Far Calls: On Omens, Slips, & Epiphanies

by Daniel Heller-Roazen

An inquiry into the theories and practices of overhearing

When words are not heard but overheard, when phrases are perceived in bits and pieces, and when speakers, failing to do as they intend, state things that they never meant to say, the saying, in its unsteady relation to understanding, becomes an event. That event has long been studied by a disparate company of prophets, priests, and rabbis, poets and philosophers, linguists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, novelists and filmmakers. All have suggested that in the contingencies of discourse, there are precious indications to be gleaned, for which special techniques are required. In Far Calls, Daniel Heller-Roazen reconstructs such arts of detection, interweaving ancient, medieval, and modern examples. From the rituals of the ancient Greeks, Jews, and Romans to Freud and Lacan, from Augustine’s catching of a salvific scrap of speech to the inspiration that Breton and Yeats, Proust and Joyce, drew from profane cries and transmissions, Far Calls explores the powers of sonorous coincidence and the varieties of reading that it incites.

408 pages, Hardcover

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities. He is the author of The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations; The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (2007), which was awarded the Modern Language Association's 2008 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature Studies; Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (2005); and Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (2003). These books have been translated or are forthcoming in translation in Arabic, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. He has also edited the Norton Critical Edition of The Arabian Nights and has edited, translated and introduced Giorgio Agamben's Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999). Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2000, he studied philosophy and literature in Toronto, Baltimore, Venice and Paris (BA in Philosophy, University of Toronto; MA in German and PhD in Comparative Literature, Johns Hopkins University). He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He teaches courses on classical and medieval literature, aesthetics and the philosophy of art.