Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
emphasis), “appeared to me a lot more essential than all others:
radical discontinuities blurred into a theory that placed involution,
or its dissolution, on the same plane as revolution. Ultimately, I conspired
that the theory of moments, considered as a unique philosophy
and ontology, might eliminate the idea of human historicity.”
The political moment, as Lefebvre wills it, is a pure and absolute
act of contestation: a street demo or flying picket, a rent strike
or a general strike. Streets would be the staging, and the drama
might be epic or absurd or both, scripted by Brecht or Chaplin or
Rabelais—who could tell? It’s meant to be spontaneous, after all.
Lefebvre points out how Hegel and Marx each emphasized the
importance of the “moment.” All dialectical movement progressed
through different moments: moments of skeptical, negative consciousness
defined history for Hegel; moments of contradictory
unity defined and structured capitalism for Marx. All reality for
both thinkers was momentary, transient, in motion, in fluid state,
whether as an idea or as material reality.
Just as alienation reflected an absence, a dead moment empty
of critical content, the Lefebvrian moment signified a presence,
a fullness, alive and connected. Lefebvre’s theory of moments
implied a certain notion of liberty and passion. “For the old-fashioned
romantic,” he quips in La Somme et le Reste, “the fall of a
leaf is a moment as significant as the fall of a state for a revolutionary.”
21 Either way, whether for the romantic or for the revolutionary—or
for the romantic revolutionary—a moment has a “certain
specific duration.” “Relatively durable,” Lefebvre says, “it stands
out from the continuum of transitories within the amorphous realm
of the psyche.” The moment “wants to endure. It cannot endure
(at least, not for very long). Yet this inner contradiction gives it
its intensity, which reaches crisis point when the inevitably of its
own demise becomes apparent.” 22 For a moment, “the instant of
greatest importance is the instant of failure. The drama is situated
within that instant of failure: it is the emergence from the everyday
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