Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
overcome biological man and the man of today is an imperative
precisely the contrary of a fascist postulate, after which conflicts
are eternal and problems don’t have a human solution. Nietzsche
wouldn’t have been able to support Hitler’s ideology: his historical
‘rumination’ of the past, his cult of the state, the disdain for
universalization of the individual.” Consequently, “it’s absurd to
write Nietzsche contra Marx.” 38
In La Somme et le Reste, Lefebvre said nothing had happened
to dampen and render unsupportable the stirring final passages of
his Nietzsche book. Nothing, too, takes away from their urgency in
our own decadent age, which, as Fritz Stern hinted in the New York
Times, is drowning in “passive nihilism,” a nihilism symbolizing
“a decline and recession of the power of the spirit.” 39 “A real culture,”
Lefebvre repeated in 1958 what he’d first written in 1939, “is
at once a mode of living, a way of thinking and ability to act. It is
a sentiment of life incorporated in a human community. It involves
a relationship of human beings to the outside world. The grand
culture to follow ought to integrate the cosmic into the human,
instinct into consciousness. It will herald the culture of l’homme
total [the total man], which integrates itself naturally within the
Marxist conception of humanity.” 40 That Lefebvre could invoke
utopian man during one of the bleakest points of human history is
extraordinary and inspirational for our own dark times. Nietzsche’s
cosmic ideal, he says, can become a socialist ideal only when it
comes down to earth, where things are brutal and raw, mystified
and practical. Nietzsche’s übermenschen show real guts only when
they become menschen—everyday people, who’ve descended from
their Zarathustrian mountaintops, stripped away all alienations,
shrugged off institutions and the state, and announced in public that
God is dead—that we killed him. From then on, from an ordinary
patch on planet earth, we can surge upward, breathe in the sunshine,
open ourselves, come alive again. The will toward the total
man marks the beginning, not the end, of history and geography.
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