Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
Preface: “A Youthfulness of Heart” I never met Henri Lefebvre or saw him lecture. Some of my friends who did said he was a real knockout. Others who had contact with him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his boyish passions, his virility—even in old age—and the posse of young, attractive women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him as a Rabelaisian monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one. I’m sorry I missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct, live. But I did see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s. The series The Spirit of Freedom was strictly for insomniacs and appeared in the wee hours on Channel 4. Each of the four programs tried to assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the twentieth century. The cynical and pejorative tone throughout wasn’t too surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard- Henri Lévy, France’s pinup thinker and Paris-Match’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. 1 The night I watched, an old white-haired man sat in front of the camera, dressed in a blue denim work shirt and xix
p r e F a c e rumpled brown tweed jacket. In his ninetieth year, it was obvious to viewers Lefebvre hadn’t long left to live. Even Lévy described his interviewee as “tired that afternoon. His face was pallid, his eyes blood-shot. I felt he was overwhelmed from the start and clearly bored at having to answer my questions.” 2 I didn’t care that Lefebvre looked tired and bored that night. I remember he kept telling Lévy he’d rather talk about the present and the future, about things going on around him in the world, rather than recount tales of bygone days. More than anything, I’d been overjoyed to glimpse the old man himself, and I still vividly remember the moment. It was my first real sighting of a scholar who’d stirred my intellectual curiosity for several years already. The long-awaited English translation of The Production of Space had just appeared in bookstores around that time, and Lefebvre was much in vogue within my own discipline, geography. I was still in the throes of my doctoral thesis, too, using his work as theoretical sustenance; my first published article, bearing his name in its title, had been accepted in a professional journal. I felt like I was about to enter the adult world of academia with Lefebvre as my guiding spirit, a man I admired not just for what he wrote but for how he lived. His rich, long, adventurous life of thought and political engagement epitomized for me the very essence of an intellectual. I found him refreshingly different from the post- Sartrean “master thinkers” like Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser, more in touch with everyday life and everyday people; Lefebvre spoke to me as a radical person as well as a radical brain. I loved his grand style. He wasn’t afraid to think about politics and current affairs on a grand, sweeping scale or to philosophize what he called “the totality of life and thought.” Lefebvre wanted to “de-scholarize philosophy,” wanted to make it living and pungent, normative and holistic. 3 Indeed, “to think the totality” was Lefebvre’s very own pocket definition of philosophy itself, the magic ingredient of his “metaphilosophy,” through which, like xx
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Preface: “A Youthfulness of Heart”<br />
I never met <strong>Henri</strong> <strong>Lefebvre</strong> or saw him lecture. Some of my friends<br />
who did said he was a real knockout. Others who had contact with<br />
him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his boyish passions,<br />
his virility—even in old age—and the posse of young, attractive<br />
women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him as a Rabelaisian<br />
monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one. I’m sorry I<br />
missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct, live. But I did<br />
see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s. The series<br />
The Spirit of Freedom was strictly for insomniacs and appeared<br />
in the wee hours on Channel 4. Each of the four programs tried<br />
to assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the twentieth<br />
century. The cynical and pejorative tone throughout wasn’t<br />
too surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard-<br />
<strong>Henri</strong> Lévy, France’s pinup thinker and Paris-Match’s answer to<br />
Jean-Paul Sartre. 1 The night I watched, an old white-haired man<br />
sat in front of the camera, dressed in a blue denim work shirt and<br />
xix
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