Toward an Existential Marxism: 1957-1968
 
 
 

Six
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The Arguments Group:
Existentialized Marxists
 
 
 

From 1956 to the upheaval of May, 1968, Marxism and existentialism were no longer in direct confrontation.  Both movements eased their adversary stance as part of the general change in French intellectual life away from the acrimonious polemicizing of the earlier period.  Marxists, existentialists, Christians, and later, structuralists, as well as liberals and academics, were talking and listening to one another.  Ideological lines were no longer drawn as sharply as during the Cold War period.  Lucien Goldmann could argue that Jean Piaget's psychology was compatible with Marxism; Teilhardian and personalist Christians moved to reconcile themselves with Marxism; Roger Garaudy of the CP was now opening his hand to phenomenologists, existentialists, and even Christians, sincerely initiating dialogue and interchange.[1]

The amicable mood of French intellectual life furthered the recognition within Marxism and existentialism that each was incomplete and partial, that each needed to revise its basic concepts, that sectarian purity did not encourage critical thought.  Each camp now began with the accomplishments of the 1940s, in an effort to redefine the limits of thought or, better, to reshape the advances of the 1940s into a new type of thought.  With this project, the second phase of the encounter between Marxism and existentialism opened.

1. Roger Garaudy, Perspectives de l'homme: existentialisme; pensée catholique, structuralisme, marxisme (Paris, 1959).

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Significant changes in the social formation of France also influenced the tenor and concerns of the debate.  The Fourth Republic, although politically as unstable as the Third Republic, did manage to lead France out of the economic stagnation of the 1920s and 1930s.  The effect of modem dirigisme, state planning, beginning with the Monnet Plan of the 1940s, was to accentuate concentration and technical modernization in industry and retailing [2] the extent that many feared "Americanization." [3] The Fifth Republic, under De Gaulle, continued these domestic trends.  To intellectuals, the France of 1960 was qualitatively different from that of 1950. [4] A new France was emerging by 1960 that some called a consumer society, others a post-industrial society (Touraine), others a technological society, still others an affluent society.  All were agreed that present and future French capitalism would be drastically different from the familiar nineteenth-century image.  With this general consensus, intellectuals had to reframe and to give up many precious intellectual certainties that were now obsolete.

1956 represented the watershed in the development of existential Marxism.  The intellectuals who witnessed the Hungarian invasion, as well as the revolt in Poland, without moving to the Right, became the principal forces in developing a Marxism suitable for advanced capitalism.  Not only had Sartre made his separation from the CP, but there was a momentary confluence between the major thinkers of Socialisme ou Barbarie and a group of Marxists now expelled from the CP who went on to establish Arguments (Morin and Axelos).  Several informal committees were created at this time (the Committee of Intellectuals Against the War in North Africa and the Saint-Just Cir-

 2 Bill Warren, "Capitalist Planning and the State," New Left Review, 72 (March-April, 1972) 23.
 3 J. J. Servan-Schreiber, Le Défi américain (Paris, 1967).
 4 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (N.Y., 1971) 40.

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cle) that served as centers for the exchange of ideas and experiences.  Hence from 1956 onward there was a continuum of theoretical development that lasted until May, 1968, and perhaps beyond.  The enduring unity that had begun in 1956 among those who were to develop existential Marxism can be illustrated by the fact of the collaboration of Castoriadis and Lefort with Morin from Arguments in a book on the events of May, 1968.

1. Arguments

In late 1956, a new journal called Arguments appeared.[5] Deeply moved by the prospects of de-Stalinization and its early failure in Hungary, the directors of the journal, Edgar Morin, Jean Duvignaud, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Fougeyrollas, were primarily ex-Communists.  Morin, like Duvignaud, had joined the CP during World War II and was expelled in 1951.  Fougeyrollas, a Party theorist, was a professor of philosophy.  Lefebvre was a long-time Communist and a leading Marxist theorist in France.  Nothing illustrates better the relative amicability of positions at this time than the journal Arguments.  It was originally conceived by Edgar Morin and Roland Barthes on the model of an interdisciplinary and non-sectarian Italian journal.[6]  Argomenti in Italy was established by Franco Fortuni, Franco Momigliano, and others from Milan and Turin as a center for open Marxist debate and discussion.  The Italian editors invited Morin and Roland Barthes to initiate a journal in France on the same model.  They also

