Since the early Greeks, philosophy has focussed on generality of beings. In the 20th century (mainly with Heidegger and Adorno), the focus shifted to the individual and the particular. In this book, the author turns to the particular as such, in the sense of the individual, but also of the qualitatively particular. Starting from our respective experience as well as from poems and lines of poetry, she asks about the particular, using examples such as the cloud in a Brecht poem, trees, birds, the sensually perceptible, the particularity of the self, the particular in haiku. On the one hand, something speaks to people as a particular by itself, on the other hand, it owes its particularity to their attention.
