Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course of his exploration, (...) Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)
Rhythmanalysis displays all the characteristics which made Lefebvre one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the analysis of rhythms -- both biological and social -- Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life.With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of the question of (...) space. This volume also includes his earlier essays on "The Rhythmanalysis Project" and "Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Towns.". (shrink)
This edition contains a new introduction by Stefan Kipfer, explaining the book’s contemporary ramifications in the ever-expanding reach of the urban in the ...
The French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre meditates on the relationship between jouissance, space, and architecture. Commissioned as a part of a study on tourist new towns in Spain, the book identifies spaces devoted to pleasure, enjoyment, sensuality, and desire as sites where the possibilities for a society moving beyond Fordism are manifested. In order to study these possibilities, architecture needs to be redefined as a mode of imagination rather than being restricted to a specialized practice or a collection (...) of monuments. Taking the practices of habitation as the starting point of the inquiry, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is understood as a production of space on all scales, from the domestic interiors, through urban spaces, to landscapes. Extending the focus of the book from “architecture” to “space of jouissance” within a transdicisplinary perspective, Lefebvre opens the discussion towards questions of subversive spaces, rhythmanalysis of the body, and pedagogy of senses. He proposes a Marxist take of architecture different from and alternative to the voice of Manfredo Tafuri, which since then has dominated critical architectural theory and history. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment not only fundamentally changes our view on French and international architecture culture after 1968 but it gives new impulses for today’s debates about architecture and the urban society. (shrink)
Tous ceux qui se préoccupent de la réalité humaine, écrivains ou sociologues, psychologues ou ethnographes, cherchent le "concret". Où se situe ce "concret humain"? Il se trouve dans la vie quotidienne, dans notre vie quotidienne. Mais la vie quotidienne ne peut être déterminée, dans son caractère concret, que si l'on dispose d'un instrument et d'une méthode. Dans la ligne du marxisme vivant, cette Critique de la vie quotidienne apporte une réponse à la question précise de l'instrument et de la méthode. (...) Deux attitudes ont été prises en ce qui concerne la vie quotidienne par les penseurs, écrivains ou idéologues : les uns, réalistes ou "populistes", considèrent la vie quotidienne comme pleine et accomplie, ses gestes les plus obscurs, ses actes et ses événements les plus répétés comme infiniment chargés de sens ; d'autres au contraire, esthètes ou métaphysiciens par tempérament ou par doctrine, déprécient la vie quotidienne au profit d'une autre vie, d'un autre monde plus vrai, plus homogène. (shrink)
Originally published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, it established his position in the vanguard of a movement which was to culminate in the events of May 1968. A classic analysis of the modern world using Marxist dialectic, it is a book which supersedes the conventional divisions between academic disciplines. With dazzling skill, Lefebvre moves from philosophy to sociology, from literature to history, to present a profound analysis of (...) the social, political and cultural forces at work in France and the world in the aftermath of Stalin's death—an analysis in which the contours of our own "postmodernity" appear with startling clarity. (shrink)
Space, Difference, and Everyday Life merges these two schools of thought into a unified Lefebvrian approach to contemporary urban issues and the nature of our ...