5 Studies of the Arguments group are neither numerous nor conclusive. The best is the book-length essay by Louis Soubise, Le Marxisme après Marx, 1956-1965: quatre marxistes dissidents française, preface F. Chatelet (Paris, 1967).  Also see Yvon Bourdet, "Le Néo-revisionisme," in Communisme et marxisme (Paris, 1963) 39-78; and Richard Gombin, Les Origines du gauchisme (Paris, 1971) 49-98.  Soubise's study is very complete, sympathetic yet critical. Bourdet is sharply negative, from a quasi-Trotskyist perspective. Gombin is favorable, viewing Arguments as the philosophical basis of the New Left.
6 Interview with Edgar Morin in Paris, Sept. 15, 1973.

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made efforts of a similar kind in England and Germany.  Arguments invited and received articles from all progressive camps: Soboul, a Stalinist historian; Naville, a Trotskyist; Mascolo and Lefebvre, both ex-Cornmunists; Colette Audry, a Sartrean; Maximilien Rubel, a Marxist humanist; Alain Touraine, a sociologist.  Arguments was the only Marxist journal in the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s to avoid sectarianism.  It therefore became an important center for an exchange of ideas, for an opening up of Marxism toward new intellectual currents and new social phenomena.

If Arguments was theoretically diverse, its leaders had much in common.  They were all shaped by participation in the Resistance, joining the Communist Party in the struggle against Nazism.  They all left the Party, mostly in the aftermath of the Hungarian invasion, disillusioned and disoriented but unwilling to retreat from radicalism.  After 1956 they were for the most part Paris-based academics and remain so today.

In tone, the journal expressed the sudden intellectual liberation of men embittered by the constraints of CP discipline.  For the first time, these thinkers could freely explore fundamental questions that for too long had been forbidden.  Whole issues were devoted to cultural questions that Marxists normally avoided: "The Problem of Love" (Jan.-March, 1961) and "The Problem of Cosmology" (October-December, 1961).  Quite expectedly, there were excesses, romantic posturings about "planetary thought," about thought dans l'ouverture de líouverture, about "post-Marxism," about unrelenting criticism." From the cramped dogmatism of Stalinism, Arguments, intoxicated with its new freedom, went full swing to the opposite pole.  Many independent Marxists, like Claude Bourdet, editor of the Left Wing, L'Observateur,[7] who were in sympathy with the

7 L'Observateur, a bi-weekly with a readership of about only 10,000, played an important role for intellectuals as the only organ for a non-Communist politics.  In the early 1960s it was

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group's anti-Stalinism, were repulsed by its often total iconoclasm.[8] At times, Arguments read like an abstract negation of Stalinism.  Caught in a kind of Oedipal rebellion against a severe father, it defined itself ambiguously as both explicitly Marxist-revisionist, implying that it was continuing the Marxist tradition, and as adventurously and brashly beyond Marxism.[9]

Nevertheless., the journal dramatically revitalized Marxist thought.  Arguments defined its thought as one of "interrogation, questioning, problematic." [10] It asked all the repressed questions about Russian socialism, about the role of the superstructure, about the weaknesses of the Marxist theory of knowledge, about the class structure of advanced capitalist society, about the apparent failure of the Proletariat to carry out its historical mission.

When Arguments ceased publication in 1962, its director Kostas Axelos claimed that it had accomplished its purpose.[11] An attitude of critical inquiry had been established within Marxism and, although Arguments completed no new theoretical "system," a new radical framework was taking shape that would provide a basis for the politics of the New Left.[12]  What Axelos did not state was that the main thinkers of Arguments were at this time dispersed throughout the globe and there were no younger men on the scene who were considered suitable to take over direction of the periodical.  More than the journal, however, it was the collection of books edited and largely written by the Arguments group, that was to have a very substantial impact on French Marxist theory.

it was the center for a germinating new left whose radical views on the Algeria and colonial question had little representation in parliament.
8 Bourdet, op. cit., 41-48.
9 Bourdet, op. cit., 68-69 and Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire (Paris, 1964) 191n-192n.
10 Axelos, ibid.
11 Axelos, ibid.
12 Gombin, op. cit., 54.

