Idea Transcript
Critique of Everyday Life VOLUME I
Critique of Everyday Life VOLUME I Introduction •
HENRI LEFEBVRE
Translated by John Moore With a Preface by Michel Trebitsch
VERSO London
.
New York
Contents
First published as Critique de la vie quotidienne I: Introduction by Grasset, Paris 1947; second edition with new foreword by L' Arche, Paris 1958 This translation first published by Verso 1991 © Grasset 1947, L'Arche 1958 Translation © John Moore 1991 Preface © Michel T rebitsch 1991 All rights reserved Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London WI V 3HR USA: 29 West 35 th Street, New York, NY 10001-2291 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lefebvre, Henri Critique of everyday life. Vol. I: Introduction. 1. Title [Critique de la vie quotidienneJ. English 302 ISBN 0-86091-340-6
Translator's Note
Vll
Preface by Michel Trebitsch
IX
Foreword to the Second Edition
1
I In Retrospect . II What Has Changed in the Last Ten Years? . III On Chaplin, Bertolt B recht and Some Others . IV Work and Leisure in Everyday Life . V Some Overviews on the ' Modern World' . VI Once Again, the Theory of Alienation . . . . VII Alienated Labour . VIII Philosophy and the C ritique of Everyday Life . IX Plans and Programme for the Future
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lefebvre, Henri, 1905[Critique de la vie quotidienne. English] Critique of everyday life I Henri Lefebvre : translated by John Moore : with a preface by Michel Trebitsch. em. p. Translation of the 2nd ed. of: Critique de la vie quotidienne. Includes index. Contents: v. I. Introduction ISB N 0-86091-340-6 (h b) I. Life. 2. Philosophy, Marxist. 1. Title. 1991 BD431.L36513 194-dc20
CRITIQUE OF E VERYDAY LIFE
Introduction
101
B rief Notes on some Well-Trodden Ground 2 The Knowledge of Everyday Life 3 Marxism as Critical Knowledge of Everyday Life
Typeset by Leaper & Gard Ltd, Bristol Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd v
103
€� 138
4 The Development of Marxist Thought
176
5 Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside
201
6 What Is Possible
228
Notes
253
Index
275
Trans lator's Note
Except when prefixed ( Trans. ), footnotes are from the original. Translations of quotations in the text are mine, except when the source title is given in English. B ibliographical details are presented in the original in a partial and un systematic way, and wherever possible I have endeavoured to complete and standardize this information, a frequently difficult task, since the author uses his own translations of Marx. I wish to thank my colleagues Robert Gray, John Oakley and Adrian Rifkin for the advice and encouragement they have given me d uring the preparation of this proj ect.
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Preface
by Michel Trebitsch
What a strange status this book has, and h ow strange its destiny has been. If Henri Lefebvre can be placed alongside Adorno, Bloch, Lukacs or Marcuse as one of the main theoreticians of 'Critical Marxism', it is largely thanks to his Critique of Everyday Life ( Critique de La vie quotidienne), a work which, though well known, is little appreci ated. Perhaps this is because Lefebvre has something of the brilliant amateur craftsman about him, unable to cash in on his own inven tions; something capricious, like a sower who casts his seeds to the wind without worrying about whether they will germinate. Or is it because o f Lefebvre's style, between flexibility and vagueness, where thinking is like strolling, where thinking is rhapsodic, as opposed to more permanent constructions, with their monolithic, reinforced, reassuring arguments, painstakingly built upon structures and models? His thought processes are like a limestone landscape with u nder ground rivers which only become visible when they burst forth on the surface. Critique of Everyday Life is one such resurgence. One could call it a triple resurgence, in that the 1947 volume was to be followed 1962 by a second, Fondements d 'une socioLogie de La quotidiennete, and in 1981 by a third, De La modernite au modernisme (Pour une metaphiLosophie du quotidien). At the chronological and theoretical intersection of his thinking about alienation and modernity, Critique of Everyday Life is a seminal text, drawn from the deepest levels of his intellectual roots, but also looking ahead to the main preoccupation o f his post-war p eriod. If we are to relocate it in Lefebvre's thought as a whole, we will need to go upstream as far as La Conscience mystifiee ( 1936) and then back downstream as far as Introduction ii La modernite ( 1962). !X
