Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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2. Introduction to Modernity, p. 118. All parenthetical page numbers henceforth
refer to this text.
3. In a 1983 interview, Lefebvre noted how the Situationists devised dérive—
collective, often nocturnal pedestrian drifts through urban space. The
practice sought to expose the idiocy of an urbanism based on monofunctional
separation. These drifts tapped the “psychogeography” of different
neighborhoods (in Paris, London, Amsterdam) and cognitively stitched
together the urban fabric by emphasizing what was getting torn apart and
plundered. “We had a vision of a city,” Lefebvre said, “that was more and
more fragmented without its organic unity being completely shattered.” See
“Lefebvre and the Situationists International,” October (Winter 1997).
4. Introduction to Modernity, p. 122.
5. “The abstraction of the state as such,” Marx wrote in his Critique of
Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843), “wasn’t born until the modern world
because the abstraction of the political state is a modern product” (see Karl
Marx—Early Writings, p. 90; emphases in original).
6. For more details on the Marxist position vis-à-vis the homegrown artisananarchism
of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) see my Metromarxism
(Routledge, New York, 2002), pp. 42–45. For Lefebvre’s own views on
the matter, see his stimulating discussion on Frederick Engels’s Housing
Question “Engels et l’utopie,” reprinted in Espace et Politique. Lefebvre’s
latter booklet is included in Anthropos’s edition of Le droit à la ville (Paris,
1972).
7. Cf. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minnesota University Press,
Minneapolis, 2003), p. 84; see, too, La révolution urbaine (Gallimard,
Paris, 1970), p. 114.
8. Karl Marx, Capital—Volume 1 (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 284.
9. Lefebvre’s Le droit à la ville has been translated by Eleonore Kofman and
Elizabeth Lebas and introduced in their edited Writings on Cities—Henri
Lefebvre (Blackwell, Oxford, 1996). On occasion, I’ve tweaked their translation.
Page references to follow use the English as well as Anthropos’s
original 1968 French version, Le droit à la ville suivi de Espace et politique.
Lefebvre’s urban impulse had already been glimpsed in a detailed
historical account of the 1871 Paris Commune, La Proclamation de la
Commune (Gallimard, Paris, 1965), but it was around, and especially after,
1968 that his urban œuvre really took off. Along with Le droit à la ville,
this would include Du rural à l’urbain (Anthropos, Paris, 1970), La révolution
urbaine (Gallimard, Paris, 1970), and La pensée marxiste et la ville
(Casterman, Paris, 1972). Thus, by 1972, in his seventy-first year, Lefebvre
could justifiably be called an urban scholar. His critique of “urbanism,”
and his analyses of “urban space,” would soon edge him toward studying
the role of geography in the “survival of capitalism,” culminating with La
production de l’espace (Anthropos, Paris, 1974).
10. “What relation is there today,” Lefebvre asks in The Right to the City (p. 92),
“between philosophy and the city?” An ambiguous one, he responds, unambiguously.
“The most eminent contemporary philosophers,” says he, “don’t
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