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Arguments translated and published the classic works of Western Marxism: Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness and Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy; it brought out the major works of Herbert Marcuse; it published Trotsky, Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital, Edward H. Carr's History of Russia and Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism, all of which challenged fundamental propositions in the conventional wisdom of Stalinism and helped establish a higher level of intellectual debate.  Above all, it brought out numerous studies by men of its own group: Axelos, Lefebvre, Chatelet, and Fougeyrollas.  Still another important influence of Arguments concerned its integration of "bourgeois" social sciences with Marxism.  In the early 1960s, members of Arguments attended classes given by Paul Lazarsfeld, the quantitative sociologist, and other American social scientists whose mathematical sophistication fascinated them.  Later on, Pierre Fougeyrollas, Henri Lefebvre, Joseph Gabel, and Georges Lapassade went on to make important contributions in political science and sociology. This also aided in bringing a critical perspective to the new generation of students in social science.

Before entering into the discussion of the theory of the Arguments group, I should stress that my use of the term "existentialized Marxists" is not meant to imply a direct adoption of existentialist doctrine on their part.  Rather, I intend this title to refer to their appropriation of notions of subjectivity and of the opening of theory toward action that, in a loose sense, can be termed existentialist.

2. Morin, Mascolo, and the CP

The intellectual biography of Edgar Morin illustrates the background and direction of the Arguments group.  Morin's Autocritique was an autobiographical recounting of an intellectual's life under Stalinism, his expulsion from the Party, and his agonizing reorientation.  A style of public self-criticism had developed within the CP as a counter-

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part to the confessions of the Communist leaders at the Moscow Trials.  With the mass exodus of intellectuals from the CP in the 1950s, the confession became a new genre of the pilgrim's progress from Stalinist mystification to intellectual liberation, a coherent if twisted perspective on the world, a total explanation that had been coercively sustained by the Party.  Stalinism suddenly disintegrated for the intellectual into a pile of sterile, dogmatic sand.  Ideas that once were held with passionate intensity now appeared stupid or slightly absurd.  Naturally, Morin and the rest foamed with resentment against their Stalinist past, but they did not simply turn into anti-Communists.  Instead, they sought to learn an intellectual as well as a moral lesson from their experience; they struggled to interpret their own past as part of history.

A generation younger than Lefebvre, Morin joined the Party during the war, filled with a romantic Marxism and, as his self-analysis disclosed, a martyr complex.  Along with Hervé and Courtade, be learned a Hegelian Marxism from a disciple of Lukacs, Georg Szekeres.  The Communists learned their Hegel not from Kojève but from a Hungarian Communist. [13] In a loose sense, Morin was always an existential Marxist, never a good Stalinist.  He defined his position in the Party, along with that of his friends Dionys Mascolo and Robert Antèlme, as an "existential opposition." [14] With his romantic impulses, his bits of Hegel, his interest in Sartre, Morin lobbied in the Party without success for a recognition of the role of culture.  Indeed the superstructure always interested Morin more than the substructure; no sooner was be out of the Party than be published books on the cultural and psychological facets of death and the cinema.  Morin's adherence to the Party through the 1940s forms a study in cognitive dissonance: with each event-the Rajk trials, the attack on Tito, etc.--Soviet socialism appeared very different from Morin's concept of it.  Yet he managed to hold in balance

13 Autocritique (Paris, 1959) 42.
14 Ibid., 117 and 84.

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the glaring contradiction of reality to his ideas.  The Party finally took the initiative and excommunicated him when he published an article in the Trotskyist L'Observateur in 1951.

By a torturous process of mental reorganization, Morin moved step by step from orthodoxy to existential Marxism.  The first Stalinist postulate to vanish was the metaphysical belief in the future: within official Marxism it was necessary to believe in Russia as the future realization of Communism.  All difficulties in the present could be explained away by the dogma that Russia embodied the hopes of mankind for emancipation.  Once Morin gave this up, he relished existentialism's focus on the present as a healthy tonic. [15] Without faith in the necessity of the Kingdom to come, the Kingdom of this world could be seen better for what it was.

While in the Party, Morin saw himself in bad faith, refusing to accept responsibility for his adherence to Stalinism.  His personal morality of fighting for authenticity and justice was in total opposition to his ideology.  Morally, he rejected the Stalinist system: ideologically, be rejected his morality.[16] He realized that a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union was urgent, but participation in the Party made all criticism impossible.  To accept responsibility for his own views, Morin had to leave the Party and develop his ideas independently.  Eventually, Morin completed the dismantling of his official Marxism.  Through reading Socialisme ou Barbarie he became critical of the Russian bureaucracy.  Then the Proletariat lost its monolithic solidarity in his eyes when French workers evidenced no enthusiasm for Polish and Hungarian workers in their demands for worker self-management in 1956.  In fact he visited the Polish workers' councils with Lefort and Mascolo.  Revolutionary infallibility was no longer an attribute of Russian bureaucrats and French manual laborers.  The identification of the empirical working class with the next stage of human realization now collapsed.

After several years of personal anguish and difficulty, the ex-Communist began to see history from a new light, in the manner of the Arguments group.  The center of his

15 Ibid., 144.
16 Ibid., 152.

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mental world shifted from the fate of Russian politics and the economic struggles of French workers toward the astonishing new features of advanced capitalist society.  A new "planetary" era was already in advanced stages of development, an era that witnessed new contradictions very different from those of Marx's model of England in the nineteenth century.  The new contradictions were those of a world of material abundance, security, and comfort, distorted by a "hyperpetty-bourgeois" mentality-what we call the American dream.  Material luxury now posed the question "comment vivre?" but the "masses" did not know bow "to enjoy man." Foreshadowing the concepts of play and daily life of the Arguments group, Morin announced the "center of the contradiction": ". . . the petty-bourgeois life of comfort becomes a passive life of play with dreams, pastimes, distractions; the great technical adventure requires an active life of play where man, becoming aware of just this adventure, attempts to live." [17] The existentialist notion of authenticity, and Sartre's concept of play as the highest form of human realization, were beginning to emerge in the thought of the Arguments group.

A total reconversion of our culture is needed," Morin urged, in order to realize the potentials of the planetary era.  The old problems of capitalism remained and new ones were being added, problems of the psychic life, of culture, modes of alienation that would not magically vanish with the appropriation of the means of production.  Hence the timetable for revolution had to be revised: "the prehistory of man is not near its end. . . ." [18] As Marx said, history progressed on its bad side, "barbarism advances along with civilization" as the cunning of reason moved in ever more illegible ways.  At present, "We are in the iron age of the planetary era," [19] at the beginning of a vastly different, strange and as yet not fully intelligible world.  Still, despair was not the right attitude to take toward the planetary era. A new type of thinking was called for in a new situation,

17 Ibid., 153.
18 Ibid., 231.
19 Ibid., 234.

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a qualified optimism based on a critical Marxist understanding but also on Freudian insights and insights from other new disciplines.  Was Morin still a Marxist?  "Yes and no": "Today I think Marxism must be integrated in a more total conception, one that considers man in a biological, psychic and social dialectic, that takes Freud's enormous discovery into account and that retrieves the problem of the relations between the real and the imaginary." [20]

Morin inaugurated an "integral revisionism" that presented a "totality" that was "open," that accepted "contradictions" which were "irreducible," like the contradiction between the real and the imaginary.  The urgent need was for a new mode of thought that accepted "unlimited revisionism, critique, relativity, contradiction," and that struggled continually against reification.  This type of thought was the central project of the Arguments group, but Morin himself did not systematize it.[21] At the end of the Autocritique Morin mythologized his new insights when he insisted that his intellectual departure was no more than a return to ideas he maintained as a fourteen-year-old boy, before he was entranced by Stalinism.  This Nietzschean eternal return of the same served to unify his life, preserving the integrity of his personality through the barren Stalinist years and in effect rewriting his own history to suit his current preoccupations.

