reseña libro sobre lefebvre en ingles

7/28/2019 resea libro sobre lefebvre en ingles

1/16

Book Reviews

Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism.

Leiden: Brill, 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 167711 (cloth).

Antonio Gramsci has had something of a spectral presence in geography, often

looming in the background of regulation theory and analyses of the local state.

Recently, a decided turn to Gramsci can be witnessed in research on political

ecology, globalization, philosophy and space. For anyone interested in Gramsci,

Peter Thomas The Gramscian Momentis quickly becoming required reading given its

exhaustive presentation of Gramscis thought and politics. The Gramscian Moment

has the ambitious task of providing a philologically accurate reading of Gramsci

in the hope of renewing Marxist philosophy and working-class movements. The

starting point for Thomas is a philological reconstruction of Gramsci necessary for

combating two influential, yet limiting, readings of Gramsci, specifically Althussers(1970) critiques levelled in Reading Capital and Perry Andersons (1976) landmark

The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci published in New Left Review.

In Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1970), Althusser levelled a series of

criticisms against Gramsci, suggesting that Gramscis adherence to Hegel leads

him to produce a flat totality, incapable of determining social dynamics from a

scientific (anti-historicist) vantage point. At the same time, Althussers infamous anti-

humanism led him to argue that the Italians work was tainted by voluntarism and

faith in the conscious will of social actors. This reading of Gramsci shaped debates

throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and as Thomas argues, continues to hold swaytoday, predominantly within philosophical circles. If Gramsci is often understood

through an Althusserian lens, Perry Andersons influential criticism of the Prison

Notebooks is the second reading of Gramsci through which many approach his

work. Anderson argued that Gramscis work was beset by a number of slippages

that ultimately amount to contradictory accounts of the state, hegemony and the

relationship between the East and the West. As Thomas recounts, Anderson

is suspect of Gramscis notion of civil hegemony and the situating of political

possibilities within wars of position, civil society and cultural struggles. Despite the

authoritative and seductive character of Andersons argument, Thomas argues that

his engagement with Gramsci imposes a series of schemas and dualisms onto his

work that close attention to his carceral writings do not support.

If Althusser provides a problematic philosophical caricature of Gramsci and

Anderson asserts the political bankruptcy of his work, Thomas strives to resuscitate

Gramsci from these bleak assessments. The remainder of the book is dedicated

to this task. However, perhaps more interesting to readers than the responses to

Althusser and Anderson is the detailed exposition of Gramscis method, literary style,

politics and philosophy. Although The Gramscian Momentis a long, painstaking read,

one comes away with a greatly enriched understanding of Gramscis broad style of

Marxism, both as a political practice and a philosophy, which as Thomas suggests,cannot be teased apart without doing harm to Gramscis philosophy of praxis.

AntipodeVol. 44 No. 3 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 10341049 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.00981.xC 2012 The AuthorAntipode C 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.


2/16

Book Reviews 1035

In Chapter 3, Thomas builds his case against Anderson and Althusser through

examining the literary form of the Prison Notebooks. It is wrong to search for a

hidden structure to the Prison Notebooks, argues Thomas, yet Anderson searched

for a systematic treatment of concepts in Gramscis work. When he found distinct

accounts of the state and hegemony, he mistakenly accused Gramsci of conceptual

slippage. Thomas argues that slippage is not the problem as the different contentof notes reflects Gramscis ongoing refinement and extension of key arguments.

At the same time, Thomas argues that the fragmentary character of the notes

is not a reflection of his imprisonment, but rather, reflects a deeper ontological

and epistemological position emphasizing a historicist and dialogical approach.

According to Thomas, it is only through a close philological reading of Gramsci

that we can develop a historical image of his work that attends to the continued

development and refinement of his thought.

Chapters 4 and 5 reassess Andersons stifling political evaluation of Gramsci.

Thomas mode of response is to present Gramsci as a much more dialectic thinker

than Anderson affords. On issues of consent and coercion, war of position and war of

manoeuvre, civil society and political society and the East and the West, Thomas

does a brilliant job of undermining dualistic treatments of these terms. Thomas

reading of Gramsci emphasizes the identity and distinction of the terms found in

each couplet, which anchors his analysis of political power and the means through

which the working class can become hegemonic. Given the earthworks and trenches

that exist in the West, a class that aspires to be hegemonic must pass through the

different, yet unified, moments of civil and political hegemony before reconstituting

the statethe final war of manoeuvre. In chapter 6, Thomas demonstrates how

Gramscis political reflections were not idle thoughts, but again, were based onhis attempt to develop a revolutionary strategy adequate to the West, yet always

in connection to the revolutionary movements experienced the East. Gramscis

Leninism, argues Thomas, is both in the conceptualization and actualization of

hegemony, encapsulated in the political strategy of the United Front. The attempt

to align the interests and support of allied classes with the working class was the

practical form of Gramscis theorizations. For Thomas, Gramscis development of

the United Front and philosophy of praxis are decisive for the re-emergence of any

genuinely mass, class-based politics (242), a point I will return to at the end of the

review.The final three chapters of the book (chapters 79) provide a detailed discussion

of Gramscis philosophy of praxis, which is commonly understood as a code utilized

by Gramsci to evade his prison censors. Thomas dispels this notion and suggests that

the philosophy of praxis represents the core of Gramscis philosophy of Marxism.

In a note titled The concept of orthodoxy Gramsci (1971:465) argued that

the philosophy of praxis is absolute historicism, the absolute secularization and

earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. It is along this line that

one must trace the thread of the new conception of the world. In the final three

chapters Thomas traces the meaning of this passage, with the aim of presenting a

nuanced conception of the world capable of reenergizing Marxist thought and

practice.

