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Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition
Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in one complete volume.
The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in one complete volume. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, Critique was an inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France. It is a founding text of cultural studies and a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the 'trivial' details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet remaining the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.
875 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 6, 2014
145 people are currently reading
1841 people want to read
About the author
Henri Lefebvre
159 books422 followersHenri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism.
In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme et Barbarie, Espaces et Sociétés.
Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex career and influence:
the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism.
In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme et Barbarie, Espaces et Sociétés.
Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex career and influence:
the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 30, 2015
After having read all three volumes I contend that the following phrases from Henri Lefebvre's CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFE (Verso) would make great metal song titles:
"Burdened Living Reality with a Parasitic Growth" (p. 77)
"A Mysterious Punishment" (p. 186)
"Nothingness Activated" (p. 239)
"Capable of Dying" (p. 454)
"Death Grasps the Living" (p. 454)
"Abandoned by Death" (p. 456)
"Betrothed to Death" (p. 457)
"The Black Sun of Empty Anguish" (p. 642)
"The Desolation of Everyday Life (Emptiness And Ennui)" (p. 642)
"Do Moments Die?" (p. 647)
"Perhaps Successes Are Merely Monstrosities Which Chance Has Smiled Upon" (p. 651)
"The Era of the Void" (p. 660)
"Where Unhappiness Takes Shapes" (p. 668)
"Everything Is Dead Already" (p. 739)
"Misfortune, Not Nothingness" (p. 743)
"Gift of Oblivion" (p. 801)
And the album could be called "Is Carrying Chaos Within Oneself Sufficient to Give Birth to a Star?" (p. 740)
"Burdened Living Reality with a Parasitic Growth" (p. 77)
"A Mysterious Punishment" (p. 186)
"Nothingness Activated" (p. 239)
"Capable of Dying" (p. 454)
"Death Grasps the Living" (p. 454)
"Abandoned by Death" (p. 456)
"Betrothed to Death" (p. 457)
"The Black Sun of Empty Anguish" (p. 642)
"The Desolation of Everyday Life (Emptiness And Ennui)" (p. 642)
"Do Moments Die?" (p. 647)
"Perhaps Successes Are Merely Monstrosities Which Chance Has Smiled Upon" (p. 651)
"The Era of the Void" (p. 660)
"Where Unhappiness Takes Shapes" (p. 668)
"Everything Is Dead Already" (p. 739)
"Misfortune, Not Nothingness" (p. 743)
"Gift of Oblivion" (p. 801)
And the album could be called "Is Carrying Chaos Within Oneself Sufficient to Give Birth to a Star?" (p. 740)
Want to read
August 6, 2016Hey look at me being a marketing schmo for Verso: all three volumes of Lefebvre's Big Ass Book (848 pgs.) in one BUCH half price right now: I bought one: so might you: what else are you doing with your money?: paying for LOVE?: watching GAME OF THRONES? GRRMARTIN no longer needs your cash: publishers of dead Marxists do:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1623-...
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1623-...
April 19, 2020
The only way to understand each separate volume is to read all three. To read all three volumes is to realize the masterpiece that is unfolding, to read each volume in isolation would be as experiencing a disjointed set of frustrated notes limited to the time period under consideration. Lefebvre changes while growing over time. One could not pick three more interesting years, 1947, 1961 and 1981 or a more polished author than Lefebvre to have a reflection of what the everyday meant and its potential for change.
I can only give hints at why this book is so much fun to read. The breadth of topics covered will keep all readers highly entertained and edified. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, the only law that matters is woven in the story, information theory and why it matters is too, and the nature of cycles, signal and semantics theory, time, science, Hegel, Heidegger, and stray observations beyond an old foggy complaining about change as well as a lot of that too. The social versus the individual and the particular and how the person matters beyond the totality. Hegel’s dialectic in the first two volumes, the conscious negating the unconscious leading to its negation and then to the thought itself through the dialectic movement and then by the third volume the negation of the negation is only barely mentioned and that is just in order to dis Adorno on regarding the need for an ideology past Marxism instead of the end of ideology itself. He didn’t seem to like Adorno, but yet the first volume has lots of similarities with ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. Both seem to embrace a theme that everything that is happening with modernity makes us less aware of the everyday.
