Synonyms

Henri Lefebvre

Definition

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was a French sociologist and theorist known for his work on social space, everyday life, the right to the city, and other topics bridging urban studies, spatial theory, and Marxist philosophy.

Introduction

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was a heterodox thinker whose work encompassed and connected fields like geography, sociology, urban studies, philosophy, architecture, and cultural studies. While his work makes contact with and connects various intellectual movements of his time, it is (in accordance with his own starting point) largely read through a lens of Marxism. However, more recently, Lefebvre’s work has been revisited for other philosophical resonances. In particular, a “third wave” of Lefebvrian scholarship has emerged, bringing to light more complex genealogies and readings of Lefebvre’s philosophies of space, everyday life, and difference. This “third wave” of Lefevbrian scholarship has sought to overcome a polarized reception of his work between a first wave of scholarship focused on materialist readings and a second wave of scholarship more aligned with cultural studies (Kipfer et al. 2008, 3).

It is within this opening that Lefebvre’s work has been approached through a phenomenological lens. Numerous scholars have identified the influence and resonances of phenomenology on Lefebvre’s theories of space (Simonsen 2005, 2007; Schmid 2008; Pierce and Martin 2015; Kinkaid 2020). In particular, geographers have developed connections between the work of Lefebvre and the writing of phenomenologists, including Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Heidegger, and Bachelard (e.g. Stewart 1995; Shields 1999; Elden 2004a, b; Schmid 2008; Simonsen 2010; Kinkaid 2018, 2020; Simonsen and Koefoed 2020). Elden (2004b) goes so far as to say that the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger should be added to the triad of key thinkers – Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche – shaping Lefebvre’s work. Schmid contends that “Lefebvre’s aim is, so to speak, a materialist version of phenomenology – a project Merleau-Ponty pursued too but could not complete” (2008, 39). For these scholars, phenomenology is a crucial – and often missing – piece of understanding the philosophical and political work Lefebvre is accomplishing in his theories of space, practice, difference, and everyday life.

These resonances and parallels between Lefebvre’s work and phenomenology demonstrate that there are fascinating and still unexplored avenues for phenomenological readings of his work. These openings are timely, given the re-emergence of phenomenology within geography and a growing interest across disciplines in the potential of a “critical phenomenology” (Guenther 2013, 2019; Salamon 2018; Simonsen and Koefoed 2020; Kinkaid 2020, 2021). In what follows, we identify and explore key directions for working through and extending a phenomenological reading of Lefebvre’s work. Specifically, we focus on three key themes that run throughout Lefebvre’s oeuvre – everyday life, body-practice-space, and difference – and put them into conversation with phenomenological thought. In doing so, we demonstrate the necessity of engaging phenomenology to understand Lefebvre’s work and identify the avenues a phenomenological reading opens up to develop critical theories of space, practice, difference, and everyday life through and beyond his original formulations.

Everyday Life

The first theme in Lefebvre’s work we will consider is everyday life. It is in his series of Critique of Everyday Life that his engagement with phenomenology becomes notable, so much so that we will see his theory as a combination of Marxism and phenomenology. Lefebvre was involved in critical debate with several phenomenologists and existentialists, including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but, as noted by Kofman and Lebas (1996), Heidegger was the twentieth-century philosopher with whom he engaged most (see also Elden 2004a; Sünker 2014). This engagement appears in the whole Critique of Everyday Life trilogy (Lefebvre 1958, 1961, 1981) but is most outspoken in his Métaphilosophie from 1965. Lefebvre read Husserl and Heidegger already in the 1920s, but in the 1940s he was (not surprisingly) reluctant to acknowledge Heidegger’s contributions. The obvious reason was Heidegger’s affiliation to the Nazi Party, which at that time made Lefebvre characterize his philosophy as “pro-fascist” and degenerating the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothingness to one of executioner and victim (Lefebvre 2001 [1946]). In 1965, when the first edition of Métaphilosophie came out, the language had softened, but the debate with Heidegger is still a critical one. Heidegger is too abstract, too philosophical, and too little concrete for Lefebvre. In the words of Stuart Elden, “Lefebvre wants to ground Heidegger” (2004a, 79).

“Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all” (Lefebvre 1991a [1958], 127). This was an aphorism that Lefebvre used in the introduction to the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life. He saw his work on everyday life as his principal contribution to Marxism. He initially states that “Marxism as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life” (ibid. 148), but he also argues that it does not offer a complete critical knowledge of everyday life. Lefebvre does not consider Marxism a full-blown, comprehensive theoretical system or an “orthodoxy”, but a living whole to be developed. At the same time, he was writing in a period of two dominant lines of thinking in post-war France – existential phenomenology and structuralism. From a critical reading of them all, Lefebvre developed his ideas of the contradictory character of everyday life embracing both the trivial and the extraordinary:

There is a cliché which with a certain degree of justification compares creative moments to the mountain tops and everyday time to the plain, or to the marshes. The image the reader will find in this book differs from this generally accepted metaphor. Here everyday life is compared to fertile soil. A landscape without flowers or magnificent woods may be depressing for the passer-by; but flowers and trees should not make us forget the earth beneath, which has a secret life and a richness of its own. (ibid., 87)

Lefebvre, then, argued for a dialectic understanding of everyday life in both theory and method. On the one side, it was a theory of alienation inspired by both the young Marx and Heidegger. From Marx came the critique of alienation in work, but at the same time, this theory of alienation gave occasion for a critique of Marx’s theory – in particular, political economy – and an opportunity to advance Lefebvre’s own aims to reach “down” to human experiences. In particular, Lefebvre argues that processes of alienation not only stem from working life, but also from other sectors of social life. From Heidegger’s Being and Time came the concept Alltäglichkeit (quotidienneté/everydayness) characterizing the inauthentic existence of Dasein – the dreary, reified, and repetitive unfolding of the everyday. Lefebvre continues this vein in the more sociological analysis of his age, Everyday Life in the Modern World (1984 [1971]), where he depicts what he calls the Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption (ibid., 60). The “modern world” refers to the products of industrialization and the controls necessary to socialize workers and regulate consumption. Everything in everyday life is calculated – it has been colonized by new technology and consumer society. Modernity reduces everyday life to the everyday (quotidian): “New types of alienation have joined ranks with the old …: political, ideological, technological, bureaucratic, urban etc…alienation is spreading and becoming so powerful that it obliterates all trace or consciousness of alienation” (ibid., 94).

The other side of the theory of everyday life was, for Lefebvre, connected to his above cited metaphor of “fertile soil.” The analysis of everyday life basically represented a dialectic between alienation and appropriation, or between the actual and the possible. In this sense, Critique of Everyday Life creates another avenue that also permeates his work with rural sociology, urban sociology, and later his thinking on production of space: the theme of producing one’s life as a work of art (oeuvre). The production of every life is about linear time of calculation contra the cyclical time of everyday life, involving bodily rhythms and experiences, a multiplicity of moments such as festival, dreams, play, love, leisure, culture, poetry, and art. This thematic led Lefebvre into involvement with contemporary artistic movements and, in the 1960s, with radical protest in French society. In particular, his connection to the situationist movement and its major author Guy Debord is noteworthy, as well as to the Copra group (a combination of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam) (see also Kofman and Lebas 1996). This is the occasion for Lefebvre’s introduction of the idea of a “permanent cultural revolution” (1984, 194 ff). Since people are living in social situations in which mundaneness can no longer be lived, cultural revolutions are rendered possible. Based on people’s learning, creativity, ability to enjoy and self-realization, a rehabilitation of everyday life takes place in the form of radically different styles of life to the one consolidated around them. This is where Lefebvre’s critique embraces utopian visions of a variety of social movements transcending religious, ethnic, gender, class, and national barriers.

Finally, Lefebvre in his latest work Éléments de Rythmanalyse (1992) returns to the issue of everyday life through a thinking of human and social rhythms as a way to combine his work on temporality and spatiality. The repetitive theme of the way the cyclical, rhythmic nature of the lived is contrasted with linear time of the technical and the social underlines two points: that phenomenology remains an important part of his thinking, and that the body means a lot to his work on temporality and spatiality (see also Simonsen 2005).

Body, Space, Practice

A focus on the body, practice, and space is a second area in which the phenomenological resonances of Lefebvre’s work become clear. The body and spatial practice are terms at the center of Lefebvre’s theory of space as developed in one of his major works, The Production of Space (1991b [1974]). As we develop elsewhere (Simonsen 2005, 2007; Kinkaid 2018, 2020), these terms, and the relational spatial ontology they describe, have generative overlaps and resonances with phenomenological accounts of subjectivity and space, most notably the work of Merleau-Ponty. In this brief discussion, we outline how, for Lefebvre, the production of social space begins from the body and its spatial practices, making a phenomenological lens very useful in drawing out the conceptual and political implications of his theory of space. We read Lefebvre’s Production of Space alongside Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (2012 [1945]) to demonstrate the shared concerns of a Lefebvrian and a phenomenological account of space and subjectivity.

