Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
17. Lefebvre, Autogestion et socialisme, pp. 60–61. In De l’Etat 4: les contradictions
de l’état moderne (Collection 10/18, Paris, 1978), Lefebvre explicitly
mobilizes dialectical wisdom to analyze the “modern” state. The state
here cannot be considered as eternal, as per Hegel, he says, and it cannot be
abolished directly, as per the anarchists. Rather, the state needs to be “subordinated”
to society and “reabsorbed” within society. Hence Lefebvre’s
critique of the state ends up offering a new definition of socialism, which
is neither a Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat nor a multitude rising
without institutional (and place) mediation.
18. Lefebvre, de l’État 3: le mode de production étatique (Collection 10/18,
Paris, 1977), p. 151.
19. Marx, Capital—Volume 1 (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 287,
footnote 7.
20. Ibid., p. 993.
21. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 190, 209, 211.
22. In fact, Hardt and Negri’s smooth, unruffled globe has a distinctive Kantian
feel to it, a realm of an almost ideal space, a transcendental and essentially
ungraspable structure—a feature Lefebvre denounces with gusto (cf. POS,
p. 2). Space here could easily be construed as a purely classifying phenomenon,
belonging to the a priori realm of the multitude’s consciousness,
separable from the empirical sphere.
23. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, p. 14.
24. José Bové and François Dufour, The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers against
Junk Food (Verso, London, 2001), pp. 4–5.
25. Ibid., p. 13.
26. Lefebvre’s old mate Guy Debord made a similar point a couple of years
before Lefebvre’s death. In his short autobiography Panégyrique (1989)
([Verso, London, 1991], pp. 47–48), Debord wrote, “Nearly all alcohol, and
all beers … have today entirely lost their taste, first on the world market,
then locally, with the disappearance or economic re-education of social
classes who were long independent of large industrial production, and so
too by the play of various state rules who from now on almost prohibit all
that isn’t manufactured industrially. … In the memory of a drunkard one
never imagined that they would see drinks in the world disappear before
the drinker.”
27. Bové and Dufour, The World Is Not for Sale, p. 30.
28. Lefebvre, “Henri Lefebvre ouvre le débat sur la théorie de l’autogestion,”
Autogestion et socialisme 1 (1966): 62.
29. Lefebvre, “Comments on a New State Form,” p. 780.
30. Lefebvre, “Une interview d’Henri Lefebvre,” p. 123.
31. Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, p. 124.
Chapter 8
1. Lefebvre, La Somme et le Reste—Tome II, p. 456.
1 6