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
of the feeling of power.” And elsewhere (section 552), “ ‘Truth’ is
therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered—
but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process,
or rather a will to overcome that has in itself no end. … It is
a word for the ‘will to power.’ ” 35 Struggle sanctions truth claims,
both Marx and Nietzsche concur: power is the judge and jury of
philosophical wisdom. And everyday life is its supreme court.
There’s thus no reason, Lefebvre thinks, why a Nietzschean
will to power can’t inspire the weak as well as the powerful, drive
stiffs as well as big chiefs; a subordinate minority who’s effectively
a quantitative majority can strengthen their will and develop their
own will to power, a will to empower. Here, through struggle and
confrontation, through spontaneous and organized contestation,
new truths about the world can be revealed and invented, those that
revalue existing values and negate mystified and eternal notions.
And the belief that problems of humanity are solvable through
practical force, rather than abstract reasoning, seems entirely consistent
with Marx’s practico-critical tenets: “The question whether
objective truth can be attributed to human thinking,” Marx said in
his second Thesis on Feuerbach, “isn’t a question of theory but is
a practical question. Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality
and power, the one-sidedness of his thinking in practice.”
Hence, in a sparkling dénounement to Nietzsche, subtitled
“Nietzsche and Hitler’s Fascism,” Lefebvre announces a militant
call to arms, releasing his own Nietzschean–Marxist will to power:
“Marxists must become warriors,” he urges, “without adopting the
values of war.” 36 In Nietzsche, Lefebvre smashes the windows and
encourages free spirits to leap out into the fresh air. The epoch
that put to bed La Conscience Mystifiée, yet awakens in our own,
was Wagnerian not Nietzschean, Lefebvre concludes. “Nietzsche
didn’t love the masses. The fascists flattered the masses so much
as to ensure they stayed in the situation of the masses.” 37 The
Nietzschean ideal of the future is in no way fascist: “His goal to
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