Marx is all important in the first volume and Das Kapital Volume I is clearly its inspiration. Alienation, mysticism, fetishism with reification of the object as real predominate the understanding of the everyday (I really enjoyed Das Kapital Volume I, but if that’s not your cup of tea, I would recommend ‘Infinite Jest’ by D.F. Wallace because he too has those themes within his book). Hegel and the Dialectic run throughout the second volume. ‘Sex, labor and information’ dominate the third volume. The author had a weird thing about sex (as does Sartre, and this author likes the Existentialist and still clings to the Psychoanalysts, and a footnote in volume two mentioned that Sartre liked this book but Lefebvre did not care for Sartre’s philosophy in general). He also misfires on the status of women completely within both volume one and volume two, he makes the status quo the real for women. Women magazines distract and control he says, and he never envisions and doesn’t seem to want the empowerment of women or gives any hints that they will be full contributors to society in the future.
By volume three, he realizes that most of what he had been saying is different from what he wanted to say in 1981. He walks away from the everyday qua everyday and focuses on the day to day (quotidian). He is prescient on information as the ultimate commodity and how it alienates us from ourselves (he foresees Harari’s ‘Home Deus’ vision of the world 35 years before that book comes out). He’s becoming post-modern and anti-humanist and embraces Nietzsche and even said that most of Nietzsche’s sayings on ‘will to power’ are mostly a critique of it.
The everyday starts off as the human experience of being-in-the-world proximally and for the most part by understanding itself in terms of its world as the world reveals itself as itself and not as a Self outside itself (the hammer is the hammer and we know it is for nailing without having to first reflect upon it, pre-reflection points us to our ownmost self, to our everyday self). The author doesn’t word it exactly that way, but he definitely falls into a Heideggerian way of thinking about the self as self and the everyday for the first two volumes.
Each volume is different and sees itself for what it thinks it should be, but by the end the reader knows ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’ and the author knows that understanding the everyday in order to radically transform it will be better served by creating a new self than destroying an old self (the author gives an analogy of pirates not transforming but creating a new world). The author realizes that his project needs to change with the times and does just that.
By the third volume he makes the statement that he uses the subject predicate copula formation such as ‘the rose is red’ in order to be understood and that he doesn’t want to get bogged down in the philosophical nature of ‘being qua being’. (I’m making a paraphrase out of something he said in the third volume).
The three volumes as a whole is a disclosing of how we learn to think about ourselves and our understanding is always developing as it should. Overall, when this project is looked at as a project about a project (which can only come after all three volumes are written) and the richness of learning to look at how we thought about ourselves thinking about ourselves over time this book can be a very edifying (and entertaining) read.
I can only give hints at why this book is so much fun to read. The breadth of topics covered will keep all readers highly entertained and edified. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, the only law that matters is woven in the story, information theory and why it matters is too, and the nature of cycles, signal and semantics theory, time, science, Hegel, Heidegger, and stray observations beyond an old foggy complaining about change as well as a lot of that too. The social versus the individual and the particular and how the person matters beyond the totality. Hegel’s dialectic in the first two volumes, the conscious negating the unconscious leading to its negation and then to the thought itself through the dialectic movement and then by the third volume the negation of the negation is only barely mentioned and that is just in order to dis Adorno on regarding the need for an ideology past Marxism instead of the end of ideology itself. He didn’t seem to like Adorno, but yet the first volume has lots of similarities with ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. Both seem to embrace a theme that everything that is happening with modernity makes us less aware of the everyday.
Marx is all important in the first volume and Das Kapital Volume I is clearly its inspiration. Alienation, mysticism, fetishism with reification of the object as real predominate the understanding of the everyday (I really enjoyed Das Kapital Volume I, but if that’s not your cup of tea, I would recommend ‘Infinite Jest’ by D.F. Wallace because he too has those themes within his book). Hegel and the Dialectic run throughout the second volume. ‘Sex, labor and information’ dominate the third volume. The author had a weird thing about sex (as does Sartre, and this author likes the Existentialist and still clings to the Psychoanalysts, and a footnote in volume two mentioned that Sartre liked this book but Lefebvre did not care for Sartre’s philosophy in general). He also misfires on the status of women completely within both volume one and volume two, he makes the status quo the real for women. Women magazines distract and control he says, and he never envisions and doesn’t seem to want the empowerment of women or gives any hints that they will be full contributors to society in the future.
By volume three, he realizes that most of what he had been saying is different from what he wanted to say in 1981. He walks away from the everyday qua everyday and focuses on the day to day (quotidian). He is prescient on information as the ultimate commodity and how it alienates us from ourselves (he foresees Harari’s ‘Home Deus’ vision of the world 35 years before that book comes out). He’s becoming post-modern and anti-humanist and embraces Nietzsche and even said that most of Nietzsche’s sayings on ‘will to power’ are mostly a critique of it.
