Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

p r e F a c e
everyman is suggestive in an age that frantically invokes an essential
purity of identity or else wants to homogenize everything in a
nihilistic market rage.
“I know nothing better in the world than this region,” said
Lefebvre in Pyrénées, his alternative tour guide of well-trodden
paths. “I know its strengths and weaknesses, its qualities and
faults, its horizons and limits. … I have savored the earth in my
lips, in the breeze I’ve smelt its odors and perfumes. The mud
and stones and grassy knolls, the peaks and troughs of its mountains,
I’ve felt them all underfoot.” 20 Written as part of the “Atlas
des Voyages” series, this brilliantly poetic travelogue, both geographically
materialist and romantically lyrical, mixes photos
of dramatic Pyrenean landscapes and ruddy-faced peasants with
citations from Hölderlin and Elisée Reclus. Meanwhile, we can
glimpse the “crucified sun,” those crucifixes so ubiquitous in the
South West’s landscape—giant, austere crosses framed against a
bare circle symbolizing the sun. They’d put the fear of God in
anyone. Lefebvre equated such religious iconography with bodily
repression and ideological dogmatism; it’s an imagery and mentality,
in whatever guise, he’d spend a lifetime shrugging off and
battling against. “I understand the Pyrenean region better than
anyone,” Lefebvre claimed, better than its inhabitants, “precisely
because I quit it for elsewhere. … No, not just for Paris, but elsewhere
in my consciousness and thought, elsewhere in the world;
elsewhere in ‘globality,’ in Marxism, in philosophy, in the diverse
human sciences.” 21
* * *
Last fall, I went to seek out another little piece of Lefebvre’s
world, in an unlikely place: the rare book archives of Columbia
University’s Butler Library in New York. There, you can find the
one-hundred-odd letters Lefebvre sent his longtime friend and
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