves into questions of language, sensory experience, and law across diverse literary traditions. His work probes how our understanding of the world is shaped through forgetting and how the essence of human experience unfolds from our engagement with the intangible. His authentic style is characterized by incisive analysis that weaves together philosophy, literary history, and critical theory, offering readers fresh perspectives on fundamental concepts. Heller-Roazen's writings uncover profound connections between seemingly disparate realms of thought and culture.
An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into the sense of being sentient--what it means to feel that one is alive--that draws on philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures
"From missing persons to disenfranchised civil subjects, from individuals tainted with infamy to the dead, Absentees explores the varieties of "nonpersons," human beings all too human, drawing examples, terms and concepts from the archives of European and American literature, legal studies, and the social sciences"--
An exploration of secret languages, moving among hermetic artificial tongues as diverse as criminal jargons and divine speech.
On the Forgetting of Language
"In Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen reflects on the many forms of linguistic forgetfulness. In twenty-one concise chapters, he moves between classical, medieval, and modern culture, exploring the interrelations of speech, writing, memory, and oblivion. Whether the subject is medieval literature or modern fiction, classical Arabic poetry or the birth of French language, structuralist linguistics or Freud's writings on aphasia, Heller-Roazen considers with precision and insight the forms, effects, and ultimate consequences of the persistence and disappearance of language. In speech, he argues, destruction and construction often prove inseparable. Among speaking communities, the vanishing of one language can mark the emergence of another, and among individuals, the experience of the passing of speech can lie at the origin of literary, philosophical, and artistic creation."--Jacket
Sprache dient der Verständigung. Doch immer wieder hat es Menschen gegeben, die nicht wollten, dass alle sie verstehen. Deshalb haben sie Geheimsprachen entwickelt. Daniel Heller-Roazen unternimmt in seinem Buch einen Streifzug durch die Geschichte der künstlichen und geheimen Sprachen. Von den Sprachen der Gauner, den heiligen Sprachen bis zur Beschäftigung des großen Sprachforschers Ferdinand de Saussure mit Anagrammen, von der arkanen Sprachkunst der Druiden und Bibelkopisten bis zu Tristan Tzara, der die Dada-Bewegung mit begründete und zuletzt die Lieder von Villon zu entschlüsseln meinte, erkundet Heller-Roazen die Sprachkunst von Gaunern und von Rätselfreunden und zeigt: Diese Sprachen, die Klang und Sinn gegeneinander ausspielen, verbindet mehr mit der Poesie, als bislang angenommen.