Mono-individual

These classifications were necessary to enable us to emphasize, without risk of misunderstanding, the sociological and at the same time relative nature of the notion of a species as well as of an individual. From the biological point of view, men who belong to the same race (assuming that a precise sense can be given to this term) are comparable to the individual flowers which blossom, open and wither on the same tree: they are so many specimens of a variety or sub-variety. Similarly, all the members of the species Homo sapiens are logically comparable to the members of any other animal or plant species. However, social life effects a strange transformation in this system, for it encourages each biological individual to develop a personality; and this is a notion no longer recalling specimens within a variety but rather types of varieties or of species, probably not found in nature (although there is a suggestion of it now and again in the tropical environment) and which could be termed "mono-individual." What disappears with the death of a personality is a synthesis of ideas and modes of behavior as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral species develops out of the simple chemical substances common to all species. When the loss of someone dear to us or of some public personage such as a politician or writer or artist moves us, we suffer much the same sense of irreparable privation that we should experience were Rosa centifolia to become extinct and its scent to disappear for ever. From this point of view it seems not untrue to say that some modes of classing, arbitrarily isolated under the title of totemism, are universally employed: among ourselves this "totemism" has merely been humanized. Everything takes place as if in our civilization every individual's own personality were his totem. [...] In so far as they derive from a paradigmatic set, proper names thus form the fringe of a general system of classification: they are both its extension and its limit. When they come on to the stage the curtain rises for the last act of the logical performance.
-Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 214-15