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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