Lefebvre’s theory of space begins from a critique of abstract space – that is, it is posed against a conception of space that exists apart from the subject. This “abstract space” – space as a container or coordinate system in which things are arranged – serves as a foil throughout The Production of Space, much like linear time serves as a foil for lived rhythms throughout his aforementioned works. In place of this abstract space, Lefebvre theorizes space as the product of embodied social practices. In this vein, Schmid remarks, “the subject of Lefebvre’s theory is not ‘space in itself,’ not the ordering of (material) objects and artifacts ‘in space.’ Space is to be understood in an active sense as an intricate web of relationships that is continuously produced and reproduced” (2008, 41). For Lefebvre, lived space is an absolutely necessary part of the production of space.

The theory of space presented in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception begins from this shared starting point. For Merleau-Ponty, the relationship between space and subject “is not a question of a relation between a container and its content, since this relation only exists between objects” (2012 [1945], 254). As Kinkaid notes, “Merleau-Ponty is unsatisfied with the philosophical choice of either ‘perceiving things in space’ in this naive empiricist manner, or alternatively ‘conceiving of space as the indivisible system of connecting acts accomplished by a constituting mind’ in the manner of transcendental idealism (2012 [1945], 254)” (Kinkaid 2020, 173). He asks “does not the experience of space establish a unity of an entirely different type?” (2012 [1945], 254). In grounding a theory of space in the experience of the phenomenological subject, Merleau-Ponty instead seeks a middle ground that can account for the entanglement of subject and space.

For both Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty, abstract conceptions of space erase this unique and fundamental relationship between the subject and space. While neither suggest that space does not exist outside of the perceiving subject, both Lefebvre (see Schmid 2008, 28) and Merleau-Ponty (see Lee 2014, 242), begin from the embodied subject as the only meaningful epistemological starting point for encountering space. In other words, they begin from a phenomenological encounter with space as the only possible starting point for a knowledge of space. Finding an abstract, disembodied conception of space untenable, Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty propose a relational ontology of space. This is an ontology in which the subject and space are fundamentally intertwined. This fundamental relation between subject and space relocates the production of space away from an abstract coordinate system toward an account of embodiment.

Indeed, the body is a key site in the production of space. For Lefebvre, “[t]he whole of (social) space proceeds from the body” (1991b [1974], 405), a body that is produced in relation to other bodies (Merrifield 2013). Lefebvre describes:

Space – my space – … is first of all my body, and then it is my body’s counterpart or ‘other’, its mirror-image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other. (Lefebvre 1991b [1974], 184)

Beginning from the fact of one’s own embodiment, the subject encounters space as a “practico-sensory totality” (Lefebvre 1991b [1974], 62). Here, the body is a spatial body – a body situated in a set of relations, forces, desires – through which we become oriented toward the world and capable of meaningful action therein (Lefebvre 1991b [1974], 195; Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945], 261). This lived, embodied relation to space becomes the starting point for a knowledge of space. Here, the body is not an abstract body located in space, but a spatial body, a phenomenological subject:

But one may wonder what connection exists between this abstract body, understood simply as a mediation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and a practical and fleshy body conceived of as a totality complete with spatial qualities (symmetries, asymmetries) and energetic properties (discharges, economies, waste) … the moment the body is envisioned as a practico-sensory totality, a decentering and recentering of knowledge occurs. (1991b [1974], 61)

This approach echoes Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the spatial body; Merleau-Ponty also poses an opposition between the “objective body” and “phenomenal body” (2012 [1945], 241) and begins his theory of space from the latter.

This relation between the subject and space – a relation that is phenomenological in nature – is captured in Lefebvre’s concept of spatial practice. Spatial practice names the fundamental relation between bodies and space and the manner in which they (re)produce each other; spatial practice, in other words, is how embodied action in space connects and reproduces the material and symbolic determinates of space. In speaking of spatial practice, Lefebvre describes the body’s symbolic, social, and material performance in space as a reading of space by the body and as a gestural system that links the symbolic and material realms of space (1991b [1974], 215). One’s inhabitation of space, then, can become a “lived obedience” (143) to spatial ideologies. In a similar vein, Merleau-Ponty (2012) describes this “organic relation” between the subject and space as a “gearing into the world” (262) and a “blind adhesion to the world” (265). As Simonsen describes, both thinkers are concerned with how “[t]he acts of the body develop in intersubjective fields where they are learned and disseminated as memories and habits of the flesh – sedimented and reproduced as the corporeal equivalent of ideology” (Simonsen 2013, 18). It is through spatial practice that the subject encounters space – not as a neutral container but as an arena of action charged with symbolic meanings and relations of power – and reproduces it in a manner that is at once symbolic and material. Spatial practice, then, is the arena in which the subject embodies, enacts, and resists the ideologies of space.

