Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today by TigersEye99

Understanding Henri Lefebvre (by Stuart Elden)

Lefebvre had an extraordinary life. It stretched from the very beginning of
the century until a decade before its end. It is no surprise that his French
biographer has accordingly called his work the adventure of the century!
Born eighteen years after Marx's death, and only six after Engels', Lefebvre
was a youth of sixteen at the Russian Revolution, in his late thirties at the
outbreak of World War Two, 60 at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and
still writing at the fall of the Berlin Wall. He obtained his licence in philosophy
the year Althusser was born, and published his first articles two years
before Foucault's birth, yet outlived both of them.

The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre

Click here to download this book in pdf.

Repetitious spaces are the outcome of repetitive gestures (those of the workers) associated with instruments which are both duplicable and designed to duplicate. It is in their nature as things and products co conceal that truth. Not they only don’t speak at all: they use their own language, the language of things and products, to tout the satisfaction they can supply and the needs they can meet; they use it too to lie, to dissimulate not only the amount of social labour that they can contain, not only the productive labour that they embody, but also the social relationships of exploitation and domination on which they are founded. Things lie, and when, having become commodities, they lie in order to conceal their origin, namely social labour, they tend to set themselves up as absolutes

- Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1991

Writings on Cities

Writings on Cities by Henri Lefebvre.

Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction

Click here to download this book in pdf. It can also be accessed via scribd, below.

Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction by Andy Merrifield

Henri Lefebvre’s Youthfulness of Heart

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 Work of Henri Lefebvre

 by Stanley Aronowitz, Situations, 2007

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN reception of Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) is a classic case of mis-recognition. Although he has been called a sociologist, an urbanist, and a social theorist, he has rarely been understood as a philosopher. The recently translated third volume of the Critique of Everyday Life should correct past impressions, not only because Lefebvre himself subtitles the book “Toward a meta-philosophy of everyday life,” but the work makes original contributions to philosophy. It is not excessive to claim that he is the ecophilosopher of the 21st century, for he made the connection between the massive despoiling of the global ecosystems, the new shape of social time and social space and the struggle for the transformation of everyday life which, he claims, is the key to the project of changing life and repairing our collective relationship to nature.

Fanon and space: colonization, urbanization, and liberation from the colonial to the global city

by Stefan Kipfer, Environment and Planning: Society and Space,  2007, volume 25, pages 701 - 726.

Stimulated by recent controversies about the headscarf in France, this paper offers a fresh look at the spatial and urban dimensions of the work of Frantz Fanon. While there is widespread agreement that the work of Fanon (which preceded the so-called `spatial turn' in social theory) includes powerful spatial dimensions, there is no consensus about the status of `space' in Fanon's texts. Postcolonial theorists, whose reading of Fanon dominated the Anglo-American academic world until recently, have applauded the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Fanon's work as a sign for the latter's discomfort with dialectical thought and matters of historical transformation and thus as a sign for `third-space' thinking. Representing a new, heterodox wave of Fanon interpretation and insisting on Fanon's Hegelian-Marxist, radical Black, and phenomenological preoccupations with liberation, other readers have detected a shift from spatial to temporal concerns in Fanon's work. While building on this latter reading of Fanon, I argue that the spatial aspects in Fanon's work are neither a function of a philosophical imperative of nonrepresentability nor in contradiction with his concerns about temporal transformation.

The Provocations of Neoliberalism: Contesting the Nation and Liberation after Apartheid

Gillian Hart, Antipode,Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 678–705, September 2008 
(This paper is also available in pdf here)

This paper is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of the turbulent forces at play in South Africa in relation to other parts of the world. Engaging debates over neoliberalism from a South African vantage point, I show how currently influential theories cast in terms of class project, governmentality, and hegemony are at best partial. A more adequate understanding is not just a matter of combining these different dimensions into a more encompassing model of “neoliberalism in general”. The challenge, rather, is coming to grips with how identifiably neoliberal projects and practices operate on terrains that always exceed them. A crucially important dimension of what is going on in South Africa is that escalating struggles over the material conditions of life and livelihood are simultaneously struggles over the meaning of the nation and liberation, as well as expressions of profound betrayal. These processes underscore the analytical and political stakes in attending to interconnected historical geographies of specifically racialized forms of dispossession, and how they feature in the present. The paper concludes with a call for a properly post-colonial frame of understanding that builds on the synergies and complementarities between a Gramscian reading of Fanon and relational conceptions of the production of space set forth by Lefebvre.