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HENRI LEFEBVRE C:Nitic:Jue Cr= EVEA'-:-ICA 1 HENRI LEFEBVRE c:niTic:Jue cr= VOLUME 1 EVEA'-:-ICA1.:-1 L..iF=E "One of the great French intellectual activists of the twentieth century." David Harvey "The last great classical philosopher." Fredric Jameson Critique of Everyday Life VOLUME I Y Critique of Everyday Life VOLUME I Introduction ◆• HENRI LEFEBVRE Translated by John Moore With a Preface by Michel Trebitsch Y VERSO London • New York First published as Critique de Ia vie quotidienne /:Introduction by Grassel, Paris 1947; second edition with new foreword by L'Arche, Paris 1958 This translation lirst published by Verso 1991 ©Grassel 1947, L'Arche 1958 Translation© John Moore 1991 Preface © Michel Trebitsch 1991 All rights reserved Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WI V 3HR USA: 29West 35th 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. I. Title [Critique de Ia vie quotidienneJ. English 302 ISBN 0-86091-340-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lefebvre, Henri, 19 05- [Critique de Ia vie quotidienne. English) Critique of everyday life I Henri Lefebvre : translated by John Moore :with a preface by Michel Trebitsch. p. em. Translation of the 2nd ed. of:Critique de Ia vie quotidienne. Includes index. Contents:v. I. Introduction ISBN 0-86091-340-6 (hb) I. Life. 2. Philosophy, Marxist. I. Title. BD43t.L36513 1991 194-dc20 Typeset by Leaper & Card Ltd, Bristol Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd Contents 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 Te n Years? · III On Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht 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 Critique of Everyday Life · IX Plans and Programme for the Fu tu re CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFE Introduction 101 1 Brief Notes on some Well-Trodden Ground 103 2 The Knowledge of Everyday Life 130 3 Marxism as Critical Knowledge of Everyday Life 138 v 4 The Development of Marxist Thought 176 5 Notes Written One Su nday in the French Countryside 201 6 What Is Possible 228 Notes 253 Index 275 Translator's Note Except when pr efixed (Trans. ), footnotes are from the original. Translations of qu otations in the text are mine, except when the source title is given in English. Bibliographical details are presented in the original in a partial and unsystematic way, and wherever possible I have endeavoured to complete and standardize this information, a frequently difficult task, since the au thor uses his own translations of Marx. I wish to thank my colleagues Robert Gray, John Oakley and Adrian Rifkin fo r the advice and encouragement they have given me during the preparation of this project. vzz Preface by Michel Trebitsch What a strange status this book has, and how 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 Ia 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 of 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 li�e a limestone landscape with under­ ground rivers which only become visible when they burst forth on the surface. Critique of Everyday Life is one such resurgence. One could even call it a triple resurgence, in that the 1947 volume was to be followed in 1962 by a second, Fondements d'une sociologie de Ia quotidienneti, and in 1981 by a third, De Ia moderniti au modernisme (Pour une metaphilosophiedu 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 of his post-war period. 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 In troduction a Ia modernite(1962). tX Prefa ce '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 fo rmelle, logique dialectique, Marx et Ia Iiberti 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 Lzfe. With this book, wrote Kanapa, 'philosophy no longer scorns the concrete and the everyday'. By making alienation 'the key concept in the analysis of human situations since Marx', Lefebvre was opening philosophy to action: taken in its Kantian sense, critique was not simply knowledge of everyday life, but knowledge of the means to 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 connaftre Ia 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 1953 Contribution a l'esthetique, then indeed, apart from the late 1960s, this was the most productive period in his career.2 Critique of Everyday Life thus appears to be a book with a precise date, and this date is both significantand 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 the 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 trans­ 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 X Prefa ce 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. Between 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 confirmedits place as the 'first 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 Co nfluences and above all with the argument between Sartre and Lefebvre in Action,3 In a way both were after the same quarry: Lef ebvre's pre-war themes of 'the total man' and his dialectic of the conceived and the lived were echoed by Sartre's definition of existence as the reconcilia­ tion between thinking and living. At that time Lef ebvre was certainly not unknown: from the beginning of the 1930s the books he wrote single-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 suspicious of Marxism and Marxists were suspicious of philosophy.
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