Henri Lefebvre (Hagetmau, June 16, 1901 - Navarrenx, June 28, 1991) was a French philosopher. He devoted himself to sociology, social geography and historical materialism in general. Influenced by the thought of Karl Marx, he was one of the first intellectuals to spread the study of Marxism in France. He is considered one of the fathers of the movement that led to the revolution of May 1968 and inspired an entire current of progressive thought.[1].
Biography
From the 1920s to the Liberation
Influenced by his deeply Catholic mother, Henri Lefebvre initially considered dedicating himself to the priesthood[2] before breaking with religion to focus on philosophy thanks to the teaching of Maurice Blondel in Aix-en-Provence. He arrived in Paris in 1919 and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. During his studies, he met some students, Pierre Morhange, Norbert Guterman and Georges Politzer, whom he joined in 1924 to lead a group called Philosophies, which is also the name of the magazine they published. This group launches into political action in association with the surrealist group and the magazine Clarté"). The Philosophies group evolves, according to Lefebvre,[3] from the cult of the "Spirit" to dialectical materialism. Like many other members of the group, Henri Lefebvre joined the Communist Party in 1928-1929. Not having the aggregation, he must do several small jobs and then obtain a teaching position in Privas (Ardèche), where he headed the local communist cell. Threatened with dismissal after a demonstration against the politician André Tardieu, he was automatically transferred to Montargis (Loiret) in 1931, where he taught until the war. In 1935, he was elected city councilor on a (minority) list of anti-fascist units. After a period in Saint-Etienne, the Vichy government dismissed him from teaching in March. 1941. He joined the Resistance, holding the rank of Captain FFI. From 1944 to 1947, he was the director of the Toulouse station of French Broadcasting (RDF). In the 1930s, he began publishing books on his conception of Marxism, alone or in collaboration with Norbert Guterman).
Between 1930 and 1940 he served as a philosophy professor. He translated Karl Marx, and continued a line of reflection based on humanist Marxism. His work , which appeared in 1939, places him outside of Stalinism and distances him from the French Communist Party, from which he will be expelled in 1958.
Urban dialectical planning
Introduction
Henri Lefebvre (Hagetmau, June 16, 1901 - Navarrenx, June 28, 1991) was a French philosopher. He devoted himself to sociology, social geography and historical materialism in general. Influenced by the thought of Karl Marx, he was one of the first intellectuals to spread the study of Marxism in France. He is considered one of the fathers of the movement that led to the revolution of May 1968 and inspired an entire current of progressive thought.[1].
Biography
From the 1920s to the Liberation
Influenced by his deeply Catholic mother, Henri Lefebvre initially considered dedicating himself to the priesthood[2] before breaking with religion to focus on philosophy thanks to the teaching of Maurice Blondel in Aix-en-Provence. He arrived in Paris in 1919 and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. During his studies, he met some students, Pierre Morhange, Norbert Guterman and Georges Politzer, whom he joined in 1924 to lead a group called Philosophies, which is also the name of the magazine they published. This group launches into political action in association with the surrealist group and the magazine Clarté"). The Philosophies group evolves, according to Lefebvre,[3] from the cult of the "Spirit" to dialectical materialism. Like many other members of the group, Henri Lefebvre joined the Communist Party in 1928-1929. Not having the aggregation, he must do several small jobs and then obtain a teaching position in Privas (Ardèche), where he headed the local communist cell. Threatened with dismissal after a demonstration against the politician André Tardieu, he was automatically transferred to Montargis (Loiret) in 1931, where he taught until the war. In 1935, he was elected city councilor on a (minority) list of anti-fascist units. After a period in Saint-Etienne, the Vichy government dismissed him from teaching in March. 1941. He joined the Resistance, holding the rank of Captain FFI. From 1944 to 1947, he was the director of the Toulouse station of French Broadcasting (RDF). In the 1930s, he began publishing books on his conception of Marxism, alone or in collaboration with Norbert Guterman).
