by Andy Merrifield, The Brooklyn Rail, 2004
I never met
Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, nor saw him lecture.
Some of my friends who did said he was a real knockout. Others who
had contact with him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his
boyish passions, his virility—even in old age—and the posse of
young, attractive women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him
as a Rabelaisian monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one.
I’m sorry I missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct,
live. But I did see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s.
The series, “The Spirit of Freedom,” was strictly for insomniacs
and appeared in the wee hours. Each of the four programs tried to
assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the
twentieth-century. The cynical tone throughout wasn’t too
surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard-Henri
Lévy—BHL, as the French media know him—Paris-Match’s answer to
Jean-Paul Sartre.
The night I watched, an old white-haired man sat in
front of the camera, dressed in a blue denim work shirt and rumpled
brown tweed jacket. In his ninetieth year, it was obvious to viewers
Lefebvre hadn’t long left to live. Even Lévy described his
interviewee as “tired that afternoon. His face was pallid, his eyes
blood-shot. I felt he was overwhelmed from the start and clearly
bored at having to answer my questions...I’d come hoping he would
play a certain role, and this he did with a show of goodwill I hadn’t
expected. I have to admit he also did it with elegance and talent.”
For those
savvy with Lefebvre, either in person or on the page, this show of
goodwill, and his elegance and talent in answering questions,
wouldn’t shock. That he’d been around for almost the entire
twentieth-century meant he possessed a unique, first-hand insight on
French intellectual affairs. During that time, Lefebvre had lived
through two World Wars, drunk wine and coffee with the Dadaists and
Surrealists, joined, left and joined again the French Communist Party
(PCF), fought for the Resistance Movement, driven a cab in Paris,
broadcasted on radio in Toulouse, taught philosophy and sociology at
numerous universities and high-schools, godfathered the 1968
generation of student rebels. At the same time, he’d authored over
60 books, since translated into 30 different languages, introduced
into France a whole body of humanist Marxism, made brilliant analyses
on dialectics and alienation, on everyday life and urbanism, on the
state and the role of space in the “survival of capitalism.”
And yet, it
wasn’t Lefebvre’s own work that concerned Lévy. Lévy was more
interested in other figures from France’s past: poet surrealists
André Breton and Louis Aragon, writer-communists Paul Nizan and
Georges Politzer, and philosopher Alexandre Kojève (who made Hegel
hip in interwar France). Lefebvre knew each and all, and that’s
what Lévy wanted to talk about. Lefebvre had been an indispensable
observer, a reporter from the frontline, who’d been there and
befriended other French intellectuals and outlived them all. Now he
could recount old tales to upstart disbelievers, re-live life and
death struggles of bygone days, days now buried in the basement of
our imaginations. Lefebvre, too, was somebody whom the incredulous
Lévy could summon up to discredit the radical cause, to scoff at
that silly quest for liberty, equality and fraternity.
I’d been
overjoyed to glimpse Henri Lefebvre that night, and still vividly
remember the moment. But I’ve hated BHL ever since, and
cringe each time I see him on French TV. Little did I
realize back then—couldn’t realize—was how Lévy’s “Spirit
of Freedom,” and the companion book Les Aventures de la Liberté,
set the tone for the shallowness and narrowness the new century would
soon epitomize. The Berlin Wall hadn’t long tumbled down, and every
capitalist punter was wallowing in the glory of its demise. A
seventy-year bad-rap suddenly became a spectacular media bonanza. A
new spirit of freedom dawned and we’re still in its scary midst.
Thus, the same year as Les Aventures de la Liberté hit French
bookstores (1991), across the Atlantic another scurrilous book by
Francis Fukuyama danced to a similar refrain: “the end of history.”
