Daniel Heller-Roazen, Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2021, 320 pages, hardback, ISBN 9781942130475, £28.00.

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.