Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died. (The Middle Ages also felt spatially what makes that inscription on a sun dial of Ibiza, Ultima multis [the last day for many], significant as the temper of the times.)

Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs. It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are made of—first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end—unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it—suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.

Only a commercially abstract thought could fail to attach a price to the haecceity of the matter and fail to seek a principle of individuation in it. The man who gives the matter to be elaborated places value on what he knows, what is attached to him, what he has surveyed and seen grow; for him, the initial concrete is the matter insofar as it is his, belongs to him, and this matter must be extended into objects; due to its quantity, this matter is a principle of the number of objects that will result from form-taking. This tree will become this or that plank; all the trees taken individually one-by-one will become this heap of planks; there is a passage from the haecceity of the trees to the haecceity of the planks. What this passage expresses is the permanence of what the subject recognizes of himself in the objects; the expression of the self here is the concrete relation of property, the bond of belonging. By placing the haecceity in information, the artisan does no act otherwise; but since he is not the landowner of the matter on which he works, he does not know this matter as a singular thing; it is foreign to him, it is not linked to his individual history, to his effort qua matter; it is merely that on which he works; he ignores the origin of the matter and elaborates it in a preparatory way until it no longer reflects its origin, until it is homogeneous, ready to take form, just like any other matter suitable for the same labor; the artisanal operation to a certain extent denies the historicity of the matter concerning what is human and subjective about it; conversely, this historicity is known to the one who has supplied the matter and valued it because it is deposited with something subjective, because it expresses human existence. The haecceity sought in the matter depends on a lived attachment to a specific matter tha has been associated with human effort and has become the reflection of this effort. The haecceity of the matter is not purely material; it is also a haecceity with respect to the subject. Conversely, the artisan expresses himself through his effort, and the workable matter is nothing but the support and occasionally of this effort; it could be said that from the artisan’s point of view the object’s haecceity only begins to exist through the effort of shaping; since this effort of shaping temporally coincides with the beginning of the haecceity, it is natural that the artisan attributes the foundation of the haecceity to information, although form-taking is perhaps nothing but an event concurrent with the advent of the haecceity of the object, the veritable principle of which is the singularity of the here and now of the complete operation. Likewise, the haecceity begins to exist for the proprietor of the matter with the purchase or act of planting a tree. The fact that later this tree will be matter for a technical operation does not yet exist; this tree has a haecceity not as future matter but as an object or aim of an operation. Later, this tree will conserve the haecceity for the proprietor but not for the artisan, since he has not planted the tree and has not bought it as a tree. The artisan who signs and dates his work attaches to the haecceity of this work the meaning of his definite effort for him, the historicity of this effort is the source of this haecceity; it is the initial origin and the principle of individuation of this object. The form has been a source of information through the work.