Reflections on Inventing the Individual

Here is a list of random thoughts that have occurred to me while reading Inventing the Individual:

  • When you realize how deep the connection was between family and land, and what it meant in the ancient world to lose these fundamental connections, the history of the Jewish people becomes both more familiar and more miraculous.
  • The history of humankind could be told as a story of evolving relationships between immediate and transcendent realities expressed in terms of interpretations given to these relationships.
  • I’ve been drawing my asterisk symbol for close to a decade now. I think I have been wrong about the nature of the subject present at the nexus. The subject rarely singular.
  • Slavery in pre-individual times might have a meaning inaccessible the imagination of an individual.
  • “Now is a small town.” Yes, it is. These days historical cosmopolitanism is damn near nonexistent.

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