C 2012 The AuthorAntipode C 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.


3/16

1036 Book Reviews

Chapter 7 examines the notion of absolute historicism, which is the concept

that literally grounds the Prison Notebooks. Historicizing involves tracking how

philosophies and types of knowledge exist in sedimented form in the actions of

different social classes. In this respect, knowledge/ideologies are never independent

from the specific practices through which they are lived and transformed.

As Thomas discussion illustrates, emphasizing the historical determinations ofphilosophy, ideology and politics opens these interrelated dimensions of social life to

the possibility of change, or more specifically, the radical possibility that philosophies

and ideologies could contribute to the establishment of working class hegemony.

Thomas argues that for the working class to be engaged in a process of becoming, it

must subject its own philosophies and ideologies to historical criticism, providing an

understanding of its own propositions and assumptions. Such a critique contributes

to the coherence and political efficacy of the philosophy of praxis.

Thomas builds on these themes in chapter 8, examining Gramscis treatment of

immanence, or what he also describes as the absolute secularisation and earthliness

of thought. Thomas argues that Gramscis understanding of immanence can be

traced back to Marxs (1998[1845]:569) second thesis in the Theses on Feuerbach,

which highlights the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The notion of

absolute immanence allows Thomas to argue that science and philosophy are

superstructures, not separate from social and economic life, but rather organizing

aspects of the relationship between humanity and nature. Gramsci extends this

immanentist perspective to language, which together with philosophy and science,

is a social practice that is part of the struggle for hegemony. The perspective of

immanence within the philosophy of praxis is meant to highlight different relations

of force, which Thomas describes as the differential intensity, efficacy and specificityof social practices in their historical becoming (449). It is this aspect of Gramscis

work that highlights his anti-reductionism. One final point needs to be made about

absolute immanence. Gramscis immanentist approach leads him to highlight how

senso communeand philosophy are in Thomas words sedimented in each other

(298). Hegemony, as Thomas explains, involves a critique of both senso commune

and philosophies, which must both gain greater coherence in order to inform the

this-worldliness of thought crucial to the production of the identity of theory and

practice which becomes a part of the historical process, as a critical act (383).

The final moment in Gramscis philosophy of praxis highlighted in Thomasreconstruction is the notion of absolute humanism. Contrary to Althusser, Gramsci

did not rely on a voluntarist subject that could bring about radical change. As

Thomas argues, Gramsci holds the capacity of subjects to act in tension with an

appreciation of the broad relations that historically make the person. Gramsci again

builds on Theses on Feuerbach to argue that the person (la persona) is an ensemble

of historically determined social relations that is constantly in the process of

becoming (Gramsci 1971:133). In addition, Gramscis understanding of absolute

humanism is closely connected to the question of intellectuals and their capacity to

reinforce the capitalist integral state or establish transformative conceptions of the

world. Gramscis treatment of the person comes together with his understanding

of intellectuals in the figure of the democratic philosopher understood as a concrete



4/16

Book Reviews 1037

embodiment of the general political perspective (125). The democratic philosopher

is the sounding board for the social collective that seeks to bring coherence to the

aspirations of the working class and their hegemonic aspirations. This treatment

of philosophy turns traditional notions of philosophy on their head, illustrating

the social basis of philosophy and the necessary political content of philosophical

practice.Absolute historicism, absolute immanence and absolute humanism collectively

comprise Gramscis philosophy of praxis. Thomas holds these dimensions of

Gramscis work as essential to the revitalization of Marxist philosophy and working

class movements. However, Thomas spends much less time dwelling on how

Gramsci can revitalize working class movements in the current conjuncture, even

though he suggests that this was one of his motives for writing the book. Yet to

bastaradize Zizeks (2006:118) analysis of Lukacs:

How does [Gramscis] work stand in relation to todays constellation? Is it still alive? . . .

How do we today stand in relation toin the eyes of[Gramsci]? Are we still able tocommit the act proper, described by [Gramsci]? Which social agent is, on account of its

radical dislocation, today able to accomplish it?

These are questions Thomas needs to ask if he really wants to renew working

class movements, yet unfortunately they receive scant attention in his book. Who

comprises the working class that he constantly shoulders with the historical task

of bringing about a communist future? Is Gramscis notion of class adequate for

contemporary radical politics? Is an unspecified working class the only social group

capable of transformative politics?

These questions are important as Thomas is silent on issues of gender, race,sexuality and colonialism and the social movements pursuing these issues. There

is no attempt to interrogate how social movements connected to these aspects

of social difference force us to reconsider aspects of Gramscis work. I admit that

pushing Thomas to answer these queries may seem unfair given the impressiveness

of his overall argument. However, in the absence of addressing these questions,

post-Marxists may find their suspicions over an essentialized class subject in

Gramsci confirmed, even though there is ample evidence in Gramscis writings

go demonstrate that he had a socially differentiated understanding of history,

geography and politics. Part of the appeal of Gramsci is his integral style of Marxism

and his early examination of sexuality, gender, race, internal colonialism, andrelationships between the working class and peasantry. Gramscis analysis of social

difference is provocative yet clearly insufficient. Nonetheless, if the appeal of post-

Marxist projectsuch as Laclau and Mouffes (1985)is their inclusion of new social

movements into their analysis, then it seems important to consider how this can

be achieved without the long march away from Marxism. Thomas discussion of

la persona, his understanding of superstructures in the plural, and his emphasis on

relations of force represent considerable theoretical resources for working through

these questions. Bringing Thomas philosophical concerns to bear on Gramscis

treatment of difference could potentially serve as an important rejoinder to post-Marxist readings of Gramsci. Such a project must be undertaken if the Gramscian

moment is to be realized and not locked in the past.



