Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

Preface: “A Youthfulness of Heart”
I never met Henri Lefebvre or saw him lecture. Some of my friends
who did said he was a real knockout. Others who had contact with
him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his boyish passions,
his virility—even in old age—and the posse of young, attractive
women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him as a Rabelaisian
monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one. I’m sorry I
missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct, live. But I did
see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s. The series
The Spirit of Freedom was strictly for insomniacs and appeared
in the wee hours on Channel 4. Each of the four programs tried
to assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the twentieth
century. The cynical and pejorative tone throughout wasn’t
too surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard-
Henri Lévy, France’s pinup thinker and Paris-Match’s answer to
Jean-Paul Sartre. 1 The night I watched, an old white-haired man
sat in front of the camera, dressed in a blue denim work shirt and
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