Extending an article-length thesis aired a few years earlier in the
neo-con The National Interest, Fukuyama flagged up “the end point
of mankind’s ideological evolution...the final form of human
government”: liberal bourgeois democracy. We’ve reached the
moment, Fukuyama bragged, of “remarkable consensus.” Liberal
democracy had won its legitimacy, conquering all rival ideologies,
and, he thought, we should be glad. Hereditary monarchy ran its
course a while back; so had fascism; and now, apparently, had
communism. There’s no other tale to tell, no alternative left, no
other big idea, nothing aside from bourgeois democracy. Intriguingly,
1991 was also the year something else gave way, when another big idea
bit the dust. During the middle of the night, on June 29th, a few
days after his 90th birthday, Henri Lefebvre passed away peacefully
in a hospital in Pau, Southwest France; the twentieth-century, the
“short twentieth-century” as historian Eric Hobsbawm described
it, replete with all its promise and horrors, had come to a close.
(Hobsbawm actually identifies 1991 as its cut-off point.)
Lefebvre’s
departure accorded a lengthy obituary in the major French daily, Le
Monde, who pithily described his life, as only the French could, as
“adventures of a dialectician.” The commentary bid adieu to the
“last great classical philosopher,” to the last great French
Marxist. This wasn’t so much a valediction to a generation, said Le
Monde, as a style, a style that wasn’t afraid to philosophize on a
grand, sweeping scale, nor to “de-scholarize philosophy,” to make
it living and pungent, normative and holistic. Indeed, “to think
the totality” was Henri Lefebvre’s very own pocket definition of
philosophy, the magic ingredient of his “metaphilosophy,” through
which, like Marx, he’d grasp everything “at the root.” His
heterodox Marxist rigor, his optimism of the intellect as well as the
will, his frank concern for profane human happiness, all seem
especially instructive and inspiring in an era when crony
philistinism has supposedly rendered such a style old hat.
“Love
and woman have had the profoundest influence on me,” Lefebvre once
confessed, typically. “I’ve taken only three realities seriously:
love, philosophy and the Party. Three disappointments? Up to a
certain point.” These words, and other nuggets assembled in
Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre, contrast markedly with the somber
clichés of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Les Aventures de la Liberté.
Conducted around the same time, in January 1991, in his rambling 18th
century family house in the Pyrenean bastide of Navarrenx, a more
upbeat Lefebvre emerges. Close to death yet still full of life,
Lefebvre faced two interlocutors, in the company of Catherine
Regulier, his longstanding wife, a former communist militant 50 years
his junior, and a cat that refused to budge from the old man’s lap.
It’s hard to imagine a less narrow-minded, more self-effacing and
self-critical Marxist in these discussions, 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 PCF 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 itself, nor of Marxism, since neither in
the USSR bore any resemblance to Lefebvre’s democratic
vision. “Socialism until now,” he claimed, “failed before the
problem of the everyday. It had promised to change life, but only did
so superficially...The wound there is that everything became too
serious, horribly serious. They didn’t know how to improve the
everyday for real people...life was monotone, monochrome, tainted by
a repetitive ideology.”
Our “New
World Order,” as Poppy Bush proclaimed, likewise in 1991, has
created its own monotone and monochrome world, a reality continually
tainted by the repetitive ideology of the free market.* But the
Stalinist One-State we once knew over there has since come home to
roost here, a little closer to home, in the guise of a new Washington
consensus that lies, cheats and bullies its way to capitalist fame
and glory. Never has deceit and corruption been so dominant a part of
a political arsenal. Beset by conflict, crisis, war, terrorist threat
and fundamentalism of every stripe, never has the legitimacy of
liberal democracy looked so extraordinarily fragile. And yet, at the
same time, never has there been such a cowardly capitulation to the
present, such a bankruptcy of ideas about what the future can and
ought to be. The tragedy is palpable. Truth and falsity have
degenerated into interchangeable language games, fair game for the
rich and powerful, for those who control the media. Fukuyama’s
belief that liberal democracies have less incentive for war, and have
universally satisfied people’s need for reciprocal recognition,
seems even more ridiculous than it did a decade ago.
