Haecceitic

But that's what I mean, Everett's friends are all tired grey businessmen or engineers or something, and Francine's all seem to be mumbling poets with pimply necks, God it's all so – so haecceitic. I could've gone to Nassau ...

Anyhow, the haecceitic individual would argue, as [John] Rawls would say, in virtue of his haecceitic identity alone. Sans qualities envy can neither be attributed nor imputed to him; he is nonanvious [sic: nonenvious?].

It is both diurnal, in that the greeting (and all the actions of Truman's life [Truman Burbank, protagonist in The Truman Show]) is ritualistically repeated at the same moment of each day,and contradictorily synchronic, haecceitic: all time on Truman's island is one time; it is all the time of the moment, where all futurity and historicity is compressed into the endlessly rehearsed and repeated present. […] Haecceitic temporality, or the segmentation of time into dispersed instances whole unto themselves that randomly intersect and cohere into events, is the material of a conspiratorial, destinal history founded on the retrospective forging of connections between these scattered instances.

The concept of haecceity as "a mode of individuation ... very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 261) addresses directly the "agency panic" (Melley, 2000) in an age of paranoia where the grand narrative of classical liberalism is breaking down, for the haecceitic assemblage has agency shared through connections. The objects of passionate attachment are given "voice" in such an assemblage, for example Dawson [Leery]'s love of film, Clark [Kent]'s attachment to the farm, and the alien paraphernalia in Roswell.

A poem makes connections (that are beyond the poet's control) with a reader's worldly context via the collective assemblages with which that reader has his or her own individuating and haecceitic relation. At the same time, of course, a reader, from his or her own position, makes new connections and new haecceitic relations through a poem and undergoes a process of becoming, the outcome of which cannot be entirely determined beforehand – which is to say that a reader is 'made' by the poem in the sense that she or he becomes something new that would never have existed without the poetic encounter.

A kind is haecceitic if it concerns a specified individual. For example, buying Mary a bucket of roses and moving to Dallas are haecceitic kinds. The motivation for this restriction is that normative concepts do not permit mere haecceitic differences to make a normative difference.