The everyday starts off as the human experience of being-in-the-world proximally and for the most part by understanding itself in terms of its world as the world reveals itself as itself and not as a Self outside itself (the hammer is the hammer and we know it is for nailing without having to first reflect upon it, pre-reflection points us to our ownmost self, to our everyday self). The author doesn’t word it exactly that way, but he definitely falls into a Heideggerian way of thinking about the self as self and the everyday for the first two volumes.
Each volume is different and sees itself for what it thinks it should be, but by the end the reader knows ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’ and the author knows that understanding the everyday in order to radically transform it will be better served by creating a new self than destroying an old self (the author gives an analogy of pirates not transforming but creating a new world). The author realizes that his project needs to change with the times and does just that.
By the third volume he makes the statement that he uses the subject predicate copula formation such as ‘the rose is red’ in order to be understood and that he doesn’t want to get bogged down in the philosophical nature of ‘being qua being’. (I’m making a paraphrase out of something he said in the third volume).
The three volumes as a whole is a disclosing of how we learn to think about ourselves and our understanding is always developing as it should. Overall, when this project is looked at as a project about a project (which can only come after all three volumes are written) and the richness of learning to look at how we thought about ourselves thinking about ourselves over time this book can be a very edifying (and entertaining) read.
October 18, 2024
I initially came across Henri Lefebvre via his influence on urban studies and spatial planning, which I studied as part of my MPhil. His writing on 'The Right to the City' was very influential; I read the whole piece in the collection Writings on Cities. Nearly ten years ago, I discovered that his magnum opus was called Critique of Everyday Life and found that title irresistible. Years later, I found a lovely Verso edition including all three volumes in a charity shop. I began reading it in 2019 and have finally finished two and half years later. There is a lot to say, but first of all: it was not what I expected. The title is in a sense ambiguous. It isn't A critique of everyday life, as I assumed. If anything, critique is a verb. The book does not perform the critique so much as propose and theorise doing so. Moreover, the three volumes are very different books, published in 1947, 1961, and 1981. Reading them in a combined edition with prefaces that were written later provides sufficient context that the reader incidentally gets an intellectual history of twentieth century France. Volume 2 naturally includes reflections upon 1 and volume 3 includes reflections on both. This was one of the most interesting aspects for me, as Lefebvre comments on social and political changes over the decades as well as shifts in his own thought.
As a result of my initial misconceptions, I found Critique of Everyday Life harder to read than I expected. Although some chapters do actually critique everyday life, the majority of the book is pure theory rather than applied and not infrequently dense. Lefebvre and the translators are to be commended for the clarity of style; it is the content that makes it challenging. Whole swathes of the book, including nearly the entirety of volume 2, are largely taxonomic in nature. They seek to define everyday life and its critique in exacting detail. I definitely found volume 2 the most demanding to read. Although at times it felt like my eyes were skimming over paragraphs without taking them in, I didn't seriously consider giving up. Lefebvre is an interesting thinker and I always had the sense this book was worth persisting with.
Volume 1 introduces the concept of everyday life, explains why it should be studied, and situates it within Marxism. Everyday life is articulated throughout as a residue and a base, a set of habitual activities and dynamics generally disregarded as unimportant yet with revolutionary potential. Drawing upon Marxist theory, the concepts of alienation and dialectical materialism are heavily featured:
Lefebvre was an anthropologist and philosopher; volumes 1 and 2 essentially set out a detailed Marxist philosophy of anthropology. Lefebvre wrote volume 1 immediately after the end of WWII, before consumer capitalism had really emerged. He comments on leisure, a new category at the time, and defines it in terms of a spontaneous need for a break and distraction from everyday life entailing liberation and pleasure. It is not a genuine escape, he warns:
Volume 2 appeared after more than a decade had passed, during which time Lefebvre based his academic career on studying everyday life. Yet he begins the second volume by admitting that the aims advanced in the first haven't been achieved. Everyday life is a very slippery thing. Society changed substantially between 1947 and 1961 and not in ways that he envisaged, as he concedes. The aim of volume 2 is a tighter and more exhaustive formulation of the theoretical basis for analysing everyday life. Needs and desires form a key part of this, but are difficult to precisely distinguish:
In the first chapter of volume 2, Lefebvre defends his overall project from straw men (e.g. 'objections from philosophers') and complains that ad hominem attacks have become common in academia. The prefaces to the 2014 edition provide greater detail of the controversies and fallings-out with which he was involved in the Left-wing French intellectual milieu. The most notable of these featured the Communist Party and the Situationists (who consigned him to 'the dustbin of history'). In the second volume Lefebvre is wary of 'simplification and artificial coherence', so advances a series of carefully defined theoretical concepts. Among other things, he defines level, index, sign, hypothesis, continuity & discontinuity, micro and macro, dimension, structure, and practise.
Volume 2 is thus a toolbox for the critique of everyday life. As a general reader, I found my level of interest varied rather arbitrarily in these chapters, depending on how readily applicable they were to my own unsystematic analysis of everyday life in the 21st century. The theory of the semantic field was quite exhausting, but there was much that proved rewarding. I was amused to find an example (not the first, if I recall correctly) of a twentieth century theorist warning of an ultimate horror exactly like every day on twitter dot com:
Fifty years away, as it turned out. I was also taken with the idea of relative infinity:
In addition to heavy theory, volume 2 also includes some elegant metaphors and astutely chosen examples (notably cars, which I always like to see anthropological angles on). Even when the definitions became tiring to read, they undoubtedly forced me to consider the utility of each concept in a new way. Lefebvre is an astute observer and this becomes more evident in volume 3. He again begins by reflecting upon unanticipated social changes, as well as the decline of Marxism in academia. I think the third volume was the most interesting and rewarding, as it builds upon and modifies the prior volumes very well. I appreciated Lefebvre's common sense regarding human rights:
Volume 3 devotes a lot of time to theorising information as a transformational economic commodity. Replace the word 'information' with 'data' and much of this remains remarkably relevant and insightful. Although Lefebvre doesn't quite foresee surveillance capitalism, he gets a lot closer to doing so than you would expect from someone writing in 1981. An example of his astute commentary on IT: 'There ensued a privatisation of the public and a publicisation of the private, in a constant exchange that mixes them without uniting them and separately them without discriminating between them; and this is still going on'. His analysis is certainly still worth reading in 2022, not least as an unheeded warning: 'If we let things take their course, this pessimistic science fiction scenario will gradually become our familiar landscape, because it is convenient to have a technical device at home that seems to take the whole of everyday life in hand.' This part genuinely prefigures The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power:
The final pages neatly synthesise the overall project of all three volumes, which is an astonishingly ambitious one. Whilst I was deep in volume 2, I sometimes lost sight of what Lefebvre was attempting. His theorisation of how everyday life can be studied and critiqued is inevitably incomplete, but it remains remarkable nonetheless. Despite finding it slow to read, I think Critique of Everyday Life is worth the time and effort. It is rewarding both for its content and context, such as observing Lefebvre's changes of perspective (including on women). Knowing what I know now, I think volume 3 is the most accessible and immediately useful of the three if you can't face the whole thing. While long-winded and dense at times, Critique of Everyday Life is strikingly original and retains relevance and insight. Some parts are of mostly historical interest, while others are disconcertingly contemporary. Lefebvre convinced me that everyday life is worthy of analysis and critique. I think his work still deserves to be discussed in the 21st century.
As a result of my initial misconceptions, I found Critique of Everyday Life harder to read than I expected. Although some chapters do actually critique everyday life, the majority of the book is pure theory rather than applied and not infrequently dense. Lefebvre and the translators are to be commended for the clarity of style; it is the content that makes it challenging. Whole swathes of the book, including nearly the entirety of volume 2, are largely taxonomic in nature. They seek to define everyday life and its critique in exacting detail. I definitely found volume 2 the most demanding to read. Although at times it felt like my eyes were skimming over paragraphs without taking them in, I didn't seriously consider giving up. Lefebvre is an interesting thinker and I always had the sense this book was worth persisting with.
Volume 1 introduces the concept of everyday life, explains why it should be studied, and situates it within Marxism. Everyday life is articulated throughout as a residue and a base, a set of habitual activities and dynamics generally disregarded as unimportant yet with revolutionary potential. Drawing upon Marxist theory, the concepts of alienation and dialectical materialism are heavily featured:
And that is precisely what human alienation consists in - man torn from his self, from nature, from his own nature, from his consciousness, dragged down and dehumanised by his own social products. This explains how there can be such a thing as a social mystery. Society becomes a mechanism and an organism that ceases to be comprehensible to the very people that participate in it and who maintain it through their labour. Men are what they do, and think according to what they are. And yet they are ignorant of what they do and what they are. Their own works and their own reality are beyond their grasp.
Lefebvre was an anthropologist and philosopher; volumes 1 and 2 essentially set out a detailed Marxist philosophy of anthropology. Lefebvre wrote volume 1 immediately after the end of WWII, before consumer capitalism had really emerged. He comments on leisure, a new category at the time, and defines it in terms of a spontaneous need for a break and distraction from everyday life entailing liberation and pleasure. It is not a genuine escape, he warns:
In this way leisure appears as the non-everyday in the everyday.
We cannot step beyond the everyday. The marvellous can only continue to exist in fiction and the illusions people share. There is no escape. And yet we wish to have the illusion of escape as near to hand as possible. An illusion not entirely illusory, but constituting a 'world' both apparent and real (the reality of appearances and the apparently real) quite different to the everyday world yet as open-ended and closely dovetailed into the everyday as possible. So we work to earn our leisure, and our leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work. A vicious cycle.
Volume 2 appeared after more than a decade had passed, during which time Lefebvre based his academic career on studying everyday life. Yet he begins the second volume by admitting that the aims advanced in the first haven't been achieved. Everyday life is a very slippery thing. Society changed substantially between 1947 and 1961 and not in ways that he envisaged, as he concedes. The aim of volume 2 is a tighter and more exhaustive formulation of the theoretical basis for analysing everyday life. Needs and desires form a key part of this, but are difficult to precisely distinguish:
It is too simple to see desire as qualitative and need as quantitative - the one psychological and sociological (or psycho-social), the other biological and physiological. There are needs that are social, objective, and quantifiable: needs for so many sources of energy, so many houses or schools, etc. Economists and sociologists know these needs well. On the sociological level (to use the still unclarified term 'level'), need and desire still separate one from the other. A single human reality appears with two faces, one brutally objective - the social need (for this or that), the other subtly subjective - desire (for this or for that or for something else by means of this or that, or even for nothing or for the infinite or for pure surprise), with motivations which give meaning to the desired object and to desire itself.
There are many mediations between need and desire. In fact, there is everything: society in its entirety (productive activities and the modes of consumption), culture, the past and history, language, norms, commands and prohibitions, the hierarchy of values and preferences.
In the first chapter of volume 2, Lefebvre defends his overall project from straw men (e.g. 'objections from philosophers') and complains that ad hominem attacks have become common in academia. The prefaces to the 2014 edition provide greater detail of the controversies and fallings-out with which he was involved in the Left-wing French intellectual milieu. The most notable of these featured the Communist Party and the Situationists (who consigned him to 'the dustbin of history'). In the second volume Lefebvre is wary of 'simplification and artificial coherence', so advances a series of carefully defined theoretical concepts. Among other things, he defines level, index, sign, hypothesis, continuity & discontinuity, micro and macro, dimension, structure, and practise.
Volume 2 is thus a toolbox for the critique of everyday life. As a general reader, I found my level of interest varied rather arbitrarily in these chapters, depending on how readily applicable they were to my own unsystematic analysis of everyday life in the 21st century. The theory of the semantic field was quite exhausting, but there was much that proved rewarding. I was amused to find an example (not the first, if I recall correctly) of a twentieth century theorist warning of an ultimate horror exactly like every day on twitter dot com:
At the extreme, signs and significations which are nothing more than significations lose all meaning. At the extreme looms the shadow of what we call 'the great pleonasm': the unmediated passing immediately into the unmediated and the everyday recorded just as it is in the everyday - the event grasped, pulverised, and transmitted as rapidly as light and consciousness - the repetition of the identical in a wild whirling dance devoid of Dionysian rapture, since the 'news' never contains anything really new. If this extreme were reached, the closed circuit of communication and information would jeopardise the unmediated and the mediated alike. It would merge them in a monotonous and Babel-like confusion. The reign of the global would also be the reign of a gigantic tautology, which would kill all dramas after having exploited them shamelessly.
Of course, this situation is still a long way away. It would be a closed circuit, a circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge. But it will never come full circle. There will always be something new and unforeseen, if only in terms of sheer horror.
Fifty years away, as it turned out. I was also taken with the idea of relative infinity:
If 'the real' cannot be exhausted in a finite series of limited questions formulated in logical and precise terms, to which the interviewee can only answer yes or no, and if in one way or another we must qualify it as being 'non-finite', surely we should take this into account in the representations we use.
