Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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the Feltrinelli Institute in Milan. I worked for weeks at the Institute; I found
unpublished documentation. I used it, and that’s completely my right.”
“Listen,” insisted Lefebvre, “I don’t care at all about these accusations of
plagiarism. And I never took the time to read what they wrote about the
Commune in their journal. I know that I was dragged through the mud.”
Curiously, Lefebvre thanks Debord in La Proclamation de la Commune
(p. 11, footnote 1), for his friendship and support “in the course of fecund
and cordial discussions.” But in a typesetting howler (or a Lefebvre practical
joke?), Debord is cited as M. Guy Debud!
22. Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and
Political Struggle in Latin America (Monthly Review Press, New York,
1967), pp. 76–77.
23. This is a crucial passage in The Urban Revolution. Alas, Minnesota
University Press’s English translation has deflected Lefebvre’s original
meaning.
Chapter 6
1. Espace et société, which Lefebvre launched with Anatole Kopp and
Anthropos’s blessing, was formative in his spatial turn. Between 1970 and
1980, the journal was a mouthpiece for New Left thinking on cities, space,
and politics, as well as an outlet for a new breed of Young Turk critical
sociologists, economists, and political scientists. (The sociologist Manuel
Castells was a member of the Espace et société collective.) Issue number 1
(November 1970) was inaugurated with Lefebvre’s pioneering “Réflexions
sur la politique de l’espace,” an agenda-setting manifesto. “I thus repeat,”
Lefebvre wrote, “there is a politics of space because space is political.” The
article was reprinted in Lefebvre’s Espace et politique; an English translation
appeared in the radical geography journal Antipode, Espace et société’s
nearest Anglo-Saxon counterpart, spearheaded in the United States by
the geographer Dick Peet. See Henri Lefebvre, “Reflections on the Politics
of Space,” Antipode 8, no. 2 (1976): 30–37; the piece also featured in Peet’s
handy (and still valuable) edited collection Radical Geography (Maaroufa
Press, New York, 1977).
2. See Remi Hess, “Henri Lefebvre et la pensée de l’espace,” Avant-Propos
à la quatrième édition française de La production de l’espace (Anthropos,
Paris, 2000), p. xiv.
3. Ibid., pp. xv–xvi.
4. Donald Nicholson-Smith, the translator of The Production of Space, passed
this information on to me in an e-mail exchange, April 21, 2005.
5. Guy Debord, the other Hegelian Marxist theorist, was equally nowhere
on “respectable” Anglo-American theoretical curricula. The Society of the
Spectacle, pirated by Fredy Perlman’s anarchist Black and Red Books in
Detroit and later by London’s Rebel Press, was exclusively fringe-militant
nourishment.
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