Henri Lefebvre > Quotes

“Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

“What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment.”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1

“A magnificient life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away. It is waiting like the cake is waiting when there's butter, milk, flour and sugar. This is the realm of freedom. It is an empty realm. Here man's maginificent power over nature has left him alone with himself, powerless. It is the boredom of youth without a future.”
― Henri Lefebvre

“Our search for the human takes us too far, too 'deep', we seek it in the clouds or in mysteries, whereas it is waiting for us, besieging us on all sides. We will not find it in myths — although human facts carry with them a long and magnificent procession of legends, tales and songs, poems and dances. All we need do is simply to open our eyes, to leave the dark world of metaphysics and the false depths of the 'inner life' behind, and we will discover the immense human wealth that the humblest facts of everyday life contain.”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1

“Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics. It has always been political and strategic. There is an ideology of space. Because space, which seems homogeneous, which appears as a whole in its objectivity, in its pure form, such as we determine it, is a social product.”
― Henri Lefebvre

“In the beginning was the Topos. Before – long before – the advent of the Logos, in the chiaroscuro realm of primitive life, lived experience already possessed its internal rationality; this experience was producing long before thought space, and spatial thought, began reproducing the projection, explosion, image and orientation of the body.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

“The crisis of the community, its dislocation, the distress of most of its members, went hand in hand with technological progress and social differentiation.”
― Henri Lefebvre

“a point of arrival for existing knowledge and a point of departure for a new study and new projects: complete urbanization. The hypothesis is anticipatory. It prolongs the fundamental tendency of the present. Urban society is gestating in and through the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“Chaplin gave us a genuine reverse image of modern times: its image seen through a living man, through his sufferings, his tribulations, his victories. We are now entering the vast domain of the illusory reverse image. What we find is a false world: firstly because it is not a world, and because it presents itself as true, and because it mimics real life closely in order to replace the real by its opposite; by replacing real unhappiness by fictions of happiness, for example—by offering a fiction in response to the real need for happiness—and so on. This is the 'world' of most films, most of the press, the theatre, the music hall: of a large sector of leisure activities. (57)”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1

“The domination–exploitation of human beings begins with animals, wild beasts and cattle; the humans associated with these inaugurated an experience that would turn back against them: killings, stockbreeding, slaughters, sacrifices and (in order better to submit) castration.”
― Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life

“Being satisfied: this is the general model of being and living whose promoters and supporters do not appreciate the fact that it generates discontent. For the quest for satisfaction and the fact of being satisfied presuppose the fragmentation of 'being' into activities, intentions, needs, all of them well-defined, isolated, separable and separated from the Whole. Is this an art of living? A style? No. It is merely the result and the application to daily life of a management technique and a positive knowledge directed by market research. The economic prevails even in a domain that seemed to elude it: it governs lived experience.”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1

“The history of socialism offers a twofold lesson: the fall of the collective as a transforming agent of everyday life, and the rise of technology and its problems. Given this twofold experience, and given that the idea of a revolutionary transformation of the everyday has almost vanished, the withdrawal into an everyday which has not been transformed but which has benefited from a small proportion of technical progress becomes perfectly understandable. No, what is most astonishing is perhaps the fact that this withdrawal has in no way stopped collective organization and overorganization continuing to operate on its own level: the state, important decisions, bureaucracy. ‘Reprivatized’ life has its own level, and the large institutions have theirs. These levels are juxtaposed or superimposed.”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday

“In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric. Of varying density, thickness, and activity, the only regions untouched by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that are given over to “nature.” With the decline of the village life of days gone by, agricultural producers, “farmers,” are confronted with the agricultural town.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part of a global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the economy, nor even a sector characterized by any distinctive features (aside from underdevelopment). Even though local and regional features from the time when agricultural production dominated haven’t entirely disappeared, it has been changed into a form of industrial production, having become subordinate to its demands, subject to its constraints. Economic growth and industrialization have become self-legitimating, extending their effects to entire territories, regions, nations, and continents. As a result, the traditional unit typical of peasant life, namely the village, has been transformed. Absorbed or obliterated by larger units, it has become an integral part of industrial production and consumption.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“Against an economism void of values other than those of exchange, protest stood for reuniting the festival and daily life, for transforming daily life into a site of desire and pleasure. The protesters were protesting against the fact, simultaneously obvious and ignored, that delight and joy, pleasure and desire, desert a society that is content with satisfaction—that is to say, catalogued, created needs that procure some particular object and evaporate in it.”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1

