Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

a F t e r w o r d
domination over Nature is already great,” he writes near the end
of Dialectical Materialism (1939), on the brink of total war, conscious
that his own days may be numbered, “living man is more
than ever the victim of the fetishes he himself has raised up, those
strange existences, both abstract and real, brutally material yet
clad in ideologies that are alluring and sometimes even bewitching.
A new consciousness is needed, tenacious and skeptical, in
order that these fetishes should be unmasked.”
* * *
It’s hard to imagine how Lefebvre would believe that the culture
and society we have before us is as good as it gets. There’s
always something more to add, he would have insisted, always
other possibilities, openings, moments of opportunity out there,
on the horizon, over the rainbow. We would be able to continue
for a lot longer if we could. Toward the end of his life, in 1991,
as he sat in an armchair in his old house at Navarrenx, with a rug
over his legs and a cat on his lap, he still wanted to talk about
utopia, about the future. “We’ve discredited utopia,” he said. “One
needs to rehabilitate it. Utopia may never realize itself; and yet it
is indispensable for stimulating change. Utopia is a function and
a capacity, even, above all, if it doesn’t realize itself. The dream
of an egalitarian society, a society of abundance, is within reach
though it eludes us. … But it resides there nonetheless as a means
of stimulation.” 3
I remember, too, that first and only time I’d seen Lefebvre, on
the TV, with Bernard-Henri Lévy, all the while telling his interlocutor
he’d much rather talk about the future than the past. Perhaps
he knew then; perhaps, after the Berlin Wall hadn’t long tumbled
down, he knew every capitalist punter would soon wallow in the
glory of its demise. Perhaps Lefebvre knew, near his own end, that
without some sense of utopia we’d all be lost, as a seventy-year
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