A close friend of Morin, Dionys Mascolo was among the first of the intellectuals to leave the CP after the war.  Mascolo played only a minor role in the Arguments group, allowing his name to appear on the editorial board and contributing but one article.  Yet Mascolo published a book before the appearance of Arguments that anticipated many of its themes.  His book, Le Communisme: révolution et communication, ou la dialectique des valeurs et des besoins, appearing in 1953, rejected Marx's concept of need
 
20 Ibid., 240
21 Cf. Introduction à une politique de l'homme (Paris, 1965).

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because it led to a utilitarian psychology of self-interest.  Too often Marx assumed that social groups acted according to their material self-interest and that the revolution was inevitable since the obvious self-interest of the workers was to overthrow capitalism.  Using the 1844 Manuscripts for support, Mascolo gave a non-utilitarian interpretation of Marx's concept of need, relating it to Hegel's notion of desire in the Phenomenology.  The central thesis of Marx, for him, was the theory of needs which represented subjectivity as a "lack," and was the basis of "negativity" in social consciousness.  Need pressed the individual toward an awareness of the "impossible,î toward what did not exist, toward "satisfaction." Need was "the material equivalent of the imagination."[22] As Hegel had shown, desire was born from need, leading eventually to the emergence of the need for the satisfaction of the desire of desire, or the satisfaction of the potential for human self-realization.  What is more, desire led to action, to the conquest of nature and to social relations, to the communication of desire to others.  Need and desire were the active side of subjectivity that existentialists, not Karl Marx, had developed.  In this anti-Stalinist vision, Communism was not simply against exploitation and alienation; it was for human satisfaction.  One of the chief faults in Mascolo's thesis was that it did not account for the possibility of false needs or false desires, which was a prominent question in the 1960s.

The dialectic of need and desire enabled Mascolo to set a human criterion for social organizations.  Men made their own history not only by building social structures but by seeking to gratify desire.  Desire separated social institutions from natural phenomena, discriminating between the blindness of nature and human values.  As Lukacs said, the economy, a system of tools, was a "second nature." The economy was indeed a second nature because it reproduced the unconsciousness of nature itself within the creations of man.  The economy would not become human until it was shorn

22 Le Communisme, 169.
23 Ibid., 242.

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of its naturalness and reflected human desire.  History presented a continuous series of distortions of desire in religious myths and ideologies, as men lost the knowledge of the root of desire in need.  Hence subjectivity itself took on the qualities of nature and values became commodities that had no direct relation to human need.  In this way, Mascolo's concept of desire raised the question of the concept of subjectivity for Marxism that would later be developed by the Arguments group.

3. Beyond Philosophy

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Arguments group published a series of studies that circled loosely around a single problematic: the transcendence of philosophy.  Fougeyrollas' Le Marxisme en question (1959), La Philosophie en question (1960), and Contradiction et totalité (1964); Chatelet's La Naissance de líhistoire (1962) and Logos et praxis (1962; Axelos' Marx, penseur de la technique (1961) and Vers la pensée planétaire (1964); Lefebvre's Marx, philosophe (1964) and La Métaphilosophie (1965)--most of these works were published in the Arguments collection and all of them centered on the theme, "Did Marx begin a new type of thought that avoided the difficulties of the Western philosophical tradition?" and "Did he open the path for a critique specifically suited to a dawning age of technology?" In general, the group viewed Marx's position as ambiguous, pointing toward a new kind of knowledge but also somewhat rooted in the old traditions.  Individually, the Arguments group came up with diverse, even opposing, answers to the question of Marx's transcendence of philosophy.  Looking at their works as a whole, we can say that Axelos and Fougeyrollas tended to be more critical of Marx, while Chatelet and Lefebvre saw less urgency in revising Marx's basic propositions.