“Philosophy claims to show the true nature of this world, and in a sense the claim is justified. Philosophy unmasks religion as the general theory of this inverted world, as its encyclopaedic guide, its popular logic, its “spiritual point d’honneur,” and its moral justification. Philosophy liberates man from nonphilosophy, i.e., from fantastic ideas uncritically accepted. Consequently philosophy is the spiritual quintessence of its epoch.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx

“Withdrawal into the self is passive in relation to an overcomplex social reality which oscillates between innuendo and brutal explicitness, but it appears to be a solution of sorts. It is as difficult to assess as it is to understand. It cannot be said that ‘reprivatization’ has not been actively chosen. There has been an option, and a general one (social options, group choices, socially accepted and adopted proposals for choice). Nor can it be said that it has been chosen freely. However, the choice itself is imposed and the solution is indicated or countermanded. This constraint operates within a fairly narrow margin of freedom; the weight from outside and from the ‘world’ becomes increasingly oppressive for an intimacy which has been metamorphosed into a mass phenomenon.
Is this a lifestyle, or is it life unequivocally stripped of all style? Although we would tend towards the second of these hypotheses, it is still too early to reach a decision; scrutiny of these hypotheses and this problem is part of the sociology of boredom …”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday

“The rationalism that culminated in Descartes accompanied the reversal that replaced the primacy of the peasantry with the priority of urban life. Although the peasantry didn’t see it as such. However, during this period, the image of the city came into being. The city had writing; it had secrets and powers, and clarified the opposition between urbanity (cultured) and rusticity (naive and brutal).”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“The mundus: a sacred or accursed place in the middle of the italiot township. A pit, originally-a dust hole, a public rubbish dump. Into it were cast trash and filth of every kind, along with those condemned to death, and any newborn baby whose father declined to "raise" it (that is, an infant which he did not lift from the ground and hold up above his head so that he might be born a second time, born as a social as well as biological sense). A pit, then, 'deep' above all in meaning. It connected the city, the space above ground, land-as-soil and land-as-territory, to the hidden, clandestine, subterranean spaces which were those of fertility and death, of the beginning and the end, of birth and burial. (Later, in Christian times, the cemetery would have a comparable function). The pit was also a passageway through which dead souls would return to the bosom of the earth and then reemerge reborn. As locus of time, of births and tombs, vagina of the nurturing earth-as-mother, dark corridor emerging from the depths, cavern opening to the light, estuary of hidden forces and mouth of the realm of shadows, the mundus terrified as it glorified. In its ambiguity it encompassed the greatest foulness and the greatest purity, life and death, fertility and destruction, horror and fascination. 'Mundus es immundus'.
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― Henri Lefebvre

“The specialized sciences (sociology, political economy, history, human geography) have proposed a number of ways to characterize “our” society, its reality and deep-seated trends, its actuality and virtuality. Terms such as “industrial and postindustrial society,” “the technological society,” “the society of abundance,” “the leisure society,” “consumer society,” and so on have been used. Each of these names contains an element of empirical or conceptual truth, as well as an element of exaggeration and extrapolation. Instead of the term “postindustrial society”—the society that is born of industrialization and succeeds it—I will use “urban society,” a term that refers to tendencies, orientations, and virtualities, rather than any preordained reality.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“arte.”
― Henri Lefebvre, El derecho a la ciudad (Ensayo)

“Assim, a integração e a participação são a obsessão dos não-participantes, daqueles que sobrevivem entre os fragmentos da sociedade possível e das ruínas do passado: excluídos da cidade, às portas do urbano […]”
― Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit À La Ville

“Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture. Is it essential to describe at length, besides the condition of youth, students and intellectuals, armies of workers with or without white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized and semi-colonized of all sorts, all those who endure a well-organized daily life, is it here necessary to exhibit the derisory and untragic misery of the inhabitant, of the suburban dweller and of the people who stay in residential ghettoes, in the mouldering centres of old cities and in the proliferations lost beyond them? One only has to open one's eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this generalized misery would not go without a picture of 'satisfactions' which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from it.”
― Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities

“La lucha contra el aburrimiento ha comenzado. No sabemos si el enemigo público será derrotado. Y sin embargo de esta lucha, de este desafío, depende, hasta cierto punto, el destino y sentido de la modernidad.”
― Henri Lefebvre, De lo rural a lo urbano

