The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations

(Zone Books) This book reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from ancient and medieval times to the modern and contemporary periods. Heller-Roazen argues that today the pirate provides the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe, a legal and political person of exception – neither criminal nor enemy – who inhabits an extra-territorial region. Although piracy is often considered a part of the distant past, he shows how “the enemy of all” is closer to us today than we may think. Heller-Roazen is professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language and The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation .