Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

a F t e r w o r d
confrontation, spontaneous and practical confrontation out on the
streets, making noise and demanding one’s rights, fighting the
power, and looking the negative in the face and struggling against
it. Lefebvre’s whole life and œuvre evolved and flourished through
confrontation: confrontation with the Surrealists, confrontation
with the Situationists, confrontation with the Communist Party,
confrontation with his Catholic faith, confrontation with his
Pyrenean roots, confrontation with fascism, confrontation with
Hitler, confrontation with the past as well the future, confrontation
with himself and his world.
Lefebvre lived though a century of madmen and dictators,
defeats and disasters, crises and conspiracies, and he can help us
confront the demons that haunt our new century, ones that “enjoy
the predominance of power.” “Men can and must set themselves a
total solution,” he insisted in 1939, just when everything seemed
lost. “We don’t exist in advance, metaphysically. The game has not
already been won; we may lose everything. The transcending is
never inevitable. But it is for this precise reason that the question
of man and the mind acquires an infinite tragic significance, and
that those who can sense this will give up their solitude in order to
enter into an authentic spiritual community.” 8
* * *
One of the last books Lefebvre read—reread—was by Franz
Kafka: The Castle. 9 It was a book he thought particularly pertinent
for the present conjuncture, where castles and ramparts reign
over us all, in plain view, but cut off somehow, and occupants are
evermore difficult to pin down when we come knocking on their
doors, providing we can find the right door to knock on. Following
Kafka, Lefebvre perhaps recognized the thoroughly modern conflict
now besieging us, a conflict not of us against other men but
of us against a world transformed into an immense administration.
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