“It expresses an inveterate hopefulness and openness toward the future that has often been hard to sustain in the three decades since its publication but which characterizes Lefebvre’s philosophically induced intellectual and political optimism.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“La Révolution urbaine first appeared in 1970, in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising in Paris. Cities around the world from Detroit to Tokyo, Prague to Mexico City, were the scene of major revolts, connected less through any organizational affiliation than through political empathy linking highly diverse struggles, and as the 1960s culminated in worldwide challenges to capitalism, war, racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the alienation of modern urban life, the book was inevitably received as a political testament to the possibilities for fundamental political and social change.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“not until he has recognized and organized his own energies as social energies (and we shall presently see the exact meaning of these terms), i.e., when the political form and power (the state) no longer exist outside him, above him—not until then is human (as distinguished from political) emancipation achieved. The road leading to freedom is full of obstacles and accidents, especially the political emancipations that are mistaken for true liberations.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx

“Because the individual/society relation is not known or recognized as such, because it remains opaque and because certain of the socially imposed ways it is represented do not tally with the 'lived' (the individual within praxis), the individual tries find out what this relation really is. His lack of knowledge gives rise to a fundemental uneasiness which is stimulating as it is destructive, and this is the context in which he reconstructs the relation. But he does so using representations which have been developed for this very purpose. The individual/ society relation becomes the object of a variety of theorizations which employ elements borrowed on the one hand from the lived and society as a whole, and on the other from institutions and ideologies. Ignored or misunderstood, the real realization becomes completely fossilized and alienated (reified) in a deceptive and limiting representation. Instead of participating fully and consciously in social praxis, the individual constructs himself on the basis of a particular form or representation of that form. In his efforts to rediscover the hidden relation he strays even farther from it and loses his powers (possibilities). He becomes imprisoned within himself. This attitude by which he is formed as a conscious individual, and which will soon become a mere collection of behavior patterns and stereotypes, implies some deceptively creative postulates: the 'individual/society" relation must and can be created society has a coherence and a unity, since its inner contradictions are not of prime importance. Thus in all good conscience, good will, and good faith the individual will build his 'soul'. The basic materials of this 'soul' will be representations and these come up against other previously accepted representations, which they will either challenge or reinforce. In all good conscience, the individual will believe that he is living to the full; his 'soul' will be his own creative work, and even a kind of cultural work in which creativity and representations are lived as everyday facts. In so far as they are stable realities, these 'souls' enter into a logical structure within dialectical movement. This determination ineracts with the other economic and social determinations. It superimposes itself on them in a complex relation of resonance or dissonance. It does not supplant or destroy them.”
― Henri Lefebvre

“El derecho a la ciudad no puede concebirse como un simple derecho de visita o como un retorno a las ciudades tradicionales. Solo puede formularse como un derecho a la vida urbana, transformada, renovada. Poco importa que el tejido urbano encierre el campo y lo que subsiste de vida campesina, siempre que «lo urbano» —lugar de encuentro, prioridad del valor de uso, inscripción en el espacio de un tiempo elevado al rango de bien supremo entre los bienes— encuentre su base morfológica, su realización práctico-sensible. Ello exige una teoría integral de la ciudad y de la sociedad urbana que utilice los recursos de la ciencia y del arte.”
― Henri Lefebvre, El derecho a la ciudad (Ensayo)

“Called by the fattoria committee, the unemployed braccianti arrive in force on the lands that the owners refuse to improve. In spite of the presence of the owners, the superintendents, or their agents, the workers carry out the work; they then demand their salary (pay ble to the legal investment fund). In the backwards strike, the workers work against the wishes of the boss, and their work increases the productivity of the soil. This is doubly paradoxical when compared to the conventional notion of the strike. Thus, at Empoli, between Florence and Sienna, 70,000 cubic meters of grading, ditches, and other work has been carried out by the "strikers" under the direction of the fattorie committees. The latter paid the workers directly, withdrawing 4% from the money deposited by them into the bank and representing the sale of farm products. in all the areas of Tuscany where the committees are active, they have organized the planting of vines, the work of drainage or irrigation, the repair of buildings, and whatever else might be required. They even established, in individual locations, nascent production cooperatives for clearing the land and improving uncultivated or poorly cultivated soil, which assumes their presence on these lands notwithstanding the will of the owner.”
― Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography