Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
contempt, it was Bergson. This feeble and formless thinker, his
pseudo-concepts without definition, his theory of fluidity and continuity,
his exaltation of pure internality, made us physically sick.”
Time, says Lefebvre, isn’t just about evolution but involution: “The
duration, far from defining itself solely as linear and punctuated
by discontinuities, re-orientates itself like a curl of smoke or a
spiral, a current in a whirlpool or a backwash.” 18 The Lefebvrian
moment, like Mallarmé’s, was there between the lines, in a certain
space, at a certain time. It disrupted linear duration, detonated it,
dragged time off in a different, contingent direction, toward some
unknown staging post. The moment is thus an opportunity to be
seized and invented. It is both metaphorical and practical, palpable
and impalpable, something intense and absolute, yet fleeting and
relative, like sex, like the delirious climax of pure feeling, of pure
immediacy, of being there and only there, like the moment of festival,
or of revolution.
The moment was what Lefebvre on numerous occasions calls
“the modality of presence.” A moment, be it that of contemplation
or struggle, love and play, rest and poetry, is never absolutely absolute
or unique. “There are,” he says, “a multiplicity of undefined
instances,” even though, in the plurality, a specific moment is “relatively
privileged,” relatively absolute, definable, and definitive,
at least for a moment. 19 Each moment, accordingly, is a “partial
totality” and “reflected and refracted a totality of global praxis,”
including the dialectical relations of society with itself and the
relations of social man with nature. Moments become absolute—
indeed, Lefebvre says, they have a duty to define themselves absolutely.
They propose themselves as impossible. They wager for
random winnings, “for the heady thrill of chance.” 20 The entire
life of a moment becomes a roll of the dice, a stack of chips at the
casino of modern life.
“The revolutionary aspect of non-linear time,” Lefebvre
explains in La Somme et le Reste (Tome I, p. 236, original
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