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Resurrecting the Archaic: Symbols and Recurrence in Henri Lefebvre's Revolutionary Romanticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2019
Abstract
Solar crosses were symbolic markers that once punctuated the rolling pathways at the foot of the French Pyrenees. For Henri Lefebvre, these “crucified suns” came to symbolize a number of time-tested traditions that could revitalize everyday life in the modern world. His efforts to resurrect the archaic confronted two contemporary contexts: the hypermodernization promoted throughout France's long Reconstruction and the degradation of provincial communities that attended it. A heretical Marxist, Lefebvre's social thought included a Romantic sensibility that was organically connected to southwestern France and Friedrich Nietzsche. Dialectical in nature, Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism repurposed age-old styles of symbolic expression and cyclical recurrence in order to transform everyday life and keep the deracinating forces of modernization at bay. The French sociologist's enduring interest in archaic traces, and his belief that they might one day be revived, reorients how we approach his landmark studies on space and time in the modern city.
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References
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29 Lefebvre, Les communautés paysannes pyrénéennes, 86, 94. Lefebvre drew on the work of Max Raphaël, who argued that the elaborate symbols in the prehistoric caves of southwestern France supposed a civilization with aesthetic mores, social differentiation, and a sustainable style of life. Raphaël, Max, Prehistoric Cave Paintings, trans. Guterman, Norbert (New York, 1945)Google Scholar. On Lefebvre's friendship with the German art historian see Latour, Patricia and Combes, Francis, Conversations avec Henri Lefebvre (Paris, 1991), 44–5Google Scholar.
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38 “Une vision” appeared nearly a decade later in Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité, 131–4. In letters to Norbert Guterman, Lefebvre described writing “Une vision” while on vacation at his cousin's home in Saint-Pabu, near Erquy on Brittany's northwestern coast. Henri Lefebvre, “Letters to Guterman, 1939–49,” Norbert Guterman papers, Butler Library, Columbia University.
39 Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 242–3; Latour and Combes, Conversations avec Lefebvre, 98–9.
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45 Just before this decisive statement, Lefebvre asked, “Archaism, did you say? So culture is one big job lot, take it or leave it? Does it come down to us as a single bequest?” Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 373–4. See also Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 256–64.
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52 Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 642–3.
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54 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 348, 630.
55 Ibid., 342–4, 642.
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58 Ibid., 179.
59 Debord quoted three paragraphs from Lefebvre's La proclamation de la Commune that closely resembled an article written by the situationists. From this, Debord concluded that a situationist specter haunted Lefebvre's 496-page study of the Paris Commune. For the paragraphs in question, see Internationale situationniste 7 (1962), 12. As for purposeful misspellings, the first printing of Lefebvre's La proclamation de la Commune contained an acknowledgment to a mysterious “Guy Debud.” Intentionally misspelled or not, “Debud” was removed from further printings within the year. A correctly spelled Debord, however, did not replace the erasure. See the first printing of Lefebvre, Henri, La proclamation de la Commune: 26 mars 1871 (Paris, 1965), 11Google Scholar. In the juvenile tit for tat, Debord concluded his review with a couple of misspellings of his own. Debord wrote that “the Thinker of Nanterre Henri Lelièvre” had mastered the subject of the Commune by his “brilliant dialectoque.” Debord, Guy, “L'historien Lefebvre,” Internationale situationniste 10 (1966), 73–5Google Scholar.
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63 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 156.
64 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 393.
65 Ibid., 384–5.
66 See, especially, Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et répétition (Paris, 1968)Google Scholar. On the other extreme, Lefebvre shuddered at Fernand Braudel's own aqueous image—which opposed contingency and flux by rendering in the near stillness of the ocean's depths a remorselessly repetitive and crushing sediment of culture built up over the longue durée. Braudel, Fernand, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales 4 (1958), 725–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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