Le Materialisme Dialectique
The publication of Le Materialisme Dialectique, Le Nationalisme contre les Nations, Hitler au pouvoir, bilan de cinq années de fascisme en Allemagne, made him a target of the German occupation forces during the Second World War, so he decided to join the French Resistance in 1941, abandoning his job as a philosophy teacher in provincial institutes.
After the war, he was director of Radiodiffusion Française (RDF) in Toulouse until 1949.
Faced with French structuralist thought "Structuralism (philosophy)," highly guided by Louis Althusser, his approaches to humanist Marxism had a great influence on the lines of thought of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1960 he was one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 for the right to non-submission in the Algerian war.
Professor of philosophy in Nanterre, he lived very closely in May 68; This same year he won a position as professor of Sociology at the University of Strasbourg and abandoned classes in Paris, where he was replaced by Edgar Morin.
His academic career as a professor of sociology expresses the shift from the field of Philosophy, which leads Lefebvre to develop four central lines in his work: the city and its social space"), everyday life") and the phenomenon of modernity.
His interest no longer in structures, but in conjunctures, brings him closer to the situationist movement.
In 1978 he returned to the French Communist Party, understanding that his greater independence from Moscow had created new conditions for the political work and debate of the Left, and without this implying a renunciation of his freedom of thought.
Sociopolitical thought
His main political proposal was what he called the "right to the city", advocating the capacity and need of societies to consciously produce their space.
Lefebvre attempts to answer the questions opened by the thought of Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the analysis of the modern world. His main lines of research focus on the study of capitalism, the criticism of everyday life and the production of space, a concept coined by the author that attempts to account for the way in which the social reproduction of all different social experiences is expressed. His journalistic activity in various left-wing publications revealed him as a young Marxist philosopher, with great influence on the French thought of his generation. In 1928, he joined the French Communist Party, where he served for a decade, before abandoning an excessively rigid structure subject to Stalinist discipline. He is also recognized for being one of the first translators of Karl Marx into his native language.
Intellectual contributions
He wrote in both French and English as well as German and his texts have been translated into numerous languages. In the United States, postmodern thought has drawn on its analyzes of modernity and everyday life. His criticism of everyday life was one of the greatest intellectual contributions that motivated the founding of the magazine COBRA and later the magazine Situationist International").
Lefebvre considered it necessary for everyday life to free itself from the characteristics imposed by capitalism on individual and collective life. Otherwise, everyday life will be like an underground tank in which the conventions and lies of power settle and, therefore, it will be a barrier that prevents creativity.
Notable systematic expositor of dialectical logic in his work Formal logic and dialectical logic, which he finished writing in 1941, but was only able to publish after 1947.
He was especially concerned about the problems of urbanization of the territory.
Criticism of everyday life
Contenido
En su elaboración del materialismo dialéctico, el individuo y la praxis de lo concreto ocupan un sitio central. Proponiéndose una antropología social alternativa, Henri Lefebvre sostuvo la necesidad de que la "cotidianidad" se libere del papel que reviste bajo el capitalismo, cuya función es reproducir los caracteres impuestos a la vida colectiva por las clases dominantes. La costumbre, con su temporalidad no auténtica, pues es ahistórica, no haría más que solo reproducir y perpetuar las relaciones de dominación. La cotidianidad es un tipo de depósito subterráneo en el cual se sedimentan los convenios y las mentiras del poder. Allí se encuentra la barrera que impide a la fantasía y la inventiva para encontrar las vías para la propia expresión, la autonomía del ser.