5/16

1038 Book Reviews

ReferencesAlthusser L and Balibar E (1970) Reading Capital. London: New Left BooksAnderson P (1976) The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review 100:578Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and WishartLaclau E and Mouffe C (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic

Politics. London: Verso

Marx K (1998 [1845]) The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach. Amherst:Prometheus Books

Zizek S (2006) The Universal Exception. New York: Continuum

MICHAEL EKERS

Geography and Planning

University of Toronto

[email protected]

Himani Bannerji, Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and

Ideology. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2011. ISBN 9781-551303895 (paper)

Over the last generation, Himani Bannerji has written from within the tension-ridden

social spaces of two cities that in their very different ways still carry various traces of

the British empire: Kolkata and Toronto. Situating herself in, and also between, these

points of entry into the world (Bannerji 1995:55), she has helped us understand

the workings of (multi-cultural) nationalism and (white settler) colonialism in Canada

and provided sharp analyses of Orientalist historiography, patriarchal colonialism,

and communist cultural practice in India. Her writing has pioneered a peculiarly

Marxist strand of anti-racist feminism in Canada (in such volumes as Returning theGaze [Bannerji 1993a], Thinking Through [Bannerji 1995] and The Dark Side of the

Nation [Bannerji 2000]) while developing some of the finest feminist and counter-

colonial historical materialist work on the Indian subcontinent (in, for example,

The Writing on the Wall [Bannerji 1993b], Inventing Subjects [Bannerji 2001] and

Of Property and Propriety [Bannerji, Mojab and Whitehead 2001]). In the best

traditions of radical cosmopolitanism, Bannerji has taken very seriously the weight

of the national in the modern world without reifying its power or accepting it

as her ultimate normative horizon. In fact, her texts embody a commitment to

revolutionary transformation that is worldwide in scope but accepts that in our neo-imperial world order, intellectuals with global ambitions cannot help but engage in

struggles in, for and against the nation-state.

Published in both Canada and India, Demography and Democracy brings together

some of Bannerjis most original insights into politics, ideology, and nationalism,

particularly, but not only in India. Generously framed with a long introduction, it is

a collection of new and previously published essays, some of which, like Making

India Hindu and male: cultural nationalism and the emergence of the ethnic citizen

in contemporary India, have already become classics. Four chapters, including

Making India, deal with the rise to prominence of Hindu nationalismthe BJP

and RSS and their convergent commitment to Hindutvaand its wider effects

and resonances. Some of these resonances Bannerji detects in key texts by Partha

Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty, whom she criticizes for failing to challenge



6/16

Book Reviews 1039

the links between patriarchal essentialism and cultural nationalism. One chapter

on Max Weber and disciplinary sociology rejoins Bannerjis longstanding interest in

Orientalist historical representations of India. Two others deal with the wide-ranging

work of Rabindranath Tagore, whom Bannerji considers an alternative to the cultural

nationalist claims of Hindu fundamentalism.

Demography and Democracypersuasively joins cultural critique and considerationsof identity formation with political economy and class analysis. Whether focused on

literary texts, academic treatises or wider configurations of state and civil society,

Bannerji manages to suture economic, socio-cultural, and political aspects of life.

Within the rich, multidimensional texture she weaves, distinct social positionalities

(class, gender . . .) do not appear in abstract isolation or mechanical addition but

relationally, in such a way as to allow for the convergence of many determinations

(38). In her undertaking, Bannerji elegantly and effortlessly mobilizes a host of critical

intellectual fellow travelers, including Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon,

Dorothy Smith, Walter Benjamin, and Sumit Sarkar. The result: an integral Marxist

counter-colonial, feminist orientation that is centred squarely on the historical

materialist method and refuses the schism between Marxism (reduced to political

economy) and cultural studies (coded as post-structuralism) that has misled so many

theoretical debates since the 1980s.

At the heart of Bannerjis understanding of historical materialism is a method

of decongealing ideological formations. As she argues by developing arguments

made by Marx and Dorothy Smith:

Comparable to Marxs analysis of the concept of the commodity in Capital, the

stereotypes, or discrete objects of ideology are conceptual congealations. They too

involve the application of living on dead labour. Our task, following Marx, is to de-

congeal them, to unravel the representational bundle, to disclose and deconstruct that

which lies immanent in the type of categorical purpose served by the notions of the

hindu or the muslim in the Indian hindu supremacist context or the jew in the

Zionist one (36).

Reified bodies of ideas cannot be understood simply in their isolated, thing-

like state, which seems to rule over us; but also with respect to the material

processes that produce and deploy them. The point is not to counterpose reified

forms of consciousness to authentic representations or transparent totalities but to

consider the content of ideology in relationship to the overall process of knowledgeproduction (37): the division of labour, the market and specialized institutions such

as universities. Interpretive strategies should thus historicize ideological formations

and treat markers of social difference relationally so as to avoid the twin pitfalls of

abstract universalism and excessive particularism.

