Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

e v e r y d a y L i F e
wrote “easy poetry” and “clear prose.” 35 The Abbey of Thélème
even seemed to anticipate the young Marx’s radiant vision: a “communist
utopia that opened itself resolutely towards the future. It proposed
an image of man fully developed, in a free society. At the
same time, Rabelais knows he’s dreaming, because this society is
headed towards terrible ordeals and chronic catastrophes.” 36
Lefebvre himself stepped into Rabelais’s unfettered world of
excess, affirming throughout his life his own free will in everyday
life—for better or for worse. He willfully ignored abstinence
and austerity, as well as a plebeian asceticism that informed a lot
of his generation’s visions of Marxism and communism. All the
same, there was a flip side to Lefebvre’s Rabelaisian nature, something
not entirely positive; not least was his excessive publication
(writing books at a rate that the most prolific wrote articles) and
his excessive libido (like Rabelais’s vagabond hero Panurge, extricated
from all social and familial ties, Lefebvre seemed obsessed
with a search for women and had a penchant for marriage). Indeed,
Lefebvre’s Rabelaisian excesses make his output effervescent
and vital yet repetitive and overblown, like a drunk who repeats
the same old joke to the same cronies every night at the bar. It
was excess, too, that made much of Lefebvre’s personal life chaotic,
leaving ex-partners and ex-wives to pick up the pieces of a
Lefebvrian personal liberty.
Still, excess became a redoubtable political force, and the most
magical, supreme, and excessive event Rabelais documented—the
peasant festival—enacted a joyous, primal kind of liberty that
Lefebvre would never renounce, either personally or politically.
He envisages the festival as a special, potentially modern form of
Marxist praxis that could erupt on an urban street or in an alienated
factory. The festival was a pure spontaneous moment, a popular
“safety value”, a catharsis for everyday passions and dreams,
something both liberating and antithetical: to papal infallibility
and Stalinist dogma, to Hitlerism and free-market earnestness, to
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