As we can see from this brief overview (see Kinkaid 2020 for a more detailed analysis), the phenomenological subject is at the center of Lefebvre’s conception of social space. This is a “subject in whom lived, perceived and conceived (known) come together within a spatial practice” (1991b [1974], 230). A phenomenological reading thus proves crucial for understanding Lefebvre’s account of space. Reading Lefebvre’s theories of space through an explicitly phenomenological register – with a specific focus on the embodied subject and spatial practice – illuminates the broader influence of phenomenology in his work, which can be traced through his treatments of difference, temporality, differential space, and embodiment.

Difference

Difference is a third theme that serves as an entry point for a phenomenological reading of Lefebvre’s work. The concept of difference runs through Lefebvre’s work, from the outspoken Manifeste Différentialiste (1970), to his writings on everyday life, cities, and the production of space, all the way to writings on the state. Difference is a complex term in Lefebvre’s work that takes on various resonances throughout his oeuvre.

Difference, for Lefebvre, is not so much about particularity and identity; neither does it refer to subjective experience of specific forms of embodied difference (though the body is a site of difference in Lefebvre’s account [Kinkaid 2020, 182]). It is a social state emerging from struggle, conceptual as well as lived. Furthermore, difference is connected to the concept of autogestion – a generalized concept of self-determination of all aspects of life; pursuing the right to difference means to claim a different, no longer capitalist, world based on use-value relationships and extensive self-determination (Lefebvre 1970). Difference, then, refers to an increasing variety and complexity of the social (or urban) world; it is opposed to reduction, a theoretical, practical, and ideological instrument of power and homogenization. We have to struggle against a society of “indifference” in the way we live “differentially” (ibid.). This is an idea of radical democratization or “concrete utopia” worked out in the concept of urban society (1996 [1968]) or differential space (1991b[1974]).

Despite the centrality of difference as a theme in Lefebvre’s work, he rarely extends this concern with difference to consider issues of identity and embodiment (though his conceptualizations of difference occasionally venture into thinking about the production of minorities and classes [see Kinkaid 2020 for a discussion]). Yet it is here, in this unarticulated but present connection that the phenomenological moments of his work become manifest. While Lefebvre attends to the body as a site in the production of space (1991b [1974], 405), he does not explicitly consider the role of embodied difference in producing space and society. Nonetheless, his ideas on difference have substantial overlap with the work of feminism, critical race theory, and queer theory, specifically work in these areas that applies a phenomenological perspective. Indeed, a critical phenomenological reading of Lefebvre’s work – a reading that begins from embodied difference – brings to the fore the often overlooked centrality of the body and difference that is at work in his political vision but rarely articulated explicitly. In what follows, we highlight how Lefebvre’s work has been used in a critical phenomenological register, specifically to theorize embodied difference – here, race and gender/sexuality – and how it configures social space.

In The Manifeste Differentialiste (1970) and connected writings, Lefebvre repeatedly referred to race and ethnicity: the right to be different is the right not to be classified into categories which have been determined by the necessarily homogenizing powers. The struggle today, he argued, is not simply about classes, but between peoples, nations, tribes, ethnicities, religions. In the treatment of this issue, a core concept was not only difference, but also colonization. Lefebvre saw connections between the segregation and the urban struggles of immigrants in the French cities and the imperialism and anti-colonial fights in North Africa. This connection opens up his work for a conversation with the work of his contemporary Franz Fanon. Not many writers on Lefebvre have discussed this connection. An early one was Derek Gregory who wrote that “For Lefebvre, ‘colonization’ is more than a figure of speech” (1994, 403) implying a multi-scalar social process (international, interregional, intraregional, and within everyday life). However, the connection between the two authors is most thoroughly explored by Stefan Kipfer (Kipfer 2007; Kipfer and Goonewardena 2007; Kipfer et al. 2013). He identifies the similarities between their intellectual universes. They shared critical modernist intellectual sources (Hegel, Marx, surrealism, existential phenomenology) leading both of them to a dialectical critique of racialization as a form of alienation in everyday situations. In this way, Fanon’s critique of everyday racism strongly resonates with Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life. For both authors, then, social space is a strategic mediator of political struggle “because it links the phenomenology of everyday life to the macrological dimensions of social order – in this case colonialism and racialized patriarchy” (Kipfer 2007, 718). In this sense, both authors can be seen as early prototypes of a critical phenomenology that reappears in contemporary writings on the spatial grounding of race and ethnicity. For example, we can see how racialization is an ongoing history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting their everyday lives and the way in which they are able to inhabit space (e.g. Ahmed 2000, 2006; Alcoff 2006; Simonsen and Koefoed 2020). Or we can look to more macro-orientated authors (e.g. Merrifield 2014) who broaden this lens to observe a global urban Neo-Haussmannization – a racial apartheid working from small-scale encounters to global cities.

