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.
"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.
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
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