Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
4. “An Interview with Henri Lefebvre,” Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space no. 5 (1987): 27–38.
5. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life—Volume 2 (Verso, London, 2002),
p. 3.
6. Ibid., p. 41.
7. Ibid., p. 89.
8. See David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd:
A Study of the Changing American Character (Doubleday Books, New
York, 1953).
9. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Simon and Schuster, New
York, 1956).
10. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial
Society (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964). Alongside Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Marcuse was one of the pioneers of the
celebrated “Frankfurt School of Social Research,” a left-wing think tank
that worked on critical theory, aesthetics, and politics. In attempting to
figure out modern industrial and technological society, new state forms,
and ideological manipulation, they brought Marx, Hegel, and Freud into
an imaginative dialogue. In the 1930s, the School, dominated by Jews, was
forced to quit Germany; Marcuse bivouacked for years in the United States
and taught philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.
11. Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre, p. 70.
12. Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval (Monthly
Review Press, New York, 1969), p. 31; emphasis in original. Marshall
Berman, at the sprite age of twenty-three, voiced a similar critique of
Marcuse’s “closed, fatalistic perspective” in 1964. “Marcuse has become
more concrete with advancing age, more involved than ever in the sociopathology
of everyday life. … [He] tries to explain advanced industrial
society as a smoothly functioning system in which every aspect of life reinforces
the others, an infernal machine in which all parts mesh to grind the
spirit down. … He is not accustomed to [society’s] dark and twisted ways”;
Marshall Berman, “Theory and Practice,” Partisan Review (Fall 1964):
619.
13. The butterfly figures as a powerful romantic metaphor in La Somme et
le Reste (see, especially, Tome II, p. 428), even as a symbol of Lefebvre’s
anarchist tendencies. One incident in particular is recalled, from Lefebvre’s
military service in 1926. Out on an infantry exercise one early summer
morning, “I glimpsed ten steps ahead of me, at the side of the lane, a lovely
butterfly whose rose wings where damp; this prevented him from flying. I
hastened myself, took him as delicately as possible and placed him down
on the embankment.” Three seconds later, a corporal sticks a rifle butt in
Lefebvre’s back. The captain on horseback shouts, “Chasseur Lefebvre! 8
days in police detention.” “This lad announces himself as a dangerous subversive
element … a soft dreamer, a saviour of butterflies … an intellectual
anarchist.”
14. Critique of Everyday Life—Volume II, p. 348 (emphasis in original).
175