![]() ![]() He has published on medieval as well as modern poetry, and edited a critical edition of the Arabian Nights. He works in 10 languages, including Old Occitan and Biblical Hebrew, and teaches English, German, Italian, and French literature, among others. ![]() His background lies as much in literary scholarship as in philosophical hermeneutics, and he is currently professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. ![]() This is in large part due to Heller-Roazen’s own eclectic expertise. No One’s Ways is properly a work of intellectual history, but its interests are extremely catholic. The apparent limitlessness of the signification of the “non” prefix is rendered all the stranger when we attach it to a word which already seems to cover pretty much all things in existence - a word like “things” itself, for example, or the philosophically weighty word “being.” What sense can be made of the words “non-thing” or “non-being”? And what might an inquiry into the speculative universe of “non-being” tell us about ourselves as human beings? These are the questions at the center of Daniel Heller-Roazen’s extraordinary book No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming. It might also in some sense signify all things that are not violent in nature, or all things that are not the concept of violence itself - a practically unending series of things. But that does not exhaust the word’s full potential. The word “non-violent” signals a specific thing - the absence of violence, especially where we might expect it. A violent protest, by way of this token, becomes a non-violent protest. WHEN WE PLACE the prefix “non” in front of a word, we reverse that word’s meaning. ![]()
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