Lefebvre was
a rare and necessary breed, a utopian intellectual engagé, somebody
who moved with the times yet helped shape and defy those times,
interpreting the world at the same time as he somehow changed it.
Philosopher-cum-sociologist, sociologist-cum-literary critic,
literary critic-cum-urbanist, urbanist-cum-geographer, he was too
eclectic to be any one of those categories alone. Too communist to be
a romantic, too romantic to be a communist, his oeuvre bewilders and
bedazzles, defies pigeonholing and classification, and makes a
mockery of the disciplinary border patrols now stifling corporate
universities, the University, Inc. Who could conceive professor Henri
fidgeting nervously at the next departmental research evaluation or
getting the gripes about tenure when so much more is now at stake? “I
am in essence,” he wrote in his autobiography La Somme et le Reste
(1958), “oppositional, a heretic.” “I pronounce myself
irreducibly against the existing order...against a ‘being’ that
searches for justifications beyond judgment. I think the role of
thought is to harry what exists by critique, by irony, by satire.”
“I
comprehend the world with my mind,” he said, “not with my flesh.
For I think with my flesh. I refuse to condemn spontaneity, that of
the masses, that of the individual.” Lefebvre was a Marxist who
sought not to denounce student exuberance in 1968, but to foster it,
to use it productively, constructively, tactically, alongside
skeptical working class rank-and-filers. In The Explosion (1969),
scribbled as the Molotov cocktails ignited on the Boulevard
Saint-Michel, Lefebvre assumed the role of a radical honest broker,
trying to galvanize the “old” Left—his generation, who tended
to rally around class, Party and trade unions—with an emergent “New
Left,” a younger crew of militants, less steeped in theory, who
organized around anti-imperialism and identity themes, and who spoke
the language of culture and everyday life. The parallels with
post-Seattle agitation are striking. The Lefebvrian desire to conjoin
young and old progressives around a concerted anti-capitalist
struggle remains as pressing and as instructive as ever. He warned us
long ago that the ruling class will always try to suppress and co-opt
contestation, will always try to convert romantic possibility into
realistic actuality. Lefebvre knew that in desiring the impossible,
in reaching for the stars, we might at least one day stand upright.
His was a
praxis that borrowed more from Rosa Luxemburg than Lenin, whiffed of
Norman O. Brown rather than stank of Leonid Brezhnev. In the 1970s,
somebody asked Lefebvre if, in fact, he was really an anarchist.
“No,” he replied. “I’m a Marxist, of course, so that one day
we can all become anarchists!” His Marxism was unashamedly
Rabelaisian, nurtured in the fields as well as the factories, festive
and rambunctious, prioritizing “lived moments,” irruptive acts of
contestation: building occupations and street demos, free
expressionist art and theater, flying pickets, rent strikes and a
general strike. Here the action might be serious—sometimes deadly
serious—or playful. Lefebvre dug the idea of politics as festival.
Rural festal traditions, he said in Critique of Everyday Life,
“tighten social links at the same time as they give free rein to
all desires which have been pent up by collective discipline and
necessities of work.” Festivals represent “Dionysiac
life...differing from everyday life only in the explosion of forces
which had been slowly accumulating in and via everyday life itself.”
Fascinated by
Lefebvre’s Dionysian roots, a little while back I decided to check
them out for myself. Arriving at Lyon from JFK, renting a little
Peugeot 106, blasting bleary-eyed and jet-lagged to Béarn, to
Navarrenx, in the foothills of the Pyrénées-Atlantique, I knew then
I’d discovered the rustic ribald body to the Parisian Professor’s
cool analytical head. A marvel of Middle Age town planning aside the
River Oloron, Navarrenx remains charming, sleepy and just as vital
five-centuries on. Imposing ramparts with two ancient town
gates—Porte Saint-Germain and Porte Saint-Antoine—encircle its
grid-pattern of higgledy-piggledy streets that are today lined with a
few boucheries and boulangeries, the odd melancholy café, and
several pizzerias. Those walls hark back to 1537, when the King of
Navarre commissioned an Italian architect, Fabricio Siciliano, to
refortify the 14th century originals. Thirty-odd years later,
Navarrenx withstood a three-month siege defending the honor of Jeanne
d’Albret, sovereign of Béarn and mother of King
Henri IV. Two-centuries on, in 1774, the town underwent
extensive renovation and re-planning; many structures, including chez
Lefebvre at rue Saint-Germain, hail from this period.
