Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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2. La Somme et le Reste—Tome II, p. 464.
3. See Remy Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, p. 110; cf.
Conversations avec Henri Lefebvre, pp. 50–51.
4. Conversations avec Henri Lefebvre, p. 50.
5. Ibid., pp. 50–51.
6. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941 (Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1963), p. 362.
7. As Michel Trebitsch pointed out in his preface to Critique of Everyday
Life—Volume 2 (Verso, London, 2002), p. xiv, this was Lefebvre’s first
academic qualification since his diplôme d’études supérieures, obtained in
1924. It gives hope to every aging grad student! Lefebvre’s secondary thesis,
a necessary component of the French educational system, was called
La Vallée de Campan; Presses Universitaires de France published it in
book form in 1958. The historian Michel Trebitsch prefaced all three volumes
of Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life; sadly, in March 2004, cancer
saw off at age fifty-five one of the most gifted francophone interpreters
and disseminators of Lefebvre.
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 52 (emphasis in original).
9. Critique of Everyday Life—Volume 1, p. 129.
10. Ibid., p. 216.
11. Between 1947 and 1955, Lefebvre absorbed himself in French literature,
consecrating a series of books on classical masters like Denis Diderot (1949),
Blaise Pascal (two volumes, 1949 and 1955), Alfred de Musset (1955), and
François Rabelais (1955). He used these writers not only to sharpen the concept
of everyday life but also as antidotes to bourgeois values and party
dogma. Lefebvre’s “retreat” into literature during this period seemed positively
correlated with his growing alienation from the party.
12. Critique of Everyday Life, p. 14.
13. Ibid., p. 11.
14. Ibid., p. 27. Lefebvre devotes more attention to Joyce’s Ulysses, and to
Finnegans Wake, early on in Everyday Life in the Modern World (Penguin,
London, 1971); see pp. 2–11.
15. James Joyce, Ulysses (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 643–44.
16. The dramas around daily bread and French village life, together with all
their comical hypocrisies and shenanigans, are mischievously evoked in
Marcel Pagnol’s classic 1938 film, La Femme du Boulanger [The Baker’s
Wife]. See the film’s text, whose dialogue is in the broken language of real,
everyday people (La Femme du Boulanger [Presses Pocket, Paris, 1976]).
17. Pierre Mac Orlan, Villes (Gallimard, 1929), p. 247.
18. Critique of Everyday Life, p. 48.
19. The desire also conjures up the spirit of the late Isaac Babel, the Ukrainian
short-story wizard carted off by Stalin’s henchmen one dark night in May
1939, never to return. “The Party, the government, have given us everything,”
Babel said, “depriving us only of one privilege—that of writing
badly!” See Isaac Babel, The Lonely Years, 1925–1939 (Farrar, Straus and
Co., New York, 1964), p. 399.
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