"The devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived": The concept of abstract space in the work of Henri Lefebvre

This article presents a reinterpretation of abstract space, the key concept of Henri Lefebvre's magnum opus, The Production of Space. I argue that the full significance of the concept is only revealed through an engagement with Lefebvre's broader work, which emphasizes his lifelong concern with abstraction, and which draws out the relationships between the concept and Lefebvre's scattered writings on alienation, productivism, the state, spatial planning, and everyday life. Consistent with Lefebvre's dialectical method, I interpret abstract space as internally related to the possibility of a differential space existing within its contradictions, which is in turn understood in relation to his wider concerns with autogestion, disalienation, and the politics of difference. Read in this way, the concept of abstract space can serve as a nucleus around which to orient many of Lefebvre's key ideas, while remaining consistent with his own theoretical and political commitment to a "revolutionary romanticism." © The Author(s) 2013.