Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

p r e F a c e
always inquisitive, he continued to travel far and wide, making
prescient analyses on the changing nature of the state and the role
of space in the “survival of capitalism.” As an oeuvre, Lefebvre’s
fascinating breadth and imaginative reach are perhaps unmatched.
Manuel Castells, a former assistant of Lefebvre’s at Nanterre in the
late 1960s, once remarked that Lefebvre “doesn’t know anything
about how the economy works, how technology works … but he
had a genius for intuiting what really was happening. Almost like
an artist … he was probably the greatest philosopher on cities we
have had.” 6
Lefebvre blasted out his books “jerkily, hastily, nervously.” 7
This modus operandi is the story of his whole literary life; it was
a habit he’d never relinquish, whether in war or peace. He wrote
every book as if it was his last: feverously, rapidly—perhaps, on
occasion, too rapidly. Many, in fact, were dictated, the spoken
word transcribed on the page by faithful secretaries, current girlfriends,
or a latest wife. Arguably, he undertook too much during
his long career, conceiving brilliant, original projects yet rarely
completing any of them, leaving them instead gaping, incomplete,
suggestive, as he flitted on to something else. “I loved too much,”
he admitted in his autobiography La Somme et le Reste (Tome I,
p. 48), “the bubbling and the fermenting of an idea that burst out
new and fresh.” On the other hand, this is what made his work so
experimental, so approachable; you can enter it and write your own
chapter within it. Lefebvre’s method followed Jean-Paul Sartre’s
ideal method: “It is the nature of an intellectual quest,” Sartre said
in Search for a Method, “to be undefined. To name it and to define
it is to wrap it up and tie the knot.” 8
La Somme et le Reste is one of the most original works of
Marxist philosophy ever and, to my mind, Lefebvre’s greatest
book. Written between 1957 and 1958 while Lefebvre worked in
Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS),
the two-volume, eight-hundred-leave tome was manically drafted
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