Accueil
https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/merrifield-lefebvre-intro.pdf
"I owe David Harvey an enormous and incalculable debt for his intellectual guidance and friendship over the years and for opening my eyes to Henri Lefebvre; Ed Soja’s Lefebvrian interventions always provoke and instruct." (p.XVII)
"The long-awaited English translation of The Production of Space had just appeared in bookstores around that time, and Lefebvre was much in vogue within my own discipline, geography. I was still in the throes of my doctoral thesis, too, using his work as theoretical sustenance; my first published article, bearing his name in its title, had been accepted in a professional journal. I felt like I was about to enter the adult world of academia with Lefebvre as my guiding spirit, a man I admired not just for what he wrote but for how he lived. His rich, long, adventurous life of thought and political engagement epitomized for me the very essence of an intellectual. I found him refreshingly different from the post-Sartrean “master thinkers” like Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser, more in touch with everyday life and everyday people ; Lefebvre spoke to me as a radical person as well as a radical brain.
I loved his grand style. He wasn’t afraid to think about politics and current affairs on a grand, sweeping scale or to philosophize what he called “the totality of life and thought.” Lefebvre wanted to “de-scholarize philosophy,” wanted to make it living and pungent, normative and holistic. Indeed, “to think the totality” was Lefebvre’s very own pocket definition of philosophy itself, the magic ingredient of his “metaphilosophy,” through which, like He was a Marxist who introduced into France a whole body of humanist Marxism. But he was a Marxist who seemed to reinvent himself, conceive a new sound, probe a new idea, reach a new note, almost every decade. Each reinvention built on an already accomplished body of work, yet took it further, propelled it onward. Frequently, these restless formulations recreated the old world in a new way; other times they somehow anticipated what was about to unfold in reality. He authored more than sixty books, since translated into thirty different languages, and made brilliant analyses on dialectics and alienation, everyday life and urbanism. The “retired” professor never let up in the 1970s and 1980s, never rested on his emeritus laurels." (pp.XX-XXI)
"He wrote every book as if it was his last: feverously, rapidly—perhaps, on occasion, too rapidly. Many, in fact, were dictated, the spoken word transcribed on the page by faithful secretaries, current girlfriends, or a latest wife. Arguably, he undertook too much during his long career, conceiving brilliant, original projects yet rarely completing any of them, leaving them instead gaping, incomplete, suggestive, as he flitted on to something else." (p.XXII)
"Lefebvre may have been the most self-effacing and least narrow minded Marxist who ever lived, a utopian cognizant of the discredited utopias of the Eastern Bloc. A feisty critic of Stalinism from its inception, Lefebvre spent thirty years ducking, diving, and dodging the French Communist Party bigwigs, who followed orders from Moscow and took no prisoners. These endless run-ins with the hacks, and his rejection of Soviet-style socialism, never squared to a rejection of socialism, or of Marxism, because neither in the USSR bore any resemblance to Lefebvre’s democratic vision." (pp.XXIV)
-Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre. A Critical Introduction, Routledge, 2006, 196 pages.
"I owe David Harvey an enormous and incalculable debt for his intellectual guidance and friendship over the years and for opening my eyes to Henri Lefebvre; Ed Soja’s Lefebvrian interventions always provoke and instruct." (p.XVII)
"The long-awaited English translation of The Production of Space had just appeared in bookstores around that time, and Lefebvre was much in vogue within my own discipline, geography. I was still in the throes of my doctoral thesis, too, using his work as theoretical sustenance; my first published article, bearing his name in its title, had been accepted in a professional journal. I felt like I was about to enter the adult world of academia with Lefebvre as my guiding spirit, a man I admired not just for what he wrote but for how he lived. His rich, long, adventurous life of thought and political engagement epitomized for me the very essence of an intellectual. I found him refreshingly different from the post-Sartrean “master thinkers” like Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser, more in touch with everyday life and everyday people ; Lefebvre spoke to me as a radical person as well as a radical brain.
I loved his grand style. He wasn’t afraid to think about politics and current affairs on a grand, sweeping scale or to philosophize what he called “the totality of life and thought.” Lefebvre wanted to “de-scholarize philosophy,” wanted to make it living and pungent, normative and holistic. Indeed, “to think the totality” was Lefebvre’s very own pocket definition of philosophy itself, the magic ingredient of his “metaphilosophy,” through which, like He was a Marxist who introduced into France a whole body of humanist Marxism. But he was a Marxist who seemed to reinvent himself, conceive a new sound, probe a new idea, reach a new note, almost every decade. Each reinvention built on an already accomplished body of work, yet took it further, propelled it onward. Frequently, these restless formulations recreated the old world in a new way; other times they somehow anticipated what was about to unfold in reality. He authored more than sixty books, since translated into thirty different languages, and made brilliant analyses on dialectics and alienation, everyday life and urbanism. The “retired” professor never let up in the 1970s and 1980s, never rested on his emeritus laurels." (pp.XX-XXI)
"He wrote every book as if it was his last: feverously, rapidly—perhaps, on occasion, too rapidly. Many, in fact, were dictated, the spoken word transcribed on the page by faithful secretaries, current girlfriends, or a latest wife. Arguably, he undertook too much during his long career, conceiving brilliant, original projects yet rarely completing any of them, leaving them instead gaping, incomplete, suggestive, as he flitted on to something else." (p.XXII)
"Lefebvre may have been the most self-effacing and least narrow minded Marxist who ever lived, a utopian cognizant of the discredited utopias of the Eastern Bloc. A feisty critic of Stalinism from its inception, Lefebvre spent thirty years ducking, diving, and dodging the French Communist Party bigwigs, who followed orders from Moscow and took no prisoners. These endless run-ins with the hacks, and his rejection of Soviet-style socialism, never squared to a rejection of socialism, or of Marxism, because neither in the USSR bore any resemblance to Lefebvre’s democratic vision." (pp.XXIV)
-Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre. A Critical Introduction, Routledge, 2006, 196 pages.
