Monthly Archives: August 2017

The Works of Lefebvre


The Works of Henri Lefebvre

Written by Ross Wolfe

Henri Lefebvre’s work spans a variety of disciplines and fields, ranging from philosophy and sociology to architecture and urbanism. Obviously, this relates to a number of the themes discussed on this blog. A past entry featured Alfred Schmidt’s laudatory essaydedicated to Lefebvre, which I urge everyone to read. Roland Barthes, in his Mythologies, defended his contemporary against “criticism blind and dumb” in the press: “You don’t explain philosophers, but they explain you. You have no desire to understand that play by the Marxist Lefebvre, but you can be sure that the Marxist Lefebvre understands your incomprehension perfectly, and above all that he understands (for I myself suspect you to be more subtle than stupid) the delightfully ‘harmless’ confession you make of it.”

Lefebvre blazed a path, moreover, in the theoretical inquiry into “everyday life,” taking up a thread from the early Soviet discourse on the transformation of “everyday life” [быт] and Marx’s musings on “practical everyday life” [praktischen Werkeltagslebens]. Trotsky had authored a book on the subject in the 1920s, under the title Problems of Everyday Life, and the three-volume Critique of Everyday Life by Lefebvre, released over the course of four decades (1946, 1961, and 1981), can be seen as an elaboration of its themes. Eventually, inspired by this series, the Situationist upstar Raoul Vaneigem would publish The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), while the Catholic theorist Michel de Certeau released two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life (19761980).

 

Primary literature

  1. Dialectical Materialism (1938)
  2. The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1: Introduction (1946)
  3. “Marxisme et Sociologie” (1948)
  4. “Perspectives de la Sociologie Rurale”(1953)
  5. Probleme des Marxismus, heute(1958, translated by Alfred Schmidt 1966)
  6. Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes (September 1959-May 1961)
  7. The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (1961)
  8. “Utopie expérimentale: Pour un nouvel urbanisme” (1961)
  9. “Marxisme et Politique: Le marxisme a-t-il une théorie politique ?” (1961)
  10. “Réflexions sur le structuralisme et l’histoire” (1963)
  11. Metaphilosophy (1965)
  12. The Sociology of Marx (1966, translated by Norbert Guterman in 1968)
  13. Sprache und Gesellschaft (1966)
  14. Everyday Life in the Modern World(1968)
  15. “Reply to Roderick Christholm” (1969)
  16. “Les paradoxes d’Althusser” (1969)
  17. Aufstand in Frankreich: Zur Theorie der Revolution in den hochindustrialisierten Ländern (1969)
  18. The Urban Revolution (1970)
  19. “La classe ouvrière est-elle révolutionnaire?” (1971)
  20. “L’avis du sociologue, État ou Non-État?” (1971)
  21. The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production(1973)
  22. The Production of Space (1974)
  23. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment(unpublished, 1970s)
  24. “Marxism Exploded” (1976)
  25. The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life)(1981)
  26. Interview on the Situationists (1983)
  27. Rhythmanalysis (1991)
  28. Writings on Cities (collection, 1996)
  29. State, Space, World: Selected Essays(collection, 2009)

Secondary literature

  1. Alfred Schmidt, “Henri Lefebvre and Contemporary Interpretations of Marx” (1972)
  2. Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (2006)
  3. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, Christian Schmid (eds.), Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (2008)
  4. Christian Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre, the Right to the City, and the New Metropolitan Mainstream” (2009)
  5. Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (2011)
  6. Benjamin Fraser, Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities (2015)