it is the "ontological status" of the unique thing that makes it worthy of "idiographic treatment"
Hayot cautions us, though: "The danger of this uniqueness, in both the field of historical study and the study of the work of art, is that it leads the scholar to an extreme relativism or nominalism"
artifacts under investigation in this way are "monadic," resistant to "abstraction, paraphrase, or description"
in such a scenario, scholarship can "aim only to repeat the thing exactly as such. And even such a repetition would be a falsification, since the circumstances of such a repetition would be nonidentical with the circumstances of the first occurrence" (29)
this problem "continues to haunt historical and aesthetic study in our time"