Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

p r e F a c e
each morning in an apartment along the rue de la Santé. He let
everything rip, loosened every shackle. He was about to quit the
Communist Party, to expel himself, departing from the left wing.
(J’ai quitté le Parti par la gauche,” he enjoyed bragging.) Stalin’s
misdeeds were now public; the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary
had disgusted many communists, Lefebvre included. This was
Lefebvre’s heart laid bare, his settling of accounts—with the party
and with Stalinism—his “inventory” of the epoch: personal reminiscences
and stinging rebuttals, historical and political analyses,
literary set pieces, poems that hint of Rimbaud and Mallarmé,
portraits of friends and pillories of enemies, all laced with dense
philosophical disquisitions and Marxist delineations.
It was a lyrical and romantic “confession,” revealing the
struggles and delights of a life in philosophy as well as the pitfalls
befalling a philosopher in life. The spirit of Rousseau seems close
by; yet we also suspect Lefebvre remembers Dostoevsky’s underground
man’s warning: vanity will always force men to fictionalize
themselves. Few scholars nowadays could match Lefebvre’s
prosaic powers and grip on his times. Fewer still could ever dream
up such an idiosyncratic book. Lefebvre is so passionately engaged
with what was going on around him, and inside him, that, like the
“Wedding-Guest” from Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” we cannot
choose but hear. Writing it was clearly therapeutic, a Proustian
moment, reclaiming lost time and space: “This book,” he wrote
in 1973, in an updated preface, “speaks of deliverance, of happiness
regained. Liberated from political pressure as one exits from
a place of suffocation, a man starts to live, and to think. After a
long, long period of asphyxiation, of delusion, of disappointments
concealed … look at him: he crawls up from the abyss. Curious
animal. He surges from the depths, surfaces, a little flattened by
heavy pressures. He breathes in the sunshine, opens himself, displays
himself, comes alive again.” 9
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