Ways of Not Being Someone

This essay offers a response to the three contributions to this issue’s book forum on Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons (2021). To situate the project of Absentees, the author offers a brief discussion of his preceding book, No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (2017). The treatment of the diverse literary, legal, social, religious, and mythological dimensions of the “absentee” in the book under discussion thus appears as an unfolding of the problematic of the “non-person,” whose place in the history of philosophy and logic No One’s Ways reconstructed. The response then proposes a brief discussion of some respects in which the three articles in the issue converge, some answers to the contributors’ queries and suggestions, and a few concluding remarks on issues not treated in the book that would merit further study.