Review essay. The whole and the rest: Remi Hess and les lefebvriens francais

摘要

2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Henri Lefebvre's masterpiece, La somme et le reste (S&R 2009a), one of the greatest 20th-century philosophy books and the greatest text of confessional Marxism. [Only Louis Althusser's The Future Lasts a Long Time (1993) comes close in this latter respect.] Written between 1957 and 1958, when Lefebvre worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, this two-volume 800-page tome-still unforgivably off limits to non-French readers-let everything rip, loosened every shackle. Lefebvre was about to quit the Communist Party, to expel himself, departing from the leftwing. Stalin's misdeeds were now public; the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary had disgusted many communists, Lefebvre included. Here was Lefebvre's heart laid bare, his taking stock of the past, his settling of accounts-with the Party, with Stalinism, with fascism, with himself. The book, Lefebvre often joked, could have easily borne a subtitle: "the art of making an enemy of oneself!" (cited in Hess, 2009a, page 102).