Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
idea. There was a drunkenness soon followed by a hangover.” 30
Yet while he partook in the demonstrations and politicking, he distanced
himself from the euphoria, from the frenzied celebrations,
and found a quieter “joie de vivre” with local youth movements,
frolicking, as he notes (pp. 464–65), in Fontainebleau’s forest at
midnight, promenading at dawn near Recloses, sleeping rough
in barns in a short-lived age of innocence. “Everything became
possible. All was permitted,” he writes of this period (p. 464). In
between, he needed his solitude, and Nietzsche became a source of
comfort, something personal rather than intellectual. “Nietzsche
furnished me with a system of defense. … I became a character,
my character” (p. 476).
Lefebvre was seduced—and unnerved—by Nietzsche’s poetry,
by his ability to “think in grand, dramatic images, and his cosmic
tendency.” 31 How was it possible that an immense poet, “with a
sonority of a grand organ, was the real ancestor and prophet of
racism and Hitlerian brutality”? How could a thinker who loved
the Old Testament, who went out of his way to express admiration
for Jews and disdain of his German heritage, be appropriated
by the National-Socialists? Why abandon Nietzsche to fascists? It
was time, Lefebvre says, for the Popular Front to reclaim him. “It
was also the occasion,” he writes (p. 468), “to say that the political
revolution, even where it might take place, wouldn’t resolve
all the problems of individual life, nor of love and happiness.”
Lefebvre’s hot personal bond with Nietzsche also set an example
for Marxists: “why,” Lefebvre inquires, “should relations of
Marxists to the works of Marx be so cold, so devoid of passion, so
without warmth, like relations with an object?” (p. 476).
In the mid-1930s, Lefebvre propelled a personal bond into a
critical political necessity, into a Nietzschean humanism, a ballast
to an emergent Zeitgeist. With Nietzsche’s aid, he sought to
devalue bourgeois values and invent new values, stronger values,
without God or nation, state, or commodity reification. At a time
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