Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

a F t e r w o r d
Almost a century on, progressives need the greatest caution
in everything we do; we need to look around on every side before
we can make a single step. The gravity of the situation isn’t lost
on any of us. And yet, at the same time, there’s a sense that we
should, and can, lighten up. After all, even amid the existential
no-exits of Kafka, a black humor radiates, a glint of light warms
a cold corner: as Kafka’s fellow countryman Milan Kundera notes
in his latest book Le Rideau [The Curtain], Kafka “wanted to
descend into the dark depths of a joke [blague].” 11 It was comedy
that let K. deal with tragedy and let him pull back the curtain, rip it
down, and tear it apart. He can still help us see what lies inside and
beyond the wrapping, and H. knew it. Indeed, Kundera’s metaphor
seems apt for H., who ripped down curtains suspended in front of
our Kafkaseque modern world, demasked them, named what lay
behind them, and asked us to look within.
Lefebvre’s most Kafkaesque book is Vers le cybernanthrope
(1971), where H. became a land surveyor facing the cybernanthrope’s
tribunal, trapped within the confines of his rational castle,
searching for a way out, confronting curtains of systematized mystification.
In its corridors, the cybernanthropic last man stalks the
Lefebvrian total man in a duel over our collective destiny. But it’s
humor that will win out in the end. The cybernanthrope, H. says, is
neither tragic nor comical: he’s farcical. He’s a product of a farcical
situation and farcical events. Of course, he doesn’t see himself as
farcical, because he’s rather earnest, taking seriously his duties, his
realism. What’s in store for us, H. thinks, is another world war, a
guerilla war that any potential total man needs to keep on waging,
using as arms spirit and satire. We’ll have to be perpetual inventors,
H. says, restless creators and re-creators. We’ll have to cover
our tracks, engage in pranks and jokes, knock cybernanthropes off
balance, keep them guessing. For vanquishing, for even engaging
in battle, we’ll valorize imperfections and disequilibria, troubles
and gaps, excesses and faults. We’ll valorize desire and passion,
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