The problem goes beyond our frame of reference. There is a law that knowledge still obeys: 'I must stop'. Sooner or later it comes to a halt before an obstacle which also acts as a support: an object. Praxis overcomes it; analysis dissolves it using other means. Knowledge and praxis perceive the non-finite as a possibility, a 'horizon of horizons'. We must not see it as actual infinite. We must make infinity relative.
In addition to heavy theory, volume 2 also includes some elegant metaphors and astutely chosen examples (notably cars, which I always like to see anthropological angles on). Even when the definitions became tiring to read, they undoubtedly forced me to consider the utility of each concept in a new way. Lefebvre is an astute observer and this becomes more evident in volume 3. He again begins by reflecting upon unanticipated social changes, as well as the decline of Marxism in academia. I think the third volume was the most interesting and rewarding, as it builds upon and modifies the prior volumes very well. I appreciated Lefebvre's common sense regarding human rights:
It must be conceded and stated that this hypercriticism has had some disastrous results - for example, the extermination of humanism, philosophical support for human rights. On the pretext that humanism bore the marks of bourgeois liberalism and suspect ideologies, it was blithely trampled underfoot without anything being put in its place.
Volume 3 devotes a lot of time to theorising information as a transformational economic commodity. Replace the word 'information' with 'data' and much of this remains remarkably relevant and insightful. Although Lefebvre doesn't quite foresee surveillance capitalism, he gets a lot closer to doing so than you would expect from someone writing in 1981. An example of his astute commentary on IT: 'There ensued a privatisation of the public and a publicisation of the private, in a constant exchange that mixes them without uniting them and separately them without discriminating between them; and this is still going on'. His analysis is certainly still worth reading in 2022, not least as an unheeded warning: 'If we let things take their course, this pessimistic science fiction scenario will gradually become our familiar landscape, because it is convenient to have a technical device at home that seems to take the whole of everyday life in hand.' This part genuinely prefigures The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power:
Hence we are not dealing with only - or not so much - with a technocratic utopia or ideology, but with a scientistic mythology - a paradox, what is more, with the myth of an electronic Agora and the disturbing project of the technological extension of the 'audit' intended for internal control of workshops, but capable of being extended to political and police control of spaces much vaster than the enterprise...
These ideologues do not think that they are interpreting the techniques, but that they are estimating them objectively. They refuse to concede that they are presenting, or representing, a tendentious political project. To them, the project seems to follow logically from the technology. Is not technologising the social and political, as opposed to socialising and politicising technology, a choice and a decision?
The final pages neatly synthesise the overall project of all three volumes, which is an astonishingly ambitious one. Whilst I was deep in volume 2, I sometimes lost sight of what Lefebvre was attempting. His theorisation of how everyday life can be studied and critiqued is inevitably incomplete, but it remains remarkable nonetheless. Despite finding it slow to read, I think Critique of Everyday Life is worth the time and effort. It is rewarding both for its content and context, such as observing Lefebvre's changes of perspective (including on women). Knowing what I know now, I think volume 3 is the most accessible and immediately useful of the three if you can't face the whole thing. While long-winded and dense at times, Critique of Everyday Life is strikingly original and retains relevance and insight. Some parts are of mostly historical interest, while others are disconcertingly contemporary. Lefebvre convinced me that everyday life is worthy of analysis and critique. I think his work still deserves to be discussed in the 21st century.
October 2, 2015
I won't pretend to be qualified (yet) to write a proper and just review of this book. I will limit myself to say what it was to me: difficult, challenging, exciting, and fun. The first and third volumes are easier to read than the second, mainly because of the way Lefebvre wrote them, in plain language, Volume two on the other hand seemed to have more of an academic and philosophical tone that I could not always get or follow. The whole thing opened my mind to the everyday as I had not seen it before, as the main stage of events of life itself, where the good stuff happens, in some way or another. I am sure I will be riding this book again sooner than later, hopefully more prepared to comprehend contexts, terms and conclusions, and draw my own in a proper way.
That said, I recommend this reading wholeheartedly. Lefebvre develops themes that are still very much alive today, and he wrote about them in the 40s, 60s and 80s as if he were alive in 2015, seeing them unfold. For example topics related to identity, differentiation and particularities, that right away reminded me of identity politics and his 'preview' of the information age and how he'd thought it would unfurl (some of what he wrote seems almost prophetic).
That said, I recommend this reading wholeheartedly. Lefebvre develops themes that are still very much alive today, and he wrote about them in the 40s, 60s and 80s as if he were alive in 2015, seeing them unfold. For example topics related to identity, differentiation and particularities, that right away reminded me of identity politics and his 'preview' of the information age and how he'd thought it would unfurl (some of what he wrote seems almost prophetic).
February 20, 2021
Where in all of those celebrity What’s in my Handbag videos is this book??
an Essential of the Everyday
such an Essential that it is a Critique!
I don’t need to know that you’re using X skin product just because it’s a sponsor because I’m probably not going to use it because my skin is different from yours but what LEfEBVRE Hints at in this three volume binding
Is that there is the quality of the everyday to be found in the power of Thought, that if you belong to a religious or political group then so does your thought, so the next time you see the Left and Right arguing over whatever the press wants them to fight over take a step back and mediate, does your thought belong to the everyday, because that is where we supposedly belong and the Everyday is not something we all have due to Thought Privilege
Also LEfEBVRE DRAGS SARTRE FOR 800 pages
And that was worth it
More on what’s in MY bag later
an Essential of the Everyday
such an Essential that it is a Critique!
I don’t need to know that you’re using X skin product just because it’s a sponsor because I’m probably not going to use it because my skin is different from yours but what LEfEBVRE Hints at in this three volume binding
Is that there is the quality of the everyday to be found in the power of Thought, that if you belong to a religious or political group then so does your thought, so the next time you see the Left and Right arguing over whatever the press wants them to fight over take a step back and mediate, does your thought belong to the everyday, because that is where we supposedly belong and the Everyday is not something we all have due to Thought Privilege
Also LEfEBVRE DRAGS SARTRE FOR 800 pages
And that was worth it
More on what’s in MY bag later
November 8, 2021
everyday life: it's bad folks.
July 27, 2018
Excerpts from and links to two overviews of Lefebvre’s work:
"Historically speaking, Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume The Critique of Everyday Life was a great influence on the New Left, ’68 and all that. Lefebvre also continues to be an influence on the work of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson etc. Rather then discussing Lefebvre’s historical importance, this summary will outline Lefebvre’s argument and emphasizing The Critique of Everyday Life’s contemporary relevance.
"Lefebvre’s premise is that 'the only real critique was and remains the Critique of the Left…Because it alone is based on knowledge.' Lefebvre acts on this premise by arguing for a Marxian endevour at odds with the vacuous formalism of the official Stalinist Marxism of his time. Emphasizing the sociological basis of Marx’s thought and the central importance of Marx’s concepts of alienation, fetishism and mystification, Lefebvre’s argues these categories should by used to critique everyday life."
https://futuresandpasts.wordpress.com...
"Lefebvre extends Marx's analysis by discovering new forms of alienation, and arguing that capitalism not only organizes relations of production in an exploitive manner (which produces several forms of alienation in workers) but that every aspect of life is emptied of meaning or significance, which is then purchased back in the form of spectacular commodities. Rather than resolving alienation, consumption is part of the mis-recognition of their alienated state by modern consumers."
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~rshields/f...
"Historically speaking, Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume The Critique of Everyday Life was a great influence on the New Left, ’68 and all that. Lefebvre also continues to be an influence on the work of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson etc. Rather then discussing Lefebvre’s historical importance, this summary will outline Lefebvre’s argument and emphasizing The Critique of Everyday Life’s contemporary relevance.
"Lefebvre’s premise is that 'the only real critique was and remains the Critique of the Left…Because it alone is based on knowledge.' Lefebvre acts on this premise by arguing for a Marxian endevour at odds with the vacuous formalism of the official Stalinist Marxism of his time. Emphasizing the sociological basis of Marx’s thought and the central importance of Marx’s concepts of alienation, fetishism and mystification, Lefebvre’s argues these categories should by used to critique everyday life."
https://futuresandpasts.wordpress.com...
"Lefebvre extends Marx's analysis by discovering new forms of alienation, and arguing that capitalism not only organizes relations of production in an exploitive manner (which produces several forms of alienation in workers) but that every aspect of life is emptied of meaning or significance, which is then purchased back in the form of spectacular commodities. Rather than resolving alienation, consumption is part of the mis-recognition of their alienated state by modern consumers."
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~rshields/f...
