Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
15. Stéphane Mallarmé, preface to “A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish
Chance” (1895), in Stéphane Mallarmé—Selected Poetry and Prose,
ed. Mary Ann Caws (New Directions Books, New York, 1982), p. 105.
Mallarmé’s poem sprawls diagonally across the page, with certain verses
interspersed with others; odd words dwell alone just as others interlock and
interweave. Sometimes, you don’t know whether the verses flow over the
page or down the page or in both directions simultaneously.
16. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Modern Library, New York, 1944),
p. 337.
17. Ibid., p. 393.
18. La Somme et le Reste—Tome I, p. 234.
19. Ibid., p. 235.
20. Critique of Everyday Life—Volume 2, p. 347.
21. La Somme et le Reste—Tome II, p. 647.
22. Critique of Everyday Life—Volume 2, p. 345.
23. Ibid., p. 351.
24. For more details on Debord’s (1931–94) stormy life and complex thought,
see my Guy Debord (Reaktion Books, London, 2005). On the brink of
insurgency, Debord published The Society of the Spectacle (1967), his bestknown
text, a work that would become the radical book of the decade,
perhaps even the most radical radical book ever written. Utterly original
in composition, its 221 strange, pointed aphorisms blend a youthful Marx
with a left-wing Hegel, a bellicose Machiavelli with a utopian Karl Korsch,
a militaristic Clausewitz with a romantic Georg Lukács. Debord reinvented
Marxian political economy as elegant prose poetry, and with its stirring
refrains, The Society of the Spectacle indicted an emergent world order in
which unity really spelled division, essence appearance, truth falsity.
25. “Lefebvre on the Situationist International,” October (Winter 1997):
69–70.
26. Lefebvre, Le Temps des Méprises [Times of Contempt] (Éditions Stock,
Paris, 1975), p. 158.
27. Ibid., p. 151.
28. “Lefebvre on the Situationist International,” p. 70.
29. Cited in Christophe Bourseiller’s Vie et mort de Guy Debord (Plon, Paris,
1999), pp. 258–59. Nicole gave birth to Lefebvre’s sixth child, daughter
Armelle, in 1964. In 1978, at the age of seventy-seven, Lefebvre married
Catherine Regulier, then a twenty-one-year-old communist militant.
Estranged from her parents because of her relationship with Lefebvre,
Catherine and Henri stayed together until the end of his life.
30. Guy Debord, “In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni,” in Guy Debord—
Oeuvres Cinématographiques Complètes, 1952–1978 (Gallimard, Paris,
1978), p. 253. Debord’s threnody to Paris, and his denunciation of the
established film world, has a Latin palindrome title with an English translation:
“We go round and around and are consumed by fire.”
31. “Lefebvre and the Situationist International.”
32. See Andy Merrifield, Guy Debord, especially chap. 1.
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