Introduction
Who was Henri Lefebvre? Was he a philosopher, a sociologist, or an urban planner? A philosopher whose path turned to themes that truly didn’t belong to him? It is hard to define with accuracy an author who along his whole life dedicated himself and his intellectual action to question the present. Lefebvre deeply embodies the Socratic ideal of search for the truth based on the radical discussion of the society that stood before his eyes. He interlaces with active politics several intellectual interests, among which literature, language, history, philosophy, and urban planning. In order to set his intellectual biography one must above all keep in mind that one stands before a theoretician who questioned his present reality constantly on various plans of research. Besides, at the core of such a modus operandi, he decided to take part on attempts of subversion. “Theory” and “praxis” with Lefebvre very often result into a noble alliance: the fertility of his writing immediately connects to a remarkable social and political commitment. Equipped with an irreverent and provocative character he always defined himself as “political writer”1 and he never concealed the need to substantiate his studies into everyday life.
Henri Lefebvre Between Philosophy and Sociology: A Thinker Who Defies Categorization
It is no mistake to think that moving to the field of urban studies and sociology was produced by the political assumption that was required by his philosophy: As he beheld the explosion of the city caused by Fordism and by advanced capitalism systems, Lefebvre considered it necessary to turn into a novel direction. “Later on, I started to analyze space, that is the city and the urban problematic. Architecture, urban planning, spatial planning, with neo-capitalism, have become political problems. Certainly, the change of goals and stakes has caused a scattering of thought. But, as far as I am concerned, this dispersion is more illusory than real. I know well that I have been criticized because of it, but all I can do is to protest against this disapproval. I have never developed any system. What it is expected of a theoretician is the development of a system. How many are there already on the market? I refuse to add yet another one to their very long list. I refuse the system, following a acute experience that ranges from Hegelism to Stalinism. This refusal doesn’t however either include incoherence nor dispersion”.2 To Lefebvre therefore there isn’t incongruency in taking up urban studies after having dedicated himself for a while to Heidegger’s, Nietzsche’s and, mainly, Marx’s philosophy. Studies on space are a consequential and immediate passage concerning political problems derived from the Fordist capitalism of the second half of the nineteenth century. In other words, along the sociological studies, Lefebvre faces new problems produced by the present that he beholds; sociology is the tool that allows him to substantiate and to politicize philosophical studies. Studies on space and on the city consecrate his intellectual path in the arena of social and political discussion.3 We are thus standing before a poliedric author who has already become a classic in textbooks, as in Theory and experience by Simon Parker, in which he is recognized for having provided the “most important link between ‘classical urban theory’ and the new urban studies that have developed in recent decades.”4
The connections that stand between Lefebvre’s thought and Walter Benjamin—another philosopher that enquired on the changes of the city and the urban from an innovative reinterpretation of the Marxian legacy—are unique, although not entirely out of place. The fact that the German philosopher quotes La conscience mystifiée5—published in 1936 by Lefebvre and Guterman—in his essay Eduard Fusch, Collector and Historian, is clear evidence that Benjamin had come across the reflections of the French author.6 La conscience mystifiée is a pamphlet in which Lefebvre and his friend Guterman convey their opinion on the ascension of Nazi totalitarianism by means of the Marxian concept of “alienation” and describe its social dynamics of mystifying legitimization regarding the working class and the poorest population. This is Lefebvre’s only text that is explicitly quoted, but we can most probably assume that Benjamin while collecting his notes from the Passages was aware of the theory regarding everyday life, merchandize and the consumption society perceived by young Lefebvre. Both have lived the cultural Parisian atmosphere and thus the debate surrounding surrealism and Dadaism, both currents that concerned the city, the urban and Marx’s thought, from a novel and extremely heterodox perspective.
Young Lefebvre: Philosophy as Shared Critical Thought
Henri Lefebvre was born on June 16, 1901 in Hagetmau, a small village in the Landes, in Aquitaine. He’ll experience the shock of the First World War that will sign throughout his entire life the intellectual attitude of his philosophical and sociological reflection. Since his childhood and teenage years in fact he will live the horror of man’s everyday life and experience when facing atrocities. It is precisely starting from the grip of the Great War that paralyzes everybody’s life in Europe that Lefebvre dreams of an overturning, of a concrete transformation of life, of a getaway from a state of powerlessness, minority, and oppression. Therefore Lefebvre’s literature will take charge of the historical events of the twentieth century. His philosophical proposal is a continuous weighing of thought and the actual life experience of men.
In 1921 he gets to Paris. Previously—when he was fifteen—he had discovered philosophy through juvenile versions of Nietzsche and Spinoza. Through these authors he will reflect upon the dialectics between “thinking” and “living.” Due to Maurice Blondel, a renowned catholic teacher from Aix-en-Provence, whose fame is due to his heterodox reading of the Christian tradition, from which Lefebvre will however distance himself.7 Lefebvre doesn’t straightaway approach philosophy, since he first prepares for a career in the navy that is to be interrupted very early due to lung disease, and it will be precisely this condition that will lead to the opportunity of embracing philosophical studies. In the French Capital, at the Sorbonne Victor-Cuisin Library he meets Pierre Morhange, Norbert Guterman, Georges Politzer, and Georges Friedmann, with whom, initially competing with the surrealist group and by antithesis against the positivist or Bergsonian philosophy that dominated the time, he will in 1924 form the group “Philosophies.”8 These young philosophers of the first postwar were educated against the dominant ideologies in the philosophical domain, profoundly affected by the “Dreyfus case” and by the first worldwide conflict; they tried to create new paths from a theoretical and political-practical point of view. The postulate they had committed themselves to was that of endeavoring a search for knowledge and politics fields completely unheard-of; thus against Bergson and against the positivism the “young philosophers” propose a radical renovation of philosophy: philosophy should be possibility of thinking the impossible, dream and simultaneously performative action, an authentic intellectual turn over that finds its reason to exist in the everyday thinking and living. The radical antagonism regarding the more respected philosophy theories will bring the “Philosophies” group to approach the Surrealists, although both groups recognized each other as rivals. An enduring friendship will be born following Lefebvre’s article on the Dada movement, published by the homonymous journal of the “Philosophies” cultural circle.9 Within this frame the intuition to realize everyday life and urban space into the work of art metaphor will arise. To Lefebvre, Dada is the substantiation of a pungent critique of the existing, and he is seduced by the radical critique to the society of that period. It is paramount to highlight how Lefebvre’s activity belongs to a cultural effervescence that encounters numerous young French theoreticians; in the range of a few years various journals and political circles will be born and will die, between the two wars France will host prolific movements that will be beheaded with the Second World War.10 Lefebvre is part of the disquiet11 of a generation who wishes to enact the social change, live it in a performative way in the everyday life and intellectually finds that philosophical currents such as Bergsonism and positivism lack answers. Philosophy can survive and keep on possessing a meaning only if it succeeds in listening to man’s experience, underlining its contradictions in order to raise them to the status of object of study and henceforth of genuine transformation. This transformative conatus associated to philosophy surely derives from Spinoza readings. However, as we have a while back hinted, its places its foundations in the trauma of the Great War, that brought with it destructive savageries and an anthropologic and...