Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
sought to abolish philosophy—and to renew the action of art on
life (and life on art). They were bored with art, bored with politicians,
bored with the city, bored in the city. The city had become
banal; art had become banal; politics had become banal—it still
is. Everything needed changing: life needed changing, time and
space needed changing, cities needed changing. Everybody was
hypnotized by production and conveniences, by sewage systems,
elevators, bathrooms, and washing machines. Presented with the
choice between love and a garbage disposal unit, Debord once
jeered, young people opted for a garbage disposal unit.
The Situationists, and Guy Debord notably, exerted a strange
grip on Lefebvre. He began teaching fringe members at Strasbourg
in the early 1960s, likely pages from his Critique of Everyday
Life, and word spread fast; the SI, in turn, seemed to radicalize the
aging professor, kept him on his toes, taught him a thing or two
about praxis, forced him to up the ante in the classroom. Teachers
and students both felt something brewing, gurgling within postwar
culture and society, ready to erupt. Debord embodied the pure liberty
Lefebvre admired, perhaps even envied. 24 The young Parisian
who was neither student nor professor fascinated Lefebvre. Nobody
knew how Debord got by; he had no job, didn’t want a job. In fact,
in 1953, he’d chalked on the wall of the rue de Seine a refrain
that would become a sacred Situationist shibboleth: “Ne Travaillez
Jamais”—“Never Work!” Later in life, Lefebvre recalled Debord
(with his then-wife Michèle Bernstein) inhabiting “a kind of studio
on rue Saint Martin, in a dark room, no lights at all.” Not very
far from his own rue Rambuteau apartment, it was “a miserable
place, but at the same time a place where there was a great deal of
strength and radiance in the thinking and the research.” 25
Lefebvre and Debord became acquainted through women.
Bernstein’s childhood friend, Évelyne Chastel, was Lefebvre’s
girlfriend—despite the big age gap. One day, both couples bumped
into each other on a Parisian street not long after Lefebvre had quit
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