Conceptual abstraction is itself a metaphorical act because it posits resemblance among distinct existents

Evidence

But language emerges; we do name and talk about things, whether in error or not; and the rationalizing procedures of the eighteenth century led Rousseau to try to “understand” (or “explain”) this situation by genetically or historically deducing a stage in which it was not yet present: “The repeated contacts between man and various entities, and between the entities themselves, must necessarily engender in the mind of man the perception of relationships” (Rousseau, quoted in AR155). Such relationships — first, comparisons (“large, small, strong, weak”), and then number itself — mark the birth of true conceptualization and abstraction; or, if you prefer, of an abstraction that grasps itself as such (unlike nomination, which still purports to respect the particular, and not to compare). Sheer conceptual relationship would then seem to wash back over the particular and convert it into a series of equivalences or identities: you cannot, in other words, evoke the quantitative differences between two entities (this tree is larger than that one) without having somehow posed their equivalence (or their resemblance), at least in that respect. The reign of the name therefore ends at that point, and that of the word, the concept, the abstraction, the universal, begins. DeMan will, of course, now crucially identify this transformation as the operation of metaphor. The concept implies some preliminary decision about the resemblance of a specific group of entities among themselves (we call them henceforth men, trees, armchairs, or whatever). Yet on that level of the preliminary decision, the entities have nothing in common with each other; they are all distinct existents, and therefore, at that virtually prelinguistic moment, to “compare” two distinct “blossomers” is as outrageous a linguistic act as to describe “my love” as a “red, red rose.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 507

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies DeMan’s radical claim that abstraction/universals are metaphor — a naming of the mechanism underlying rhetoric.
• XREF: Connects to Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory and to nominalism vs realism debates; also relevant to the parody/pastiche distinction since both rest on generic classification. — connects to: Abstraction is the for-itself’s original mode of being, not a mental act — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 607; Even abstract thought is built from physical and sensory metaphors — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 728; Logical abstraction is simultaneously a sociological abstraction. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 528 (+4 more)