De ahí el privilegio concedido por Lefebvre al arte, comprendido no tanto en su autonomía sino como medio de experiencia o experimento estético capaz de demostrar el carácter infundado del convencionalismo de lo cotidiano. El arte moderno pone las condiciones de la supresión de la cotidianidad. Estas teorías se refieren a la experiencia o experimento y a las reflexiones del movimiento surrealista, al cual Lefebvre pertenecía en su juventud. La trilogía "Crítica de la vida cotidiana " (1947, 1961, 1981) presenta de manera muy profunda este pensamiento. Lamentablemente su obra fue negada durante mucho tiempo, probablemente por su carácter crítico y su condición marxista, y aún no se conoce del todo más allá de las traducciones al inglés, la trascendencia de sus ideas hoy se nos presentan como una alternativa para la reconstrucción del conocimiento y estructura de la sociedad, los títulos de su obra crítica a la sociedad se presentan en su idioma original en espera de una traducción al Español.
Hypothesis
When asked the question "What is the mode of existence of social relations?", Lefebvre will respond in The production of space: "Relationships cannot exist without a support and that support is the material substrate."
Postulate
The development of society can only be conceived through the relationship of “urban society” (the urban). Society projects social life. He criticizes organicism, evolutionism, continuityism and urbanism. The urban has entered a critical phase, resulting in an implosion-explosion with an urban concentration and rural exodus, extension of the urban fabric, complete subordination of the agrarian to the urban. It is an irreversible process, but the urbanization process can be projected in such a way that the city-countryside antagonism is overcome and urbanization, by deconcentrating, can articulate the environment and the landscape. It proposes phases (critical), levels (global, medium and private) and dimensions. The individual can create a political ideology that allows him to change the structure of the city and reorganize the territory, so that man appropriates the space that makes up his identity.
Controversy around Geography and its disciplinary field
As a result of his research on land ownership as well as the deep interest he presented regarding what in his terms can be considered an urban revolution, Lefebvre is often considered the putative father of an epistemological revolution in the disciplinary field of geography. It particularly formulates the need to affirm a new right to the city that it defines as a right beyond the quality of urban life,[5] focused on the need to demand the city in which we want to live, in the collective capacity to plan our urban life. A discussion that is based on his book The Production of Space"), where he values the importance of rethinking the category of space and stating that there is no objectivity of the material object but that it is a dimension of human life whose character of existence is associated with the politicity of Zoon politikon, so the material expression of social relations is not only an object but an active and passive participant in the ways in which human life is expressed and which is therefore eminently political. The construction of space is always a power struggle, even from the sphere of everyday life, whether from the internal structure in which "the dwelling house" is conceived and distributed, associated with the family relationship or the productive logic on a global scale of the social reproduction system itself located both historically and geographically, thus constituting a struggle to define the character and meaning of social reproduction and the purposes materialized by it.
That is why Lefebvre insists that space is the product of society and since each society has a specific way of thinking about the world, it has the right to the capacity and need to produce its own space and therefore, every human being has the right to the construction of space.
The right to the city
In 1968 Lefebvre wrote Le droit à la ville (The right to the city), a text that paved the way towards a strategy of knowledge linked to political strategy, towards the implementation of the city as a right to urban life and a reference book for those of us who were trying to rethink the city as a more habitable environment and territory of a new, more "humanist" democracy points out the architect Anna Bofill who highlights the problem that the text considers the masculine as neutral universal and analyzes the urban phenomenon only from class criteria, forgetting the gender criteria "Gender (social sciences)."
1980b "Towards the Cyberanthrope" A critique of technocracy, Barcelona- Editorial GEDISA Hombre y Sociedad Collection ISBN: 84-7432-083-6.
[2] ↑ Michel Trebitsch, "Henri Lefebvre", en Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, Le Seuil, Paris, 1996.
[3] ↑ Nicole Racine, capítulo "Henri Lefebvre", en Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, Éditions de l'Atelier, Paris, 1989.
[4] ↑ Bernard Ravenel, « », Alerte atomique, numéro spécial - bilan, Suplemento 147 « 33 ans d'actions et de réflexions... du MCAA... au MDPL », 1er trimestre 1997, p. 4.
