Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M y s t i F i e d c o n s c i o U s n e s s
to lose but their chains; now, they enchained themselves, reentered
the cave to stare at shadows, and had been betrayed by the party.
They’d been seduced and manipulated by the National-Socialists
and let themselves be duped. “One needed to explain this fact theoretically,”
Lefebvre said. 6
Several factors shaped Lefebvre’s Hegelian–Marxist leanings,
leanings that would stake out the theoretical coordinates of La
Conscience Mystifiée. For a start, he’d been impressed by a series
of pathbreaking essays written in 1926 and 1927 by philosopher–
theologian Jean Wahl (1888–1974), exegeses destined to figure in
an influential book titled Le Malheur de la Conscience dans la
Philosophie de Hegel (1929). The buzzword here is malheur de
la conscience—unhappy consciousness—which Wahl gleaned
from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel said all philosophy,
thought, and history hinged on a “dialectical movement,” where
categories of the mind and reality exist in “immanent unity.”
Hegelian history is an immense epic of the mind striving for unity,
attempting to free itself from itself. From a starting point purified
of every empirical presupposition, Hegel’s Phenomenology generates
the objective world as a wholly internal movement of the
mind, the mind constantly overcoming itself in a series of theses,
antitheses, and syntheses. “Consciousness itself,” Hegel said, “is
the absolute dialectical unrest, this medley of sensuous and intellectual
representations whose differences coincide, and whose
identity is equally dissolved again.” 7
Within that restless history, “unhappy consciousness” struck
like a pathological version of what Freud would later term “normal
unhappiness.” The inability of consciousness to reconcile itself,
in both its particular and universal forms—to be itself as subject
and “other” as object—is the source of great inward disruption in
people. “Thus,” claimed Hegel, “we have here dualizing of selfconsciousness
within itself, which lies essentially in the notion of
mind; but the unity of the two elements is not yet present. Hence
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