Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

p r e F a c e
and away his best-selling book.) And yet, only two of Lefebvre’s
many Marxist monographs (The Sociology of Marx and Dialectical
Materialism) have made it into English; his greatest work, La
Somme et le Reste, is still also untranslated; ditto his pathbreaking
(and relevant) exploration on “mystified consciousness”; ditto his
work on the state, Nietzsche, and Rabelais; ditto his critique of
technocratic culture and treatises on aesthetics and representation.
Anglo-American studies that see Lefebvre as a preeminent
spatial thinker and urbanist—themes he only began to pick up as
a sexagenarian—often overlook the fact that he was first of all
a Marxist. Texts that discuss his concept of everyday life tend
to make short shrift of his dialectical method and utopian “total
man,” thereby severing parts of an oeuvre that coexist in dynamic
unity. To this degree, a thinker who detested compartmentalization
has been hacked apart and compartmentalized within assorted
academic disciplines. For that reason, I want to keep together
Lefebvre’s Francophone and Anglophone strands, highlighting the
interrelatedness of his scholarship, its polemical edge and playful
twists, its everyday aspects and other-worldly yearnings, its realism
and its surrealism. I want to travel, as Lefebvre traveled, through
time and over space, engaging with his times as well as our own.
En route, I hope this little book reaches the reader as a critical
introduction, one that emphasizes the Oxford English Dictionary’s
other notion of “critical”: it will introduce Henri Lefebvre critically,
at a “critical moment,” when it is “decisive and crucial” to do
so, when his ideas and politics are “of critical importance.”
Note: Whenever and wherever possible, the author makes use in this book of exist-
ing English translations of Lefebvre. Elsewhere, all citations from the original
French are translations made by the author.
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