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'Henri Lefebvre or Living Philosophy ' The year 1947 was a splendid one for Henri Lefebvre : as well as Critique of Everyday Life, he published Logique formelle, logique dialectique, Marx et la liberte and Descartes in quick succession. This broadside was commented upon in the review La Pensee by one of the Communist Party's rising young intellectuals, Jean Kanapa, who drew particular attention to the original and creative aspects of Critique of Everyday LIfe. With this book, wrote Kanapa, 'philosophy no longer scorns the con crete and the everyday'. By making a�on 'the key concept in t�analysis of human situations since Marx', Lefebvre was opening " philosophy to action : taken in itsKantian sense, critique was not -�-...":'---of everyday life, but knowledge of the means to knowledge sImply transform it. Thus in Lefebvre Kanapa could celebrate 'the most lucid proponent of living philosophy today'.1 Marginal before the war, heretical after the 1950s, in 1947 Lefebvre's recognition by the Communist Party seems to have been at its peak, and it is tempting to see his prolific output in a political light. If we add L'Existentialisme, which appeared in 1946, and Pour connaitre la pensee de Marx and his best-seller Le Marxisme in the 'Q ue sais-je?' edition, both of which appeared in 1948, not to mention several articles, such as his 'Introd uction a l' esthetique' which was a dry run for his 195 3 Contribution a l'esthetique, then indeed, apart from the late 1960s, this was the most productive period in his career.2 Critique of Everyday L�fe thus appears to be a book with a precise date, and this date is both significant and equivocal. Drafted between August and December 1945, published in February 1947, according to the official publisher's date, it reflected the optimism and new-found freedom of th e Liberation, but appeared only a few weeks before the big freeze of the Cold War set in. 'In the enthusiasm of the Liberation it was hoped that soon life would be changed and the world tra s formed', as Henri Lefebvre recalled in 1958 in his Foreword to the Second Edition. The year 1947 was pivotal, Janus-faced . It began in a mood of post-war euphoria, then, from March to September, with Truman's policy of containment and Zhdanov's theory of the division of the world into two camps, with the eviction of the Communist ministers in France and the launching of the Marshall Plan, in only a few months everything had been thrown in the balance, including the
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fate of the book itself. The impact was all the more brutal in that this hope for a radical break, for the beginning of a new life, had become combined with the myth of the Resistance, taking on an eschatological dimension of which the Communist Party (which also drew strength from the Soviet aura), was the principal beneficiary. With its talk of a 'French Renaissance' and a new cult of martyrs (Danielle Casanova, Gabriel Peri, Jacques Decour) orchestrated by Aragon its high priest, this ' parti des 75 ,000 fusilles' momentarily embodied both revolu tionary promise and continuity with a national tradition stretching back from the Popular Front to 1798. B etween 1945 and 1947 the PCF's dominance was both political and ideological . Polling more than 28 per cent of the votes in the November 1946 general election, it appeared to have confirmed its place as the 'fi rst party of France', without which no government coalition seemed possible. Its ideological hegemony, strengthened by the membership or active sympathy of numerous writers, artists and thinkers - Picasso, Joliot-Curie, Roger Vailland, Pierre Herve - put Marxism at the centre of intellectual debate. Presenting itself as a ' modern rationalism' to challenge the 'irration alism' and 'obscurantism' brought into disrepute by collaboration, its only rival was existentialism, which made its appearance in the intellectual arena in 1945. But existentialism also located itself with reference to Marxism, as we can see from the controversy which raged for so long in the pages of Les Temps Modernes and L'Esprit, and which began in that same year with Jean Beaufret's articles in Confluences and above all with the argument between Sartre and Lefebvre in Action.3 In a way both were after the same quarry: Lefebvre's pre-war themes of 'the total man' and his dialectic of the conceived and lived were echoed by Sartre's d efi nition of exis nce as the tion between thinking and livi � . At t at time Lefebvre was certainly not unkn own: from the begmning of the 1930s the books he wrote sin gle-handedly or in collaboration with Norbert Guterman had established him as an original Marxist thinker. But his pre-war readership had remained limited, since philosophers were s uspicious of Marxism and Marxists were suspicious of philosophy. Conversely, after 1945, he emerged as the most important expert on and vulgarizer of Marxism, as an entire generation of young intellectuals rushed to buy his ' Que sais-je ? ' on Marxism and the new printing of his little Dialectical Materialism of 1939; when he brought out L'Existentialisme, Xl
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the Party saw him as the only Communist philosopher capable of stemming the influence of Sartre. With his experience as an elder member linking the pre-war and the post-war years and his image as a popularizer of Marxism, Henri Lefebvre could be slotted conveniently into a strategy by which the Party would exploit its political legitimacy to the full in order to impose the philosophical legitimacy of Marxism. He introduced Marxism to the Sorbonne, where he gave a series of lectures, on such topics as 'the future of capitalism' (March 1947) and 'the contribution of Marxism to the teaching of philosophy' (November). The latter was reported in La Pensee, 'the review of modern rationalism', in glowing terms:
also to give up the classes at the Ecole de guerre which General Gambier, whom he had met during his military service, had managed to secure for him . In fact when the war ended he had the grade of officer in the Forces fran