At the nearby
Place des Casernes, an almost-deserted square shadowed by the Porte
Saint-Antoine, modern-day travelers can find no-frills room-and-board
at Navarrenx’s sole inn, the Hôtel du Commerce. My first, and
only, evening at the Hôtel du Commerce seems comical in retrospect.
I’d decided to take a twilight stroll along Navarrenx’s ramparts,
imbibe its atmosphere in the balmy summer air. When darkness fell,
and after a hearty supper of local salmon, I returned to find my room
infested with mosquitoes; the South West’s damp, mild climate is a
veritable breeding ground for these pests, and I’d dumbly left the
light on and shutters open. Too late for room service, too tired
after my car journey, I chose the fastest remedy: to splatter every
single one with a roll-up newspaper. Next morning, in broad daylight,
I realized the mess I’d made to the walls and ceiling, much to the
chagrin of Monsieur le propriétaire, who wasn’t amused. We
exchanged words; I placated, apologized, promised to clean everything
up, which I hastily did. Yet the portly patron wasn’t impressed,
hinting he didn’t like Americans anyway, despite me being English,
and urged us—my wife and I—to pay up and clear out, sooner rather
than later. Thus, on our debut visit, we were banished from
Navarrenx, kicked out like renegade pilgrims of Saint-Jacques de
Compostelle. We were the talk of the town for a while; Henri might’ve
sympathized had he still been around.
The
banishment had been a strange blessing. Forced to flee Navarrenx, I
discovered the Basque town of Mauléon, twenty-minutes down the road,
and the wonderful Bidegain hotel, which serves the lovely rich,
deep-bodied Irouléguy wine I knew Henri tippled. As the signature
red-shutters and Basque red, green and white flags became more
prominent, I saw and felt the proximity of Navarrenx to Basque
county; I began to grasp up-close how its culture and tradition
impacted upon Lefebvre’s own spirit and personality. His
“fanatically religious” mother was of Basque stock. He wrote:
“‘You speak against religion,’ she and her sisters scorned me.
‘You will go to hell’.” Lefebvre recognized the contradictions
traversing Basque culture because those same contradictions traversed
him: the Basques “have a very profound sense of sin; and yet, they
love to live, love to eat and drink. This contradiction is
irresolvable, because it’s a fact I’ve often stated: the sense of
sin excites pleasure. The greater the sin, the greater also the
pleasure.”
Inside
Lefebvre’s body and mind lay a complex dialectic of particularity
and generality, of Eros and Logos, of place and space; he was a
Catholic country boy who’d roamed Pyrenean meadows, a sophisticated
Parisian philosopher who’d discoursed on Nietzsche and the death of
God. He was rooted in the South West yet in love with Paris,
tormented by a Marxist penchant for global consciousness. This triple
allegiance tempered hometown excesses, made him a futuristic man with
a foot in the past, someone who distanced himself from regional
separatism. “Today,” he warned, “certain [Basque] pose the
question of a rupture with France. I see, in regionalism, the risk of
being imprisoned in particularity. I can’t follow them that
far...One is never, in effect, only Basque...but French, European,
inhabitant of planet earth, and a good deal else to boot. The modern
identity can only be contradictory and assumed as such. It also
implies global consciousness.” The incarnation of a man of
tradition and a Joycean everyman is suggestive in an age that
frantically invokes an essential purity of identity, or else wants to
homogenize everything in a nihilistic market rage.
