Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
Somme et le Reste. “We will call ‘Moment,’ ” he says, “the attempt
to achieve the total realization of a possibility. Possibility offers
itself; and it reveals itself. It is determined and consequently it is
limited and partial. Therefore to wish to live it as a totality is to
exhaust it as well as to fulfill it. The Moment wants to be freely
total; it exhausts itself in the act of being lived.” 14
The “moment” assumed the same gravity for Lefebvre as white
spaces between words did for the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. “The
blank,” the latter said, intervenes in the text to such a degree that
it becomes part of the work itself. It becomes a secret door letting
the reader enter. Once inside the reader can subvert each verse,
rearrange its rhythm, reappropriate the poem as a covert author:
“The text imposes itself,” Mallarmé wrote, “in various places, near
or far from the latent guiding thread, according to what seems to
be the probable sense.” 15 Mallarmé’s poetry disrupted linear textual
time much as Lefebvre’s theory of moments sought to disrupt
Henri Bergson’s notion of linear real time—his durée, or duration.
Creation, for Bergson, is like the flow of an arrow on a teleological
trajectory. “The line [of the arrow] may be divided into as many
parts as we wish,” Bergson said, “of any length that we wish, and
it will always be the same line.” 16 Life itself, Bergson insisted,
unfolds with similar temporality, and we comprehend ourselves in
his unbroken, absolute time, not in space: “we perceive existence
when we place ourselves in duration in order to go from that duration
to moments, instead of starting from moments in order to bind
them again and to construct duration.” 17
Lefebvre goes against the grain of time’s arrow of progress,
building a framework of historical duration from the standpoint
of the moment—from, in other words, the exact opposite pole to
Bergson’s. Lefebvre hated Bergson’s guts. In La Somme et le Reste
(Tome II, p. 383), he writes, pulling no punches, “If, during this
period [1924–26], there was a thinker for whom we (the young
philosophers group) professed without hesitation the most utter
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