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
notion of socialism plainly revolves around an association in which
dealienated individuality can prosper within a democratic community.
He isn’t a socialist who makes a simple, facile dichotomy
between a “good” public–collective ethos and a “bad” individual–
private one. Fully developed individuality, Lefebvre argues, comes
about through unfettered practice, not through drudge or routine
or through uncritical enslavement to a group dogma, be it God,
fatherland, or party. Capitalism has created a culture in which real
liberty and community have perished behind the “free” space of
the world market. And rather than drown in “the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervor” (as Marx said in The Communist
Manifesto), ruling classes have devised ways to mobilize heavenly
ecstasies, to exploit them, to use them for their own political and
economic ends.
The figure of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who plunged
into this foggy modern labyrinth, is vital here, and it is he who
loiters in the foreground of La Conscience Mystifiée as the nemesis
of mystified individuality. Lefebvre’s intellectual fascination
with the notorious German sage, who during the late 1930s was
seen more and more as Hitler’s man, took hold in the immediate
aftermath of La Conscience Mystifiée. As fascist flames engulfed
Europe, Lefebvre recalls his “necessary” rediscovery of Nietzsche,
a rediscovery that culminated with what is really a continuation of
La Conscience Mystifiée, a sort of conscience claire, titled simply
Nietzsche (1939). 28 The text spans Lefebvre’s early hopes with the
Popular Front and culminates with the outbreak of war. Who better,
he says, can help us bask in joy and burst out of misery?
Some of the most romantic pages of La Somme et le Reste
cover Lefebvre’s Nietzsche years (1936–39), years when his
Nietzsche monograph unwittingly fermented. Teaching in a collège
at Montargis, he “reread a Nietzsche never abandoned.” 29 The
success of the Popular Front, Lefebvre says, had been “a crowning,
extraordinary success, a dazzling example of a just political
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