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
when reification is everywhere, when God is on the comeback
and wacky fundamentalist values are writ large, a healthy dose of
Lefebvre’s Nietzschean skepticism strikes as piquant—and necessary.
Nietzschean free spirits are fearless, strong, and secular;
they don’t relinquish anything to institutions or higher powers, to
faith or morality. They signify the “twilight of the idols” and bid
farewell “to the coldest of cold monsters.”
“The coldest of cold monsters” was Nietzsche’s label for the
state from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (see “On the New Idols”). The
Bush administration wasn’t Nietzsche’s target, but it could easily
have been: “the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil;
and whatever it says it lies—and whatever it has it has stolen. …
Coldly, it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the state,
am the people.’ … Behold, how it lures them, the all-too-many—
and how it devours them, chews them … thus roars the monster.” 32
Yet Nietzschean intellectuals don’t hang around to suffocate in the
stench: they break windows and leap into the open air. “The earth
is free even now for great souls,” says Nietzsche. “A free life is still
free for great souls. … Only where the state ends, there begins the
human being who is not superfluous. … Where the state ends—
look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the
bridges of the superman?” 33
Being drawn to Marx and Nietzsche, Lefebvre hints in La
Somme et le Reste, is a push-pull affair, a restless shifting between
two poles, defined by will and prevailing politics. Some combination
of Nietzsche and Marx can reveal a lot about the world
outside and inside our heads. It’s a complex connection, a veritable
dialectic that dramatizes a creative tension: it seems a
potentially fruitful combination unifying private consciousness
and social consciousness. Rooting for Marx and Nietzsche is to
support negativity, is to posit the power of the negative, to rally
around it. Negating the present; overcoming the past; reaching
out for the future; destroying idols, cold monsters—that’s Marx’s
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