Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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culture and tradition affected Lefebvre’s own spirit and personality.
His “fanatically religious” mother was of Basque stock. “ ‘You
speak against religion,’ she and her sisters scorned me. ‘You will
go to hell.’ ” 15 Lefebvre recognized the contradictions traversing
Basque culture because those same contradictions traversed him:
the Basques “have a very profound sense of sin; and yet, they
love to live, love to eat and drink. This contradiction is irresolvable,
because it’s a fact I’ve often stated: the sense of sin excites
pleasure. The greater the sin, the greater also the pleasure.” 16 His
libertine roots lay on his father’s side, a Breton free spirit who
loved to gamble and usually lost. “My Breton father bequeathed
me a robust and stocky body [trapu] … [he was] of light, easy
mood, Voltairean and anticlerical. … I believe that from birth
that I resembled him.” 17 He inherited his mother’s facial features:
“a long, almost Iberian face.” “The head of Don Quixote and the
body of Sancho Panza,” one lady friend described Lefebvre; she
knew him well. “The formula,” he said, “hadn’t displeased me.” 18
Inside Lefebvre’s body and mind lay a complex dialectic
of particularity and generality, of Eros and Logos, of place and
space; he was a Catholic country boy who had roamed Pyrenean
meadows, a sophisticated Parisian philosopher who’d discoursed
on Nietzsche and the death of God. He was rooted in the South
West yet in love with Paris, tormented by a Marxist penchant for
global consciousness. This triple allegiance tempered hometown
excesses, made him a futuristic man with a foot in the past, someone
who distanced himself from regional separatism. “Today,”
Lefebvre warned, “certain [Basque] pose the question of a rupture
with France. I see, in regionalism, the risk of being imprisoned
in particularity. I can’t follow them that far. … One is never, in
effect, only Basque … but French, European, inhabitant of planet
earth, and a good deal else to boot. The modern identity can only
be contradictory and assumed as such. It also implies global consciousness.”
19 The incarnation of a man of tradition and a Joycean
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