Between 1930 and 1940 he served as a philosophy professor. He translated Karl Marx, and continued a line of reflection based on humanist Marxism. His work Le Materialisme Dialectique, which appeared in 1939, places him outside of Stalinism and distances him from the French Communist Party, from which he will be expelled in 1958.
The publication of Le Materialisme Dialectique, Le Nationalisme contre les Nations, Hitler au pouvoir, bilan de cinq années de fascisme en Allemagne, made him a target of the German occupation forces during the Second World War, so he decided to join the French Resistance in 1941, abandoning his job as a philosophy teacher in provincial institutes.
After the war, he was director of Radiodiffusion Française (RDF) in Toulouse until 1949.
Faced with French structuralist thought "Structuralism (philosophy)," highly guided by Louis Althusser, his approaches to humanist Marxism had a great influence on the lines of thought of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1960 he was one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 for the right to non-submission in the Algerian war.
Professor of philosophy in Nanterre, he lived very closely in May 68; This same year he won a position as professor of Sociology at the University of Strasbourg and abandoned classes in Paris, where he was replaced by Edgar Morin.
His academic career as a professor of sociology expresses the shift from the field of Philosophy, which leads Lefebvre to develop four central lines in his work: the city and its social space"), everyday life") and the phenomenon of modernity.
His interest no longer in structures, but in conjunctures, brings him closer to the situationist movement.
In 1978 he returned to the French Communist Party, understanding that his greater independence from Moscow had created new conditions for the political work and debate of the Left, and without this implying a renunciation of his freedom of thought.
Sociopolitical thought
His main political proposal was what he called the "right to the city", advocating the capacity and need of societies to consciously produce their space.
Lefebvre attempts to answer the questions opened by the thought of Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the analysis of the modern world. His main lines of research focus on the study of capitalism, the criticism of everyday life and the production of space, a concept coined by the author that attempts to account for the way in which the social reproduction of all different social experiences is expressed. His journalistic activity in various left-wing publications revealed him as a young Marxist philosopher, with great influence on the French thought of his generation. In 1928, he joined the French Communist Party, where he served for a decade, before abandoning an excessively rigid structure subject to Stalinist discipline. He is also recognized for being one of the first translators of Karl Marx into his native language.
Intellectual contributions
He wrote in both French and English as well as German and his texts have been translated into numerous languages. In the United States, postmodern thought has drawn on its analyzes of modernity and everyday life. His criticism of everyday life was one of the greatest intellectual contributions that motivated the founding of the magazine COBRA and later the magazine Situationist International").
Lefebvre considered it necessary for everyday life to free itself from the characteristics imposed by capitalism on individual and collective life. Otherwise, everyday life will be like an underground tank in which the conventions and lies of power settle and, therefore, it will be a barrier that prevents creativity.
Notable systematic expositor of dialectical logic in his work Formal logic and dialectical logic, which he finished writing in 1941, but was only able to publish after 1947.
He was especially concerned about the problems of urbanization of the territory.
Criticism of everyday life
Contenido
En su elaboración del materialismo dialéctico, el individuo y la praxis de lo concreto ocupan un sitio central. Proponiéndose una antropología social alternativa, Henri Lefebvre sostuvo la necesidad de que la "cotidianidad" se libere del papel que reviste bajo el capitalismo, cuya función es reproducir los caracteres impuestos a la vida colectiva por las clases dominantes. La costumbre, con su temporalidad no auténtica, pues es ahistórica, no haría más que solo reproducir y perpetuar las relaciones de dominación. La cotidianidad es un tipo de depósito subterráneo en el cual se sedimentan los convenios y las mentiras del poder. Allí se encuentra la barrera que impide a la fantasía y la inventiva para encontrar las vías para la propia expresión, la autonomía del ser.