Not too long
ago, I sat in the rare book archives of Columbia University’s
Butler Library, reading the 100-odd letters Henri Lefebvre sent his
longtime friend and collaborator Norbert Guterman. Guterman, a Jew,
exited France in 1933 and settled permanently in New York. For over
forty-years, until Guterman’s death in 1984, the two men
corresponded. In the summer of 1935, Lefebvre visited New York,
stayed with Guterman, and they busied themselves on a book that tried
to explain why, despite being counter to its collective interests,
the German working class ran with Hitler. Lefebvre and Guterman
appealed for a Popular Front to reconcile fractional differences and
to catalyze a gauchiste assault. Alas, their book, published the
following year, was denounced in “official” communist circles,
dismissed as Hegelian and revisionist. Yet the thesis somehow
survived the Party and the plague, and its intriguing title is apt
for explaining the zeitgeist of Bush’s America seventy-years down
the line: La Conscience Mystifiée—mystified consciousness, a
consciousness not only usurped by the fetishism of the market, but
alienated from itself by “absolute truths” of nationhood,
patriotism, God and the President.
Lefebvre’s
letters from this period are shadowed by a pessimism of impending
doom that has a familiar ring about it: “a funk prevents the people
from thinking and living,” he wrote in October of 1935; “The
moment of catastrophe approaches,” he said in another communiqué a
few months later. “I will not make a will,” Lefebvre confessed,
on the brink (August, 1939). “What I would have been able to
bequeath isn’t yet born...I don’t think of posterity in writing
to you, but of our work, our fraternity, our true friendship...”
Columbia’s “Guterman Collection” is a moving testimony of an
enduring friendship that survived a century of war and peace, love
and hate, displacement and disruption. Yellowing letters, written on
tissue-paper parchment, on regional Communist Party notepaper (“La
Voix du Midi”), on postcards mailed from Algeria, Greece, Italy,
Brazil and Spain—all bear Lefebvre’s typical cursive:
free-flowing and fast-paced, spread frantically and unevenly across
the page. His pace mimics both political mood and personal
circumstance. “Mon cher vieux Norbert,” many of Lefebvre’s
letters begin, affectionately. “I would love to know what you’re
doing, and how you live in America.” Lefebvre bemoans his dire
family situation during the Occupation, his penury after the peace,
his struggles to find a steady teaching job, his latest love, latest
wife: Evelyne, Nicole, Catherine, whose own letters crop up in the
archive. “I spend my time,” explains Evelyne to Norbert, “typing
what Henri has feverishly written to earn us a few sous.”
Ideas and
books are discussed, ongoing projects debated, future ones planned:
“We can, in combining our efforts,” Lefebvre wrote in January of
1936, “establish a circulation of ideas.” A little more than a
decade later, he said that “I know what we need well enough: it’s
not that I send you news from time to time, but that we
reestablish—like 10 years earlier—a continuous current of
exchanges and information. It is this continuity and intensity that
makes our correspondence a veritable laboratory preparing and
experimenting with a common oeuvre.” Seeing Lefebvre’s original
hand, glimpsing his crossings-out and annotations, deciphering his
certainties and doubts, exposes the shallowness of a communicative
culture based exclusively around email and cell-phones. In one later
letter, the septuagenarian laments how his grandchildren know only
the telephone; they’ve forgotten how to write letters! Another
note, dated Oct.18, 1977, says: “I almost forgot to tell you that
Catherine [Regulier] and me are making a book together: a series of
philosophical and political dialogues between a very young woman and
a monsieur who has no more than a youthfulness of heart.” The
eventual text, La révolution n’est pas ce qu’elle était
(1978)—“the revolution isn’t what it used to be”—expressed
Lefebvre’s open-ended, inventive Marxist spirit, which continually
updated itself as society updated itself. It’s a spirit we can
still tap. Indeed, as the sclerosis of our body politic hardens to
the point of apoplexy, we need, perhaps more than ever, not only a
new Popular Front, but also a certain monsieur’s “youthfulness of
heart.”