In Demography and Democracy, Bannerjis key target is the interpretative

paradigm of tradition versus modernity (24). She shows that the purportedly

anti-Western Hindu fundamentalisms in India have one thing in common with the

Orientalism of classical sociology and Max Weber: a mode of thinking that emanates

from and returns to the ontological dividing line of tradition and modernity.This becomes most evident when one analyzes how both mobilize women as

figures for their respective demographic projects of domination. As Bannerji argues



7/16

1040 Book Reviews

with respect to colonial administrators, who proved so influential for academic

Orientalism:

With regard to women, the colonial state and its cultural discourse is not actually

employed in modernizing their world through real acts of social reform. As any student

of colonial history can tell, indigenous women provide the colonial state with an occasion

for characterizing their societies in racial/ethnocentric terms as barbaric, savage ortraditional while actively inventing traditions for them or crushing pre-existing dynamics

of resistance . . . What is also forgotten in the dualist schema of colonization versus

nationalism is that the discourse of tradition is at the same time, in the first instance, a

part of colonial discourse (122).

In this longer view, current fascist claims to invented traditions like Hindu-ness

appear as quintessentially modern operations that resurrect and recast both the

homogenizing cultural assumptions of the colonial state and the deeply gendered

and ethnicizing violence that helped build that state in the first place.

In one of the most insightful analyses of the transfigurations of subaltern studies,Bannerji faults some scholars in this school, notably Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh

Chakrabarty, for failing to properly unbundle precisely the mutual imbrication of

woman, tradition and modernity in (post-)colonial India. Bannerji locates

this failure in Chatterjees and Chakrabartys increasingly culturalist analyses of

colonialism, nationalism and subaltern community in India. This culturalist shift

displaced the Gramscian elements which also influenced early subaltern studies. It

left little room to discuss womens complex relationship to modernity in socio-

politically nuanced, relational terms. Instead, womens agency (and their own

specific subalternity) got subsumed under the subalternity of the elite (the

Calcutta middle-class) (Chatterjee cited on p 157) and womens domestic self-

sacrifice for the nationalist cause (Chakrabarty cited on p 163). In this context,

the womans question became resolved, as it were, in a highly particularized

hindu/brahimincal communitarian discourse that places the heart of moral purity

. . . in the sacrifice of the woman for the family, the (religious) community and the

nation (169). Bannerji argues that Chatterjees and Chakrabartys limits lie in their

refusal to break with the civilizational frames of their subjects of study, within which

critiques of patriarchy are reduced to the civilizing claims of the colonizer.

Bannerjis search for anti-patriarchal alternatives to Hindu nationalism and

European Orientalism leads her away from subaltern studies and back to the decadesof struggle, hope and creativity that preceded Indian independence. In Rabindranath

Tagores pedagogy and four of his novelsGora, Gharebaire, Chaturanga, and

Charadhyayshe finds a critique of communalist nationalism emanating from

a humanism that, while universalizing in outlook and sensibility, was sensitively

immersed in the specificities of Indian history and rejected the strictures of colonial

rule. She suggests that:

Rabindranaths developmental philosophy and practices were not only romantic and

liberal, but that they were so in the teeth of colonialism. He not only sought to unbind

the liberatory and creative potentials of children and adults, but had to steer a coursebetween being mindful of colonialism and all that is entailed in it and yet not being

caught in a simplifying reactive and referential relation to it. For a colonized subject to



8/16

Book Reviews 1041

aspire to universalist humanism was indeed a project against the graina gesture and

could be, and was, misunderstood by both the nationalists and the lofty pretension of

the colonialists. His metaphysical modernism/humanism aspired to a universalist morality

posited in the social background of a casteist and communalist society, inscribed and

reinforced with colonialism. He called for a constant rejection of narrowness, chauvinism,

binary world views and other forms of particularism, all of which become an easy reflex for

colonized peoples. But this was no vacuous transcendence, as it retained the lineaments

of strong specificities of its socio-historical origins and the political bondage of India. His

dynamic social and aesthetic pedagogy marked a journey between what is and what

ought to be (219).

For Bannerji, those aspects of Tagores work that are committed to an

understanding of human nature as unfinished, open-ended potential, leave space

for the development of womens emancipatory subjectivities while confronting the

static notions of selfhood in colonial culture and reactive nationalisms.

These reflections on Tagore are part of Bannerjis ongoing project on the Indian

literary and artistic giant, who has recently become subject to burgeoning literature.For Bannerji, the distance between Tagore, liberal-capitalism and the historical

forces converging in Hindutva opens up an opportunity for an intellectual war

of position against the twin hegemonies of neoliberalism and fundamentalism

in India today. Indeed, like other recent commentators (Chakrabarti and Dhar

2008), Bannerji detects enough resonances between Tagore and the Marxist and

feminist anti-colonial lineages embodied in her own work (as well as those of

Sumit and Tanika Sarkar, Romila Thapar, Aijaz Ahmad, Priyamvada Gopal, and Vijay

Prashad) to claim Tagore for the left in an endeavor to wrest India not only from

ethno-nationalism but also neoliberalism. Despite the differences between Tagore,Marxism and revolutionary projects for national liberation, Tagores suggestion that

true decolonization and the move towards a genuinely cooperative society has to

entail a qualitative transformation of human subjectivities (against Western-colonial,

capitalist-individualist, and ethno-traditionalist influences), is worth bringing into

contact with the otherwise distinct dialectical critiques of liberal and Western

humanism in Marx critique of alienation and Fanons new humanist critique

of European colonalism (225226). In this light, Tagore offers two crucial lessons

against ethno-nationalism. Claims to national independence need not all be cut

from the same culturalist cloth. They can be avenues for broader social and

economic emancipation. And critical modernism is not a property of Europe but

a homegrown source that can be appropriated for anti-imperial purposes.

Demography and Democracy offers manifold insights into what Marxist-feminist

method can yield for those interested in tracing the relationship between class-

based, patriarchal and (neo-)colonial dimensions of nationalist ideology. Readers of

a radical geographical journal like Antipodemay of course be curious how Bannerjis

nuanced treatment of the national (not as a presupposition but as a historically

specific product of social forces) would translate into an analysis of other scales

and forms of spatial organization. The insights of her fellow travelers Gramsci and

Fanon on the question of city and countryside as well as the relationship betweeninter/trans-national scales might be particularly useful starting points for a more

decisively historico-geographical materialist analysis of nationalism and patriarchy.



9/16

1042 Book Reviews

Such a socio-spatial extension of her work would also invite additional commentary

on the links between the pitfalls of nationalism in India, on the one hand, and the

explicit (and murderous) return of mono-cultural fascism in Euro-America, on the

other. Judging by the breadth of Bannerjis past work, one may expect some of

these topics to be addressed more fully in the future.

ReferencesBannerji H (ed) (1993a) Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics. Toronto:

Sister Vision PressBannerji H (1993b) The Writing on the Wall: Essays on Culture and Politics. Toronto: TSAR PressBannerji H (1995) Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism Toronto:

Womens PressBannerji H (2000) The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and

Gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars PressBannerji H (2001) Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism. Chennai:

TulikaBannerji H, Mojab S and Whitehead J (eds) (2001) Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender

and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism. Toronto: University of Toronto PressChakrabarty A and Dhar A K (2008) Development, capitalism, and socialism: A Marxian

encounter with Rabindranath Tagores ideas on the cooperative principle. RethinkingMarxism 20(3):487499

STEFAN KIPFER

Faculty of Environmental Studies

York University

[email protected]

Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays (translated by Gerald

Moore, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden; edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden).

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. ISBN 9780-81665317-1

(paper), ISBN 9780-81665316-4 (cloth)

If it is no longer remarkable in Anglophone geography to speak of space, nature,

and landscapes as socially produced, it is largely a reflection of the extent to

which contemporary spatial and geographical thought has been transformed in its

encounter with historical materialism over the past two decades, and in particularwith the ideasor at least the languageof the French Marxist philosopher and

sociologist Henri Lefebvre. While Marxist geographers and others had engaged with

Lefebvres work in the 1970s and 1980s, principally around urban questions, and

Lefebvres Sociology of Marx had remained in print through two English editions

from 1968, Donald Nicholson-Smiths 1991 translation of Lefebvres The Production

of Space, though it followed the French publication by nearly a generation,

excited geographers around Lefebvres rich and multi-faceted conceptualization

of relational space. It offered a deeply politicized conception of the spatial as a

broad analytic that was, though historicized in epochs in Lefebvres book, also in

some ways easily generalized across different kinds of spaces, scales, and social

sites. As recent Lefebvre scholars have observed, while Production of Space was

undoubtedly a pivotal coming together of spatial ideas and modes of analysis for



10/16

Book Reviews 1043

Lefebvre, it remains one of a seemingly impossible 70 books written by Lefebvre,

mainly between the sixth and the ninth decades of his life, along with a wide

array of articles, lectures, commentaries, and reviews, all moments in Lefebvres

own evolving strain of dissident humanist, anti-productivist, anti-Stalinist Marxism

(Brenner 2001; Elden 2004; Merrifield 2006; Shields 1999). And yet, even as a

string of new translations has allowed for a broader disciplinary engagement withLefebvres work on cities, alienation and everyday life, rhythms and rhythmanalysis,

and Marxist theory (Lefebvre 1991b, 1995, 1996, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2009a),

the initial wave of interest around Production of Space, resonating with an already

pervasive materialism (or materialisms) in geographical discourse has, alongside Neil

Smiths (1990) production of nature thesis, left its mark on the vocabulary of the

discipline, and in a sense, transcended its author. Whatever the time lag, materialist

geographers can take some creditfor a slight shift in the discourse, if not for a full

Lefebvrian explosionthat Lefebvre no longer even needs to be referenced when

speaking of the production of space.

Of course, it is not surprising that Lefebvres opus on spacebecame the touchstone

to his work in Anglophone geography in the 1990s. Production of Spaceremains an

exceptional text within Lefebvres corpus because, through space, it drew together

a wide range of Lefebvres engagementswith everyday life; with urban planning

and politics; and, though it has thus far received less attention, in his theory of

the state and of state space (but see Brenner 2001; Elden 2004:211255). These

latter concerns would culminate in the immense De l Etat, Lefebvres wide-ranging

analysis of the modern state, published in four volumes between 1976 and 1978.

While that work remains largely untranslated into English, a parallel collection of

Lefebvres essays on the state, written between 1964 and 1986, has been producedunder the editorship of Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden as State, Space, World (SSW).

Brenner and Elden deliver 15 chapters by Lefebvre, most of them translated for the

first time, which begin to fill the void in Anglophone scholarship around Lefebvres

more explicit state theory, along with a lengthy introduction which situates the

work in terms of its heterodox influences and engagements. Drawn from a range

of journal articles, lectures, and excerpted chapters, the collection becomes a kind

of shadow volume for De l Etat, inviting us to reconsider the state in Lefebvres

work, perhaps even to place it at the heart of Lefebvres spatial theory. For Brenner

and Elden, this is a serious move with implications for how we are to understandLefebvreand the production of spaceand also for gauging the insights that

Lefebvres understandings of the state might provide for analyses of contemporary

global processes and events.

The editors introduction sets an ambitious tone. They quote from Lefebvres

(1976) The Survival of Capitalism, in which the phrase production of space perhaps

first appears. In that book, Lefebvre seeks to understand capitalisms capabilities for

reproducing itself over time, for overcoming manifold crises and, despite fierce

internal contradictions, to continue to grow. We cannot calculate at what

price, Lefebvre writes (SSW:26), but we do know the means: by occupying space,

by producing a space. But if the production of space was key to understanding

capitalisms survival, then for some, like Harvey, Lefebvre had failed to explain

exactly how or why this might be the case (SSW:26, from Harvey 2003; for



11/16

1044 Book Reviews

an earlier, related critique, see Smith 1990:123126). For Harvey, the question

of how capitalism could only secure its own survival through the production

and sometimes the destructionof particular geographical landscapes and space

economies had of course also led to a series of analytically productive concepts,

including notions of the spatial or spatio-temporal fix, creative destruction, and

accumulation by dispossession. But Harveys gibe suggests a certain frustrationwith Lefebvre, and perhaps with his peculiar Anglophone reception, for lacking the

analytical teeth to cut into the problem that his poetics had helped to evoke. Brenner

and Elden disagree (SSW:26): Our responsewhich comes through as Lefebvres

in this collectionis that the role of the state is central. They organize State,

Space, World around three pivotal (and intersecting) themes, recurrent in De l Etat:

state power and autogestion (movements of self-management or, less literally,

grassroots control); the state mode of production, Lefebvres reconceptualization

of the Cold War state and geopolitical condition as a stage in the history of world

capitalism (orafter the history of capitalism); and mondialisation, which is translated

not quite as globalization but becoming worldwide. These ideas are presented with

considerable care by the editors, providing a good deal more than Lefebvres own

idiosyncratic referencing style would have permitted: each chapter in State, Space,

World is preceded by a brief introduction offering an overview of the debates that

Lefebvre was engaged in, and with whom. While Lefebvres reworking of Marxist

state theory is at the core of the volume, his ideas also turn in relation to many

non MarxistsHegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Axelos, the Surrealistsand these

contributions are highlighted. It is, in particular, Lefebvres reading of the State

through the production of space that I want to draw out in this review, an

analytical perspective which, though itself a response to a different political context,may be useful today for understanding the spatiality of State (and non-state) power,

and its relation, in Lefebvres work, to the radical critique of the State.

Though the book is not arranged strictly chronologically, the first two chapters

dealing with broad themes on state and society and the Marxist concept of the

withering of the state, respectivelystand out as the earliest works selected for

the volume (1964), with most pieces written considerably later. The essays, both

from a socialist journal, warn against capturing the state as an end in itself for Marxist

politics. In this, Lefebvre draws a sharp distinction between notions of democracy

and the democratic state:Democracy is nothing other than the struggle for democracy. The struggle for democracy

is the movement itself. Many democrats imagine that democracy is a type of stable

condition toward which we can tend, toward which we must tend. No. Democracy is

the movement. And the movement is the forces of action. And democracy is the struggle

for democracy, which is to say the very movement of social forces; it is a permanent

struggle and it is even a struggle against the State that emerges from democracy. There

is no democracy without a struggle against the democratic State itself, which tends to

consolidate itself as a bloc, to affirm itself as a whole, to become monolithic and to

smother the society out of which it develops (SSW:61).

Written in critique of both Stalinism and the western European socialist states

(and left parties)for Lefebvre, the twin descendants of Lassalian Socialismthese



12/16

Book Reviews 1045

opening essays, though brief and provisional, suggest a prying open of categories

that he would return to in De l Etat. Lefebvres radical sense of democracy as

the struggle for democracy appeals to Marxs notion of true democracy, wherein

the political state ultimately dies out, as Engels would later put it (in SSW:84),

after state interference in social relations becomes, in one sphere after another,

superfluous. . .

. For Lefebvre, of course, the historical context was radically different.His affirmative faith in democracy as a political expression and social force is

thus also an effort to understand and to challenge our enduring alienation in a

world wherein even Marxism can be turned into a mere ideology of state, and

revolutionary thought, as Lefebvre (SSW:206) describes the model of Soviet

State socialismscare quotes originalhas degenerated into an ideology of

growth.

In developing his critique, Lefebvre, among other Marxists of his generation,

was faced with the difficulty of explaining the massive growth of state apparatuses

and functions on both sides of the iron curtain, particularly in its direct role

of managing the economy; he had to deal, in other words, with the apparent

successand basic competenciesof the state.1 It is a task to which Marxist-

Leninist theories of the withering of the state might appear, at first glance, ill-

suited. But for Lefebvre, it was precisely because of the resilience of the bourgeois

state, and its elevated role in the production and regulation of space economies

at multiple scales, that the classical concept of the withering of the state had

to be re-examined. In the second article, he makes a close reading of Lenins

reading of Engels in order to elucidate two key distinctions of classical Marxist

state theory: first, the material historicity of the stateit is born of social and

historical forces, it will deteriorate and die like other products of history as theseforces themselves experience revolutionary transformations; second, and building

on this fundamental observation that the state is historical, the nature of the state

itself therefore must also transform under changed historical conditions. If the state

dies out of itself, in Engels formulation, as it becomes redundant in one sphere

after another, it is only because: In the place of the government of persons steps

the administration of things and the management of processes of production. The

state is not abolished, it withers away (SSW: 8485). But while, for Lenin, the

passage had been mobilized largely against the arguments of anarchists calling for

the states annihilation, it is the concluding phrase that is emphasized by Lefebvre,the withering away and remaking of political power; and it is directed toward

both the permanent, muscular proletarian statethe Stalinist distortionand its

adherents in the French Communist Party.2 For Lefebvre, the stakes were high, for,

if it were proven that the State could not be made to wither away, that the state

is destined to prosper and flourish until the end, then Marxism as a whole would

have to jump ship (SSW:72).

