Term
Abstraction
used in 43 texts across the archive
“It would be better to speak of a drift towards abstraction, rather than toward arbitrariness: the sign is abstract, even the first one, which had to be normed in such a way as to supplement its self-evidence from the very beginning precisely because there was no single way of conveying the intent to cease and desist. But even in this case the abstractions we speak of are marked by the drift, by the disciplinary spaces that have constructed them: in other words, abstraction involves accentuation and abbreviation, which is necessitated by the entrance of outsiders for whom the particular version of the sign current is not self-evident while at the same time making the sign even more difficult for the next outsider to grasp.”
In use
“By now, the forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that have been re-embedded.”
“Abstraction creates new “elements,” and therefore new relations between elements.”
“The abstraction of the sovereign from rivalry provides a model of action free from resentment: regardless of the actual motives of actual sovereigns, to the extent that they are sovereign the absence of resentment can be imputed to them.”
Key texts