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Preface by Michel Trebitsch
The critique of everyday life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. A historian and sociologist, Lefebvre developed his ideas over seven decades through intellectual confrontation with figures as diverse as Bergson, Breton, Sartre, Debord and Althusser.
Written at the birth of postwar consumerism, though only now translated into English, the Critique is a book of enormous range and subtlety. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet which remains the only source of resistance and change. Whether he is exploring the commercialization of sex or the disappearance of rural festivities, analyzing Hegel or Charlie Chaplin, Lefebvre always returns to the ubiquity of alienation, the necessity of revolt. This is an enduringly radical book, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.
This third volume of the Critique of Everyday Life completes Lefebvre’s monumental project. It seeks to shed light on changes inscribed within everyday life, and at the same time to reveal certain virtualities of the everyday, taking into account the crisis of modernity but also the decisive assertion of technological modernism.
“Lefebvre was a rare and necessary breed, a utopian intellectual engagé, somebody who moved with the times yet helped shape and defy those times, interpreting the world at the same time as he somehow changed it… It’s a spirit we can still tap.” — Andy Merrifield, The Brooklyn Rail
Praise for Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II
“A brilliant example of how theory can be joined with experience to critique and better understand contemporary society.” — Frontlist
Praise for Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I
“A savage critique of consumerist society…” — Publishers Weekly
Henri Lefebvre, former taxi-driver, resistance fighter and professor of sociology at Strasbourg and Nanterre (1901–1991), was a member of the French Communist Party from 1928 until his expulsion in 1957. He was the author of sixty books on philosophy, sociology, politics, architecture and urbanism.Lefbvre's Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. I and Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. II are also published by Verso.
Publication
Jan. 2008
180 pages
Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 193 9
US$24.95 / £12.99 / CAN$27.50
