Dumas de Demain: The French Literary Magazine Vol. 7

ENTRETIEN AVEC UN AUTEUR:
VIRGINIE GREENE
Virginie Greene is a Professor of French in the Department of
Romance Languages and Literatures, at Harvard University. She is a
specialist of medieval literature, with strong interests in history and
philosophy, and in Proust and his times.
She is the author of Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and
Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), a study of seminal
classical, medieval and modern literary and philosophical texts
leading to a broader reflection about fiction as a universal human
trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy.
* * *
1. You write that “If we understand abstraction as pulling (trahere)
general ideas from (ab) real or fictional particulars, then
adstraction is the operation of pulling the general toward (ad) a
fictional particular.” Abstractions and adstractions help connect
the real or fictitious and the imaginary or general. What are the
differences, if any, in the objectives or outcomes of employing an
abstraction vs an adstraction? Would one be better used in cases
that the other would not?
Like many things happening in our minds, abstractions and
adstractions can be subconscious or conscious, intentional or
unintentional processes. I invented the neologism "adstraction" to add
more nuances or other perspectives on such processes, and to show
the proximity between logical thinking (tending toward abstract,
general ideas) and fictional thinking (tending toward abstract,
particular ideas). Intentional abstraction may be more useful to solve
problems such as how many barns animals can fit in a given barn, but
intentional adstraction may be more useful to take into account the
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