Introduction

Summary

What is it that we want from abstraction? This book explores the work performed by abstraction as a keyword in modernist literary and visual cultures, and in the critical thought of modernity. It is a confluence of three preoccupations: first, a sustained curiosity about the work of the words ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ in literary, critical and philosophical writing; second, an equally sustained attachment to abstract art, along with a desire to know what this attachment means; and finally, an effort to extend a critical posthumanism through the rethinking and revaluation of the inhuman – what Reza Negorestani refers to as a cross-disciplinary ‘labor of the inhuman’ (Negorestani 2014) – in modernism. In his work The Inhuman, Jean-François Lyotard connected Guillaume Apollinaire's statement ‘More than anything, artists are men who want to become inhuman’ (1913) with Theodor Adorno's ‘Art remains loyal to humankind uniquely through its inhumanity in regard to it’ (1969) as keynotes of a modernist avant-garde (Lyotard 1991: 2). This book places what abstraction means to us, and what is at stake in it, at the heart of these concerns. Where abstraction is at work so too, I suggest, is a scrutiny of the relation between the human and the inhuman.

The book takes a new approach to the dichotomy through which abstraction is generally understood: as a mode of thought and as a mode of art. I hope I can justify my sense that abstraction gets really interesting, its work more intense and intriguing, when we erase the barriers that normally separate abstraction in these two modes, freeing up our thinking about the work of abstraction in order to make it newly and critically visible. Abstraction in and since modernism has been instrumental in interlinking our various understandings of what it is to think, of what art is and does, and of what it might be to be human or inhuman. Yet, at the same time, this conceptual work is in key respects invisible, often contradictory, certainly unstable. The story told in what follows, and especially in Part I, is of how abstraction may escape our view or disappear in plain sight, whether within the boundaries of a single text, or across the different disciplinary fields in which it is used.