Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
feelings in a society riven by upheavals, convulsions, and irresolvable
conflicts. “This offered their extravagant subjectivities a
total—or apparently total—adventure.”
Stendhal’s romanticism affirmed disparate elements of society:
“women, young people, political rebels, exiles, intellectuals,
who dabbled in deviant experiments (eroticism, alcohol, hashish),
half-crazed debauchees, drunks, misfits, successive and abortive
geniuses, arrivistes, Parisian dandies and provincial snobs.” 42
This ragged, motley array of people attempted to live out, within
everyday bourgeois society, their ideal solutions to bourgeois society,
challenging its moral order, surviving in its core, “like a maggot
in a fruit,” trying to eat their way out from the inside. They
sought to reinvent the world. And using all their powers of symbolism,
imagination, and fiction, a new subjectivity was born, a
new lived experience conceived; outrageous fantasy succeeded in
shaping grubby reality. Could, wonders Lefebvre, a “new romanticism”
do the same in the 1960s? Could a “new” new romanticism
do it at the beginning of the twenty-first century? And who are
the “maggots” eating their way out from the inside of our rotten
society?
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