Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

e v e r y d a y L i F e
my green candle, let’s go to war, since you’re so keen on it!”) But
on festival day, all masks were dropped, all ideology exposed, all
pretence pilloried. On festival day, another more immediate truth
was heard, in frank and simple terms, amidst the laughter and
the foolishness—because of the impropriety and parody. People
literally drank and laughed away their fears. Laughter opened up
people’s eyes, posited the world anew in its most naive and soberest
aspects.
In 1955, Lefebvre warned how we’d lost Rabelais’s laughter.
And in losing it, he said, we’ve lost a big part of our cultural heritage,
even lost a weapon in our revolutionary arsenal. Lefebvre’s
study of Rabelais, by embracing festival, laughter, and the medieval
sage as educator, evokes another instance of his “regressive–progressive”
method: going backward, he suggests, helps us go forward
and onward. For Lefebvre, the laugh of Rabelais bawled the
song of innocence, not a song of deception, “a naïve life that sets
its own laws upon solid principles, without struggling against itself
nor without having to repress. … It’s thus that the living humanism
of Rabelais can serve the socialist humanist cause: by laughing.” 37
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