Scholars have also used Lefebvre’s work (specifically as it operates in a phenomenological register) to consider themes of gender, sexuality, and space. Lefebvre’s treatments of gender and sexuality tend to be abstract, monolithic, and heteronormative (Blum and Nast 1996), yet feminist and queer theorists have nonetheless used his work as a starting point for thinking through the gendered and sexualized production of space (Kipfer et al. 2013). Much of the appeal of his work to feminists relates to his focus on the body and his critiques of phallocentric space (Stewart 1995). To draw out and extend Lefebvre’s perspectives here, scholars have brought his work into contact with feminist theory and queer theory. For example, Alfaro (2021) engages Lefebvre’s concepts alongside feminist formulations of “the globally intimate,” and Kinkaid (2018, 2021) engages queer phenomenology to extend Lefebvre’s theorizations of differential embodiment.

Feminist scholars working in a number of fields have deployed Lefebvre’s work to consider themes including gender and architecture (McLeod 1997), gender, colonialism, and modernity (Ross 1996), economic geography and democracy (Massey 1994), sex work and urban space (Hubbard and Sanders 2003) and feminist urban theory (Buckley and Strauss 2016), capitalist urbanization (Alfaro 2021), and other topics. Scholars engaging queer theory have also provided critiques of Lefebvre’s treatment of these themes (Blum and Nast 1996), while working to extend his general approach to questions of queer gender, sexuality, and space, including topics of queer temporality (Ivanchikova 2006), queer visuality (Kinkaid 2018), queer bodies in healthcare spaces (Meer and Müller 2017), and Islam and queer space (Abraham 2007). And, working within the project of critical phenomenology, Ahmed in her Queer Phenomenology (2006) uses Lefebvre’s ideas of spatial orientation to grasp how gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodily orientations encounter dominant social and spatial structures. These diverse applications of Lefebvre’s thought are united in their efforts to center the body in the production of space, attend to the experience of differently located subjects, and consider how social differences produce space and vice versa.

Conclusion

As we have demonstrated in this brief review, phenomenology is a key lens for making sense of Henri Lefebvre’s intellectual and political project and extending it into new realms. Themes of everyday life, the body, practice, and difference beckon further engagement with phenomenological thought. We argue that phenomenological thinking can illuminate overlooked moments in Lefebvre’s thinking, complicate more limited readings, and open up new avenues for engagement.

In calling for more attention to the phenomenological themes operating in Lefebvre’s work, we do not seek to displace other ways of making sense of his work, including political economy. Rather, we seek to draw out already existing engagements with phenomenology in his work and the scholarship deriving from it to illuminate Lefebvre’s unique and heterodox contributions to theorizing space and (capitalist) society. Bringing phenomenological readings into explicit engagement with Marxist thought can enable us to bridge concerns with embodiment, experience, and perception with the realms of political economy, capitalist culture, and the production of material inequality. Developing this sort of materialist phenomenology out of the intersections of phenomenology and a Marxist critique was reportedly Lefebvre’s aim (Schmid 2008, 39), an aim shared with Merleau-Ponty. This is an expansive and generative intellectual project that remains under construction in the “third wave” of Lefebvre scholarship (Kipfer et al. 2013, 116). Furthering this ambitious intellectual project will require careful attention to the deployment of phenomenological thinking in Lefebvre’s work and further excavation of its phenomenological themes: everyday life, embodiment, practice, and difference, along with temporality, rhythm, and subjectivity.

Cross-References