Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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rumpled brown tweed jacket. In his ninetieth year, it was obvious
to viewers Lefebvre hadn’t long left to live. Even Lévy described
his interviewee as “tired that afternoon. His face was pallid, his
eyes blood-shot. I felt he was overwhelmed from the start and
clearly bored at having to answer my questions.” 2
I didn’t care that Lefebvre looked tired and bored that night.
I remember he kept telling Lévy he’d rather talk about the present
and the future, about things going on around him in the world,
rather than recount tales of bygone days. More than anything, I’d
been overjoyed to glimpse the old man himself, and I still vividly
remember the moment. It was my first real sighting of a scholar
who’d stirred my intellectual curiosity for several years already.
The long-awaited English translation of The Production of Space
had just appeared in bookstores around that time, and Lefebvre
was much in vogue within my own discipline, geography. I was
still in the throes of my doctoral thesis, too, using his work as theoretical
sustenance; my first published article, bearing his name
in its title, had been accepted in a professional journal. I felt like
I was about to enter the adult world of academia with Lefebvre
as my guiding spirit, a man I admired not just for what he wrote
but for how he lived. His rich, long, adventurous life of thought
and political engagement epitomized for me the very essence of
an intellectual. I found him refreshingly different from the post-
Sartrean “master thinkers” like Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser,
more in touch with everyday life and everyday people; Lefebvre
spoke to me as a radical person as well as a radical brain.
I loved his grand style. He wasn’t afraid to think about politics
and current affairs on a grand, sweeping scale or to philosophize
what he called “the totality of life and thought.” Lefebvre wanted
to “de-scholarize philosophy,” wanted to make it living and pungent,
normative and holistic. 3 Indeed, “to think the totality” was
Lefebvre’s very own pocket definition of philosophy itself, the
magic ingredient of his “metaphilosophy,” through which, like
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