Maurice Natanson’s scientific contributions

name. Those who have no name once had one; they are historical casualties, the wounded of memory, not displaced but unplaced persons. Those who quite literally have no name, who were never named, are protohuman, victims of a peculiar terror. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens includes the mysterious character of the little slavey, euphemistically called a "servant," in the employ of Lawyer Brass and his sister-the little creature dubbed the "Marchioness" by Dick Swiveller. This tiny person has no name. In a shadowy scene, Daniel Quilp asks her: "What's your name?" "Nothing," she replies. "'Nonsense!' retorted Quilp. 'What does your mistress call you when she wants you?' 'A little devil,' said the child" (Chapter 51). When, at last, she is given a name, Swiveller decides on "Sophronia Sphynx" "as being euphonious and genteel, and furthermore indicative of mystery" (Chapter The Last). But happy endings do not obliterate grim origins: the nameless underground of the slavey's life conceals the secret of her parentage. The "little devil's" destiny is to become Sophronia Swiveller but also to remain nee Sphynx. The literal or etymological meaning of the word anonymous delivers us to the threshold-and beyond-of the social world. Naming is the primordial human act. And with the proper name, naming transcends the anonymous not by tautology but by recognition. Franz Rosenzweig writes: "With the proper name, the rigid wall of objectness has been breached. That which has a name of its own can no longer be a thing, no longer everyman's affair. It is incapable of utter absorption into the category for there can be no category for it to belong to; it is its own category. Nor does it still have its place in the world, its moment in occurrence. Rather it carries its here and now with it. Wherever it is, there is a midpoint and wherever it opens its mouth, there is a beginning."1 In this sense, the social world is comprised of persons, beings with names whose naming points back to * Modified versions of this essay were presented in 1978 at the New School for Social