It is an exacting standard that Lefebvre derives from Leninthe necessity for the

radical critique ofevery statebut as we see in this collection, it is one around which

Lefebvres thinking would continue to evolve in distinctive ways. In part this occurs

through his engagement with autogestion, already at that time a widely debated

concept for the European left, onto which Lefebvre largely projects the problem of

the struggle for democracy in relation to changing geometries of state power. This



13/16

1046 Book Reviews

tension between democracy and the state is thus reflected in the emergence of

management associationsin their simplest and most interesting forms, which

appear precisely, Lefebvre argues, in the weak pointsof existing society (SSW:144,

emphasis original). Conversely, during the course of its development, the state

binds itself to space through a complex and changing relation that has passed

through certain critical points (SSW:224). Lefebvre offers no simple map for locatingthese weak and strong points, but he does provide, in an essential chapter on Space

and the State drawn from the final volume of De lEtat, a useful schematic of the

moments of this relation. These are conceived broadly in terms of the States

production of three kinds of spaces: the national territory, social space, and mental

space. It is in this remarkable discussion that Lefebvre reads the State through the

production of space; for each of these categories Lefebvre emphasizes the work

required of the State to produce and reproduce spaces, but also their contested and

impermanent nature. The national territory may be a physical space, mapped,

modified, transformed by the networks, circuits and flows that are established

within itroads, canals, railroads, commercial and financial circuits, motorways

and air routes but it is also a materialnaturalspace in which the actions

of human generations, of classes, and of political forces have left their mark, as

producers of durable objects and realities . . . The State must produce a social

space as such, an (artificial) edifice of hierarchically ordered institutions, of laws

and conventions upheld by values that are communicated through the national

language. But this social architecture, this political monumentality, is the State

itself, a pyramid that carries at its apex the political leadera concrete abstraction,

full of symbols, the source of an intense circulation of information and messages,

spiritual exchanges, representations, ideology, knowledge bound up with powerand this too is ultimately vulnerable. Born in and with a space, the state may also

perish with it (SSW:224).

But while the State may effectively function through its strong points, they do not

maintain or reproduce themselves. Rather:

The existing State is grounded upon these strong points. Men of the State busy

themselves with sealing up the cracks by every means available to them. Once they

are consolidated, nothing happens around these reinforced places. Between them are

found zones of weakness or even lacunae. This is where things happen. Initiatives and

social forces act on and intervene in these lacunae, occupying and transforming theminto strong points or, on the contrary, into something other than what has a stable

existence (SSW:144).

Autogestion thus suggests for Lefebvre a withering of sorts, but one with a peculiar

geography which occurs precisely in spaces where state power has been evacuated,

or become run down. The Paris commune serves as Lefebvres primary example, but

he also turns to the example of Algeria, where autogestion has been set up in the

domains abandoned by the colonists (SSW:145). It would be of great theoretical

and practical interest to discover the weak points of the current French state and

society. Where are they situated? asks Lefebvre (SSW:145) presciently in a 1966essay, In the universities, with the students? . . . In the new urban housing projects?

In the (State-controlled) public sector of the economy?



14/16

Book Reviews 1047

Lefebvres engagement with the grassroots control movements as the form

taken today by revolutionary spontaneity (SSW:142), and his reliance on them

for revealing a radical critique of the State, appears to shade him closer to

some of those with whom he had had disagreements, including anarchists and

situationists.3 But then, 3040 years after most of these pieces were written,

some of Lefebvres differences with other erstwhile intellectual rivals also appearless profound. The editors recall an oblique reference to Foucault among those

speculative philosophers who have diluted the concept [of power] by finding it all

over the place. . . (SSW:12), and yet Lefebvres use of the geometrical metaphor

of critical points in the volume, where power has been contested and reinvented in

the cracks and on the margins of State power, sound rather similar to Foucaults

(1978) points of resistance. But while both theorists resort to the point as a tool of

abstraction for explaining complex spatial and territorial arrangements of power,

it is Foucault, Lefebvre suggests, who has forgotten about where power has

its real seat: in the state, in constitutions and institutions (SSW:12). Lefebvres

insistence on understanding the State as the totality of power relations, albeit one

perpetually withering away at its weak points, not only distinguishes him from

Foucaults more distributed sense of power; it also points Lefebvre toward what he

saw as the increasingly pivotal role of the statea Hegelian system of systems

which establishes connections among all elements of social lifein the production

of space.4 As a totality, Lefebvre insists, the State was no longer distinguishable from

the mode of production.

Lefebvres prescience is at times extraordinary. Brenner and Elden suggest

that part of the value of the work is in gauging, with hindsight, how Lefebvre

apprehended the transformations occurring around him. To do so is in some waysto read neoliberalism against the grain of conventional narratives, for Lefebvres

focus, as it is framed in this volume, is not the trans-national and the privatized but

the elaboration of the state. His notion of mondialisation, for example, anticipates

the emerging discourse of globalization, but for Lefebvre the term is deployed for

identifying how the State is becoming worldwide even as we are also witnessing

a mondialisation of labor flows, of technology, of expertise (SSW:246247). The

worldwide scale of the mode of production implies a new kind of state (SSW:218),

not through the unlimited reach of a single state or of an interstate system per se,

but rather through the pervasiveness of a new mode of production, a state mode ofproduction. Expanding on arguments developed in Production of Space, the chapter

on Space and the State (excerpted from the final volume ofDe l Etat) focuses on

the peculiar integrative role of state spaces, built on control of particular stocks and

flows, and realized in a hierarchically stratified morphology (SSW:230). State

space is the glue of the mode of production, simultaneously: a space of exchange;

a regulatory space of state control (and violence); a space of common language

or codes, and for establishing chains of equivalence; a space also built on, and

stimulated by, crisis and catastrophe. The state mode of production corresponds to a

shift in the requirements of the modern state, from a concern with the production of

objects in space to the production of space itself. This transformation is observed in

Production of Space, but is given sharper focus here through attention to the political

and regulatory character of state spacesideological, practical, and tactical-strategic



15/16

1048 Book Reviews

(or geopolitical). Far from monolithic or even (necessarily) stable, however, these

spaces require work to keep from being rent apart by processes emanating from

contradictions in the mode of production, including the atomization of private

property and the spontaneous qualities of capitalism, as well as the movements of

autogestion and other social forces.

