How Non-being Haunts Being makes much ado about nothing. A nimble scholar and graceful writer, Corey Anton explains why and how “human experience and reality as a whole can show itself for what it is only as we grasp how nothing or non-being relates to being.” Revelatory and provocative. Timely and important.

Sheldon Solomon, Skidmore College

Our humanity rests on the struggle of reconciling ourselves with death and the afterlife. Professor Anton’s work revives this ancient dilemma. Please consider Corey Anton’s recent work How Non-Being Haunts Being: On Possibilities, Morality and Death Acceptance as a must read for students of media ecology.

Explorations In Media Ecology

The further I got into Anton’s ontological exploration of being and its relation to nonbeing in this most welcome book, the more I considered the old idiom, “nothing ventured, nothing gained”–only perhaps with a new theoretical twist. Like many of his erudite discussions on the nature of “no-thing,” the book provides a much-needed theoretical reversal of our taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of being and human agency. By the end of the book, I was thoroughly convinced that we should adopt a new idiom, “nothing ventured, everything gained”–metaphysically that is. For Anton successfully persuades us that “nothing” is at the heart of our existence and by adopting this new perspective we open to the possibilities of our being limited only by our lack of imagination, communicative abilities, and theoretical prowess…. This book is a wonderful read and my brief descriptions of each chapter do not do justice to the wealth of insight the book provides. Anton–with grace and humility–finds a masterful way of weaving hefty ontology discernments into very practical discussions on matters of everyday importance to our lives. In other words, we not only learn a new ontological perspective but the implications such a new perspective has for a variety of personal, social, cultural, and political issues.

Atlantic Journal of Communication