Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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borrow their themes from the city. [Gaston] Bachelard has left admirable
pages consecrated to the house [in The Poetics of Space]. Heidegger has
meditated on the Greek city and Logos, on the Greek temple. Yet the metaphors
epitomizing Heideggerian thought don’t come from the city but from
a native and earlier life: the ‘shepherds of being,’ the ‘forest paths.’ … As for
so-called ‘existentialist’ thought, it is based on individual consciousness, on
the subject and the ordeals of subjectivity, rather than on a practical, historical
and social reality.”
11. Lefebvre, “Engels et l’utopie,” p. 217; cf. Metromarxism, pp. 42–48.
12. In The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space
(Guilford, New York, 2003), the urban geographer Don Mitchell puts a
provocative twist on Lefebvre’s thesis, immersing it in the North American
legal system. In staking out a beachhead for disenfranchised homeless
people, and other expulsees from the city’s public realm, Mitchell pushes a
Lefebvrian right into a twenty-first-century urban ethic.
13. Cited in Remi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, p. 315.
14. Lefebvre, “No Salvation away from the Center?” in Writing on Cities —
Henri Lefebvre trans. and repr. E. Kofman and E. Lebas, p. 208.
15. Personal communication, August 30, 2004. For other Soja insights and reminiscences
of “the dear old man,” see his Thirdspace (Blackwell, Oxford,
1996). Jameson’s essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92, replete with Lefebvre’s
looming presence, is now a classic. A book-length version, sporting the
same title, was published by Verso in 1991. “The notion of a predominance
of space in the postcontemporary era we owe to Henri Lefebvre,” wrote
Jameson (p. 364), “(to whom, however, the concept of a postmodern period
or stage is alien).”
16. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991),
pp. 73–74.
17. Ibid., p. 77.
18. “Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities,” in Writings on Cities—Henri
Lefebvre, p. 236.
19. “No Salvation away from the Center?” Writings on Cities—Henri Lefebvre,
p. 208. Interestingly, Lefebvre’s love affair with Florence and Venice was
shared by Guy Debord, who made clandestine visits to Venice (including
a poignant one just before his suicide in 1994) and, during the 1970s, went
into “exile” for several years in Florence’s Oltarno district: “There was this
little Florentine who was so graceful. In the evenings she would cross the
river to come to San Frediano. I fell in love very unexpectedly, perhaps
because of her beautiful, bitter smile. I told her, in brief: ‘Do not stay silent,
for I come before you as a stranger and a traveller. Grant me some refreshment
before I go away and am here no more.’ ” Guy Debord, Panégyrique
(Verso, New York, 1991), p. 47.
20. Writing on Cities—Henri Lefebvre, p. 208.
21. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore
(Continuum Books, London, 2004).
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