De ahí el privilegio concedido por Lefebvre al arte, comprendido no tanto en su autonomía sino como medio de experiencia o experimento estético capaz de demostrar el carácter infundado del convencionalismo de lo cotidiano. El arte moderno pone las condiciones de la supresión de la cotidianidad. Estas teorías se refieren a la experiencia o experimento y a las reflexiones del movimiento surrealista, al cual Lefebvre pertenecía en su juventud. La trilogía "Crítica de la vida cotidiana " (1947, 1961, 1981) presenta de manera muy profunda este pensamiento. Lamentablemente su obra fue negada durante mucho tiempo, probablemente por su carácter crítico y su condición marxista, y aún no se conoce del todo más allá de las traducciones al inglés, la trascendencia de sus ideas hoy se nos presentan como una alternativa para la reconstrucción del conocimiento y estructura de la sociedad, los títulos de su obra crítica a la sociedad se presentan en su idioma original en espera de una traducción al Español.
Hypothesis
When asked the question "What is the mode of existence of social relations?", Lefebvre will respond in The production of space: "Relationships cannot exist without a support and that support is the material substrate."
Postulate
The development of society can only be conceived through the relationship of “urban society” (the urban). Society projects social life. He criticizes organicism, evolutionism, continuityism and urbanism. The urban has entered a critical phase, resulting in an implosion-explosion with an urban concentration and rural exodus, extension of the urban fabric, complete subordination of the agrarian to the urban. It is an irreversible process, but the urbanization process can be projected in such a way that the city-countryside antagonism is overcome and urbanization, by deconcentrating, can articulate the environment and the landscape. It proposes phases (critical), levels (global, medium and private) and dimensions. The individual can create a political ideology that allows him to change the structure of the city and reorganize the territory, so that man appropriates the space that makes up his identity.
Controversy around Geography and its disciplinary field
As a result of his research on land ownership as well as the deep interest he presented regarding what in his terms can be considered an urban revolution, Lefebvre is often considered the putative father of an epistemological revolution in the disciplinary field of geography. It particularly formulates the need to affirm a new right to the city that it defines as a right beyond the quality of urban life,[5] focused on the need to demand the city in which we want to live, in the collective capacity to plan our urban life. A discussion that is based on his book The Production of Space"), where he values the importance of rethinking the category of space and stating that there is no objectivity of the material object but that it is a dimension of human life whose character of existence is associated with the politicity of Zoon politikon, so the material expression of social relations is not only an object but an active and passive participant in the ways in which human life is expressed and which is therefore eminently political. The construction of space is always a power struggle, even from the sphere of everyday life, whether from the internal structure in which "the dwelling house" is conceived and distributed, associated with the family relationship or the productive logic on a global scale of the social reproduction system itself located both historically and geographically, thus constituting a struggle to define the character and meaning of social reproduction and the purposes materialized by it.
That is why Lefebvre insists that space is the product of society and since each society has a specific way of thinking about the world, it has the right to the capacity and need to produce its own space and therefore, every human being has the right to the construction of space.
The right to the city
In 1968 Lefebvre wrote Le droit à la ville (The right to the city), a text that paved the way towards a strategy of knowledge linked to political strategy, towards the implementation of the city as a right to urban life and a reference book for those of us who were trying to rethink the city as a more habitable environment and territory of a new, more "humanist" democracy points out the architect Anna Bofill who highlights the problem that the text considers the masculine as neutral universal and analyzes the urban phenomenon only from class criteria, forgetting the gender criteria "Gender (social sciences)."
1980b "Towards the Cyberanthrope" A critique of technocracy, Barcelona- Editorial GEDISA Hombre y Sociedad Collection ISBN: 84-7432-083-6.
[2] ↑ Michel Trebitsch, "Henri Lefebvre", en Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, Le Seuil, Paris, 1996.
[3] ↑ Nicole Racine, capítulo "Henri Lefebvre", en Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, Éditions de l'Atelier, Paris, 1989.
[4] ↑ Bernard Ravenel, « », Alerte atomique, numéro spécial - bilan, Suplemento 147 « 33 ans d'actions et de réflexions... du MCAA... au MDPL », 1er trimestre 1997, p. 4.