Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
son semblable, son frère within the leaves of another Rabelaisian
prophet, the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose study Rabelais
and His World elevated Rabelais to the summit of the history of
laughter. 32 Rabelaisian laughter was intimately tied to freedom,
Bakhtin similarly argued, especially to the courage needed to
establish and safeguard it. Written in the 1930s, during the long
nights of Stalin’s purges, Rabelais and His World endorsed the
spirit of freedom when it was increasingly being suppressed.
Bakhtin’s text wasn’t translated into French until 1970 and so was
unread by Lefebvre in 1955; it came to English audiences in that
big party year of 1968. Bakhtin’s closest contemporary would have
been a book and a theorist Lefebvre did actually know: Homo
Ludens (1938)—“Man the Player”—by the Dutch medieval historian
Johan Huizinga, who emphasized the play element in Western
culture just as Hitler got deadly serious across Europe.
Like Bakhtin and Huizinga, Lefebvre adores Rabelais’s laugher,
but his laughing Rabelais guffawed as a probing critic. Lefebvre’s
Rabelais chronicled how nascent bourgeois culture, with its hypocritical
moral imperatives and capital accumulation exigencies,
repressed the subversive spirit and basic livelihood of the peasantry.
Rabelais was a utopian communist after Lefebvre’s own heart; if
party communism resembled Thomas More’s Utopia, with its
ordered, regimented island paradise, hermetically sealed off from
anything that might contaminate it, Lefebvre’s was a libertarian
“Abbey of Thélème,” with neither clocks nor walls. There, Rabelais
urged “hypocrites and bigots, cynics and hungry lawyers” to “stay
away”; there, laws and statutes weren’t king but people’s “own free
will”: “DO WHAT YOU WILL,” proclaimed Rabelais, as he clinked
glasses with a few old pals. 33 “Our Rabelais,” writes Lefebvre, “had
a utopia at once less immediately dangerous than More’s, [yet] more
beautiful and more seductive … a strange abbey, not a church but
a fine library … an immense chateau.” 34 Inside, everybody drank,
sang and played harmonious music, spoke five or six languages,
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