I intone, within myself, the exalted hallucination of closure; a vainglory of abnegation seizes me (renouncing love but not friendship, etc.),

allow the media class to further abnegate its function to educate and lead

a wholesale abnegation of our aspirations to something 'higher' than mere animality

describes the abnegation of unknown people

an unavoidable approach, but one that was palliated by the caution and self-abnegation with which I drew my conclusions

he seems, self-abnegatingly, to want to taste the sweat on the meat, as a salty political reminder.

The priests I knew practised self-abnegation but perfected a quiet dance of ego.

Only the selflessness of aesthetic contemplation, along with a kind of Buddhist self-abnegation, can purge us of the astigmatism of wanting, and allow us to see the world for what it is.

This repeated abnegation of qualification is one of many figurations of a deeply problematic tendency to reject ideas of authority and authorship throughout the nonfiction, in ways that dovetail interestingly with the structural and vocal instability of the fiction.

One radical option remains: abnegation — some “Great Refusal” to obey the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening