Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
During Lefebvre and Debord’s early friendship, it was hard to
know who influenced whom. Lefebvre may have lifted more from
Debord and the Situationists than he cracked on. He and Debord
were like a Faust–Mephistopheles pairing: Lefebvre, the old intellectual,
fraternizing with the devilish powers of Debord, a darker
figure, a man of the night uniting with Lefebvre’s personality of
the sun. In rescuing the sun from crucifixion, Lefebvre seemingly
summoned up the spirit of darkness. Debord and the Situationists
internalized the destructive–creative powers Lefebvre secretly harbored
within himself; they were his catharsis incarnate, his kids of
Dionysus. “We brought fuel to where the fire was,” Debord explained
in his film In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni. “In this manner
we enlisted definitively in the Devil’s party—the ‘historical evil’
that leads existing conditions to their destruction, the ‘bad side’ that
makes history by undermining all established satisfaction.” 30
In concert, Faust and Mephistopheles read Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano, about the doomed alcoholic antihero Geoffrey
Fermin, supping not a few mescals themselves; Debord even helped
organize Lefebvre’s teaching schedule. Debord and Bernstein
sometimes sojourned at Lefebvre’s summerhouse in Navarrenx.
And through Lefebvre, Debord met the young Belgian poet and
free spirit Raoul Vaneigem, another avid Lefebvre reader who’d
soon enter the Situationist fray. Around this time, too, Lefebvre
discovered the Dutch utopian architect and planner Constant
Nieuwenhuys and other anarchist “Provos” in Amsterdam, who
later came to Paris and discovered Debord and his crew. Debord
and Nieuwenhuys steadily nudged Lefebvre toward an interest in
urbanism, which would soon hatch in Introduction to Modernity.
“I went to Amsterdam to see what was going on,” Lefebvre recalls.
“There were Provos elected to the city council in Amsterdam. …
Then, after that, it all fell apart. All this was part and parcel of
the same thing. And after 1960 there was the great movement
in urbanization … from that moment the historic city exploded
33