Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

p r e F a c e
if, in fact, he was really an anarchist. “No,” he replied. “I’m a
Marxist, of course, so that one day we can all become anarchists!” 12
His Marxism was unashamedly Rabelaisian, nurtured in the fields
as well as in the factories, festive and rambunctious, prioritizing
“lived moments,” irruptive acts of contestation: building occupations
and street demos, free expressionist art and theater, flying
pickets, rent strikes, and a general strike. Here the action might
be serious—sometimes deadly serious—or playful. Lefebvre dug
the idea of politics as festival. Rural festal traditions, he said in
Critique of Everyday Life (1947), “tighten social links at the same
time as they give free rein to all desires which have been pent up
by collective discipline and necessities of work.” Festivals represent
“Dionysiac life … differing from everyday life only in the
explosion of forces which had been slowly accumulating in and via
everyday life itself.” 13
* * *
A few summers ago, I decided to check out Lefebvre’s Dionysian
roots for myself. One warm July evening I arrived at the village
where he’d grown up and vacationed during college recesses. I
wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for in Navarrenx, or what
I’d find, but I knew somehow the pilgrimage would help me better
understand the man himself, and his milieu. Sure enough, I
realized immediately I’d discovered the rustic ribald body to the
Parisian professor’s cool analytical head. A marvel of Middle
Age town planning aside the River Oloron, in the foothills of the
Pyrénées-Atlantique, the bastide of Navarrenx remains charming,
sleepy, and just about vital five centuries on. Imposing ramparts
with two ancient town gates—Porte Saint-Germain and Porte
Saint-Antoine—encircle its grid pattern of higgledy-piggledy
streets that are today lined with a few boucheries and boulangeries,
the odd melancholy café, and several pizzerias. Those walls
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