Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West

A new theory of personhood makes the case that a “person” has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one.

What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like “person” or “love” seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everyth...