We didn’t read any of these to be able to summarize the contents, as we did with the literature on the syllabus, but because they could give us something. What was this “something”? For my part, it was something being opened up. My whole world consisted of entities I took for granted and that were unshakable, like rocks and mountains of the mind. The Holocaust was one such entity, the Age of Enlightenment another. I could account for them, I had a clear image of them, as everyone did, but I had never thought about them, never asked myself what circumstances had made them possible, why they
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