The Arguments group went back beyond the 1844 Manuscripts to the earlier Doctoral

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Thesis, dealing no longer with the young Marx, but with the juvenile Marx.  What interested them in the dissertation was Marx's critique of philosophy.  They were fascinated by Marx's statement there that" . . . the world's becoming philosophical is at the same time philosophy's becoming worldly, that its realization is at the same time its loss . . . "[24]  Marx seemed to be calling for the abolition of philosophy as part of the goal of Communism because philosophy was an alienated mode of thought and presumably Marx himself had invented a new type of thought that would avoid its pitfalls.  But how could philosophy be realized?  Could the alienation of past philosophy be transcended?  Did Marx accomplish these goals?  Was his concept of alienation a fulfillment of the new type of thought?  Was the project of realizing philosophy identical to the project of the Proletariat in abolishing private property?  Did Marxism need to be revised in accordance with the notion of transcending philosophy?  These were the questions asked by the Arguments group.

The question of the goal of philosophy was raised by the group with a sharp awareness of the onset of a new historical era.  They were now in an age of technology in which the entire globe was qualitatively more unified and alienated than in the past.  Material needs were near satisfaction, bringing to light the question of specifically human or poetic needs.  Above all, man was no longer viewed in confrontation with nature; to the extent that Marx's thought bore residues of the old Promethean combat with nature it would have to be shelved.  The center of advanced technological society bad shifted from work to leisure, from the economic structure to the political and cultural superstructure.  The new age raised new problems and new forms of alienation, those of the psyche, of the electronic media, of space-age politics.

As a result of these sharply new intellectual concerns the Arguments group rejected

24 Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 62.  Cf. also, The German Ideology.

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old Marxist questions and principles, whether Stalinist, Leninist, or Trotskyist.  While undertaking their critique of Marxism, the Arguments group found itself inevitably drawn to the existentialists.  Axelos and Fougeyrollas gained their perspective on Marx from studying Heidegger, while Chatelet and more especially Lefebvre resorted continually to Sartre's early positions in Being and Nothingness and to his criticism of diamat in "Materialism and Revolution." The differences between Heidegger and Sartre, while in some respects great, were not enough to break the unity of the Arguments group's existential Marxism.

These general comments about the Arguments group will become more concrete through a review of their positions on the question of the transcendence of philosophy.

4. Kostas Axelos and the Concept of Play

Kostas Axelos, who took on the burden of editing Arguments and later directed the collection, came to France from Greece during the Civil War on the same boat with Castoriadis and Kosta Papaioannou, a right-wing Marxist.

We have already discussed Axelos' critique of Marx as a prophet of technique in Marx, penseur de la technique.  In that book as well as in articles published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, collected as Vers la pensée planétaire, Axelos discerned a deep flaw in Marx's thought: that Marx remained in the metaphysical tradition of philosophy since Plato, an argument that Axelos took over from Heidegger.  The existentialist's interest in Marx dated from the first edition of the 1844 Manuscripts.  Landshut, its editor, was a student of Heidegger, and Heidegger assisted him in that venture.[25] Later, in his "Letter on Humanism" in answer to questions from the French Heideggerian, Jean

25 See the euphoric discussion of the relation of Marx and Heidegger among Axelos, Chatelet, Lefebvre, and Beaufret, "Karl Marx et Heidegger," Nouvel observateur, 10:473 (May 28, 1959) 16.

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Beaufret, Heidegger argued that humanism, whether Sartre's or Marx's was, first, inadequate to confront the crisis of man in "an age of technology" and "mass society" and, second, inadequate to reveal the profundity of human reality.[26]  His call for a new philosophical criticism suited to a technological age pleased the Marxists of the Arguments group, but the other argument against Marx had greater impact on them.  For Heidegger, humanism led to metaphysics, since it purported to locate an essence of man, like Marx's species-being or Descartes' cogito.  The idea of an essence made man into just another animal species, whereas for Heidegger human reality was existence, a "standing in the clearing of Being." Because man stands outside of himself, he is open to Being, not just to human being.  In the twentieth century, man has lost his awareness of Being; this is the substance of his crisis.  Humanism failed to transcend human reality toward Being, and hence reduced the scope of human possibility.