February 26, 2025
Oeuvre beaucoup trop avancé intellectuellement pour ma compréhension. Rempli de phénoménologie , de dialectique hégélienne , d’élaboration de concept sociologique, etc. Arreté au milieu de la 2ième partie, après un effort mental épuisant. Pourtant cité par Genevieve pruvost dans quotidien politique comme oeuvre importante.
June 10, 2021
I spent a long period going through this tome, and admittedly, failed to extract much from the process. Whilst many of the ideas introduced in 'Critique of Everyday Life', they are difficult to understand in their depth and intricacy that they deserve. This is partially due to Lefebvre's writing style, which was apparently a literal transcription written by his wife, Henriette Valet, of speeches he made to her in-between puffs of his pipe (which, if true, means she deserves a huge amount of credit for what I imagine was a very long and difficult task).
However, even if the details are hard to absorb, the overarching message of this text, that the 'everyday' is dominated by commodity consumption, and we must counter this by advocating for a renewed politics of leisure time. Further to this, the sheer time-frame these three volumes cover (almost four decades) is impressive and useful in of itself.
My rating of 3/5 is probably slightly harsh in respect of all this, although I hope to return to this text at some point in the future and give it the greater time and energy it deserves, and hopefully in doing so will be also able to give it a higher rating.
However, even if the details are hard to absorb, the overarching message of this text, that the 'everyday' is dominated by commodity consumption, and we must counter this by advocating for a renewed politics of leisure time. Further to this, the sheer time-frame these three volumes cover (almost four decades) is impressive and useful in of itself.
My rating of 3/5 is probably slightly harsh in respect of all this, although I hope to return to this text at some point in the future and give it the greater time and energy it deserves, and hopefully in doing so will be also able to give it a higher rating.
April 22, 2021
Interesting ideas, but way too longwinded.
September 24, 2021
4.5 stars, Vol III > Vol II > Vol I
February 28, 2019
Yes, this book covers a huge range of topics over a span of almost 4 decades, providing a brilliant illustration of the change over time of everyday life in the age of modernism. And yes, the central premise, that a sustained critique of the multiplicity of factors affecting everyday life is the only way to confront alienation and provide a new way of living, was, is, and remains of the utmost importance, regardless of what the individual factors may be at any given point in time (and which Lefebvre does an exceptional job of pinpointing at the various points in time when he was writing).
But above all, for me, at least, the true and lasting value of this text is the display of the dialectical method by one of its most capable and influential practitioners. I've studied dialectical theory for years now, but there was always something that I couldn't quite grasp, that just didn't sit well with me about the whole process, maybe because I couldn't understand what it truly looked like in practice, despite how much it is venerated by Marxists, Marxians, Hegelians, and the sort. After reading Lefebvre's Critique slowly, deliberately, and deeply, I can now say that I understand the dialectical method, what it sets out to do, how it is done, what it accomplishes. What this provides me is not simply another way to look at a specific philosophical technique, but rather another way of looking at the world. What more can one ask from literature of any genre?
But above all, for me, at least, the true and lasting value of this text is the display of the dialectical method by one of its most capable and influential practitioners. I've studied dialectical theory for years now, but there was always something that I couldn't quite grasp, that just didn't sit well with me about the whole process, maybe because I couldn't understand what it truly looked like in practice, despite how much it is venerated by Marxists, Marxians, Hegelians, and the sort. After reading Lefebvre's Critique slowly, deliberately, and deeply, I can now say that I understand the dialectical method, what it sets out to do, how it is done, what it accomplishes. What this provides me is not simply another way to look at a specific philosophical technique, but rather another way of looking at the world. What more can one ask from literature of any genre?
April 10, 2021
An uneven case for humanism? Among other things, Lefebvre makes the case that dialectical thinking is the best tool for analyzing the intangibles of human life. And I'm afraid, in the end, his perspective (which thankfully matures over this 35 year project) seems really quiet sensible. This veteran of the French Resistance, unrepentant communist party dissident, and idiosyncratic intellectual, warrants further research.
August 19, 2018
A mastermind, I wonder what the volume IV would be, had he written today.
I rate this 5 because of the enormous field covered, the depth of knowledge behind and within.
It's is a hard book, and I had to iron work.
cheers dialectic, I just read that some others find it difficult to explain;
however Henri Lefebvre managed excellently.
I rate this 5 because of the enormous field covered, the depth of knowledge behind and within.
It's is a hard book, and I had to iron work.
cheers dialectic, I just read that some others find it difficult to explain;
however Henri Lefebvre managed excellently.
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