Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
6. Manuel Castells, “Citizen Movements, Information and Analysis: An
Interview with Manuel Castells, City 7 (1997): 146.
7. La Somme et le Reste—Tome I (La Nef de Paris, Paris, 1959), p. 46.
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (Vintage, New York, 1968), p. xxxiii.
Sartre admired Lefebvre’s dialectical method: “Yet it is a Marxist, Henri
Lefebvre,” Sartre wrote in Search for a Method (pp. 51–52), “who in my
opinion has provided a simple and faultless method for integrating sociology
and history in the perspective of a materialist dialectic. … We only
regret that Lefebvre has not found imitators among the rest of Marxist
intellectuals.” The compliment, though, wasn’t reciprocated. Always
incredulous of Sartrean existentialism, especially in its implications for
individual freedom and political action, Lefebvre penned a fierce diatribe
contra Sartre in L’existentialisme (Éditions du Sagittaire, Paris, 1946).
Even Lefebvre’s staunchest fans agree this text is best forgotten.
9. La Somme et le Reste—Tome II (Bélibaste Éditeur, Genève, 1973), p. 11.
In the same text (chapter III), Lefebvre actually defends Proust against his
socialist detractors. “One can only wish,” Lefebvre wrote (p. 41), “that
some day socialist realism can attain an art as subtle as Proust’s, and reach
a similar visionary power and Romanesque construction.”
10. Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre (Messidor, Paris, 1991), p. 22.
11. Lefebvre, La Somme et le Reste—Tome II, p. 676.
12. Cited in Edward Soja, Thirdspace (Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), p. 33.
13. Critique of Everyday Life—Volume 1 (Verso, London, 1991), p. 202.
14. See Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre, p. 98.
15. Ibid., p. 99.
16. Ibid., p. 99.
17. La Somme et le Reste—Tome I, p. 242.
18. Ibid.
19. Conservation avec Henri Lefebvre, pp. 97–98.
20. Henri Lefebvre, Pyrénées (Éditions Rencontre, Lausanne, 1965), p. 10.
21. Ibid., p. 10.
Chapter 1
1. Immediately after the war, Lefebvre taught philosophy at a lycée (where
students prepare for their preuniversity baccalauréat) in Toulouse and at a
local military college. (One can chuckle at the young cadets being drilled
with dialectical materialism.) At the same time, with a little help from his
old Dada friend Tristan Tzara, whom he’d known since his mid-1920s university
years at the Sorbonne, Lefebvre broadcasted on Radio Toulouse.
No source indicates what he spoke about there or whether any tape recordings
of the broadcasts survive him. It’s likely he spread Communist Party
wisdom in the postwar reconstruction period, when the political stakes
were high. Afterward, long-time Lefebvre friend and supporter Georges
Gurvitch, the sociologist and Russian revolutionary exile, engineered
Lefebvre’s tenure as a researcher at CNRS in Paris from November 1947.
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