Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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his frank concern for profane human happiness all seem especially
inspiring in an era when crony philistinism has supposedly rendered
such a “meta-style” old hat. Lefebvre was a thinker whose
life and thought progressed in a kind of episodic and peripatetic
unison. His oeuvre became not just something written down on
paper but a reality actually lived.
The present offering explores, more modestly, what Lefebvre’s
own La Somme et le Reste explored: the sum and the remainder,
recounting a tale of what Lefebvre achieved while pioneering the
way for the “rest,” for the still-to-be-accomplished, the still-tobe-lived
aspect of that legacy. In the chapters to follow, I probe
key concepts: Everyday Life (chapter 1), Moments (chapter 2),
Spontaneity (chapter 3), Urbanity and the Urban Revolution (chapters
4 and 5, respectively), Space (chapter 6), Globalization and
the State (chapter 7), Mystified Consciousness (chapter 8), and the
Total Man (afterword), in the light (and darkness) of the present
conjuncture. As they shift thematically, each chapter will periodize
a specific facet of Lefebvre’s life and thought at the same
time as it tries to stress how these particular facets live on today,
as an enduring interrelated whole. Specific chapters can be read
alone, as discrete themes, but I’d like to stress their interweaving
and overlapping nature—their “s’entrelacer,” as Lefebvre might
have said.
In the Anglophone world, geographers, urbanists, and cultural
theorists have appropriated Lefebvre as their own during
the past decade or so. There, The Production of Space, perhaps
Lefebvre’s best-known book, is one of his least-known texts in
the Francophone world, who generally acknowledge Lefebvre as
a Marxist philosopher cum rural–urban sociologist; in this camp
Lefebvre reigns as a prophet of alienation and Marxist humanism,
a thinker who brought an accessible Marx to a whole generation of
French scholars. (Le Marxisme [1948], appearing in the immensely
popular “Que sais-je?” series—“What do I know?”—remains far
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