Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
Guts, as well as Lefebvre, are needed to resist the growing
professionalization of ideas and university life, where, before all
else, abstractions and cybernanthropes, evaluations and economic
budgets sanction knowledge claims. Hence, a universal capitulation
to the conceived over the lived hasn’t just taken place in the
world: it has taken place in those who should know better, in those
who read Lefebvre’s work, in those who edit and contribute to
radical journals. When scholars write about emancipation, about
reclaiming space for others, we might start by emancipating ourselves
and reclaiming our own work space, giving a nod to disruption
rather than cooptation, to real difference rather than cowering
conformity. Yet before imagination can seize power, some imagination
is needed: imagination to free our minds and our bodies,
to liberate our ideas, and to reclaim our society as a lived project.
That, it seems to me, is what the production of differential space is
really all about. It’s a project that can begin this afternoon.
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