What is to be gained from Lefebvres conceptualization of the State asindistinguishable from the mode of production? For one thing, a different entry

point onto the production of space, one that is perhaps not so arcane for new

students of Lefebvre as to dwell on the distinction between representational and

representations of space. Lefebvre argues not just for the possibility of the state

withering away, then, but that it is always already happening at weak points.

The implications of living in such a worldunder conditions of state power that are

diffuse, geographically differentiated, and unstableare less clear. As the explosive

force of the 2011 Arab Spring protests indicates, the weak points may suddenly

become exposed as vital cracks and fissures of state authority, or just as quickly,

sealed in concrete.

Ultimately, the currency of Lefebvres ideas today will rest more on their

relevancetheir continuing theoretical adequacy and analytical utilitythan their

prescience. Some might question whether we need a dose of dissident, humanist,

anti-productivist, anti-Stalinist Marxism today. Perhaps we dont.

But for those, like Lefebvre himself, intent on developing new Marxisms or new

forms of self-management, the broad conceptual lines laid out in this volume,

refocusing attention on the classic Marxist-Leninist problematic of the state, and the

reworking of that theory through both the production of space and the mode of

production, offer rewards. In State, Space, World, Brenner and Elden have assembleda highly suggestive intervention which deepens our understanding of both the

fragility and the durability of state forms in an age that translates, closely enough,

to globalization. Lefebvres writings on the state, reaching from across three eventful

decades, provide a powerful feeling of possibilityand of dread. If the state mode

of production is itself only a historical condition, are we still in it? What would

Henri Lefebvre think? He might ask whether the state still asserts itself as the

sole organizational, the sole rational, and the sole unifying moment of society?

(SSW:149). Notwithstanding the shrinkage experienced by the social democratic

state, the question remains as relevant today as the day it was written. Nonethelessone senses in reading this book that the transformation of the State is not just always

on the horizon but always already occurring somewhere, and Lefebvre continues to

provide insight.

Endnotes1 Herbert Marcuses (1964, 1966) critique of alienation under the modern technocratic state,

for instance, can be seen as a mirror image of this problematic across the Atlantic.2 In this category Lefebvre would doubtless include Louis Althusser, whose structuralism hesaw as compatible with Stalinist state communism.

3 Although, for Lefebvre, it was explicitly autogestion, not anarcho-syndicalism, that nowconstituted the key source of revolutionary spontaneity, these traditions remain closelyintertwined. The rise of the factory occupations movement in Argentina around the languageofautogestion, occurring in spaces evacuated by capital, and where state power had been run



16/16

Book Reviews 1049

down, reflects this continuing salience, and also lends currency to Lefebvres weak pointsthesis. Thanks to Elizabeth Mason-Deese for this point.4 Lefebvres use of Hegelian concepts is, following Marxs model, built around a radicalcritique of Hegelianism which salvages still usable bits and pieces from the wreckage:specifically, the method (logic and dialectics) and certain concepts (totality, negativity,alienation) (Lefebvre 1982:4).

ReferencesBrenner N (2001) State theory in the political conjuncture: Henri Lefebvres Comments on

a new state form. Antipode33:783808Elden S (2004) Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London: ContinuumFoucault M (1978) The History of Sexuality, Vol I (trans R. Hurley). New York: PantheonHarvey D (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University PressLefebvre H (1976) The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (trans

F. Bryant). New York: St Martins PressLefebvre H (1982) The Sociology of Marx(trans N. Guterman). New York: Columbia University

PressLefebvre H (1991a) The Production of Space(trans D. Nicholson-Smith). Oxford: BlackwellLefebvre H (1991b) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol I (trans J. Moore). New York: VersoLefebvre H (1995) Introduction to Modernity (trans J. Moore). New York: VersoLefebvre H (1996) Writings on Cities(trans and eds E. Kofman and E. Lebas). Oxford: BlackwellLefebvre H (2002) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol II (trans J. Moore). London: VersoLefebvre H (2003) The Urban Revolution (trans R. Bononno). Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota PressLefebvre H (2004) Rhythmanalysis(trans S. Elden and G. Moore). London: ContinuumLefebvre H (2006) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol III (trans G. Elliot). London: VersoLefebvre H (2009a) Dialectical Materialism (trans J. Sturrock). Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press

Marcuse H (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Boston: BeaconMarcuse H (1966) The individual in the Great Society. Alternatives(1):1416, 20, 2935Merrifield A (2006) Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. New York: RoutledgeShields R (1999) Lefebvre, Love & Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. New York: RoutledgeSmith N (1990) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 2nd edn.

Oxford: Blackwell

SCOTT KIRSCH

Department of Geography

UNC Chapel Hill

[email protected]

2012 Th A th A ti d 2012 A ti d F d ti Ltd

Documents

reseña libro sobre lefebvre en ingles