Impressed by this argument, Axelos wrote a book on the relation of Marx and Heidegger, Einfuhrung in ein kunftiges Denken: Über Marx und Heidegger, '[27] an article on "Heidegger et le problème de la philosophie," published Beaufret's Dialogue avec Heidegger in the Arguments series as well a translation, "Les Principes de la pensée,"[28] and participated in a colloquium on Heidegger with Beaufret, Lefebvre, and Chatelet that was printed in Arguments.

Axelos' search for an open, fragmentary, multi-dimensional, poetic, planetary thought led him to Pascal and Nietzsche.[29] Their phoristic style were examples of thought that did not close itself into a system.  Axelos also discovered fragmentary thought in Rimbaud.[30] Rimbaud had announced the demise of humanist metaphysics:

26 "Letter on Humanism," in The Existentialist Tradition, ed.  N. Languilli (N.Y., 1971) 204-'245.
27 Tübingen, 1966.
28 Arguments, 20 (1960) 27-33.
29 "La Pensée fragmentaire de la totalité chez Pascal," Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 105-135.
30 "Rimbaud et la poésie du monde planétaire," ibid, 40-171.

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"l'homme a fini!"  The end of man meant the end of the metaphysics of reason, of man who divided the world into reason and unreason, cutting himself off from Being.

La Pensée planétaire was a kind of thinking that resembled the dialectic, but the dialectic shorn of metaphysics.  Floundering in humanism since Plato, Western philosophy collapsed Being into thought.  The search for a truly dialectical mode of thought led Axelos, following Heidegger and Nietzsche, to the pre-Socratics, especially to Heraclitus.[31] Unlike Plato, the pre-Socratics thought within the totality.[32]  The pre-Socratic concept of physis was a genuine totality that Heraclitus set in motion with his concept of becoming.  Since the totality was always in flux, it could never be fixed in an intellectual system.  It was always open to new creations.  This vision of the world as an open totality suited Axelos' intuition that creativity needed safeguarding in a technocratic society.

For Axelos, Marx's concept of alienation was not adequate to the need for an open totality, since it failed to allow sufficient autonomy to political and even philosophical alienation.  For this reason, Marx did not invent a theory of knowledge that was truly revolutionary.  Marx's concept of alienation also concealed the alienation inherent in the development of technology, whether capitalist or socialist.[33] For Marx had reduced human reality to work, to making tools, to conquering nature, to producing efficient machines that led to automation: what he did not call enough attention to was that human reality also had to create itself, in Rimbaud's words, "to change life," not only to satisfy material needs, but to attain the full satisfaction of desire.

31Cf. Héraclite et la philosophie: La prémière saisie de l'être en devenir de la totalité, collection Arguments (Paris, 1962).
32 "Pourquoi étudions-nous les présocratiques?" Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 67-76.
33 "Y a-t-il une philosophic marxiste?" Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 205.

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Because of his faulty concept of alienation, a metaphysical anthropology of homo faber entered into Marx's thought. [34] Subjectivity was reduced to tool making, and had no right of satisfaction of its own.  Marx therefore was unable sufficiently to integrate materialism and spiritualism.  In a brilliant revision of the Theses on Feuerbach, Axelos summarized his position.  Here is his first thesis on Marx:

The principal fault of all historico-dialectic materialism (including Marx's) is that the object, reality, the materials are taken only under the form of produced objects, material realities, materials of work; they are thus effectively grasped, but they lack a ground and a horizon. This is why the other side was developed, in a metaphysical way--in opposition to naive or sophisticated realism--by idealist philosophy which, naturally, neither knew nor recognized the world we call real: the totality of forms, forces, and weaknesses of the constituted, concretized and fixed world--the mode of being of the constituting and open World, the other side of the same and unique World.  Marx wanted sensible objects to be superior to ideal objects; but be did not grasp human activity itself as problematic activity.  Thus he considered in the Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy as much as in the Poverty of Philosophy--material life as the only truly human one, while thought and poetry were grasped only in their conditional and ideological forms.[35]

Axelos was rejecting not the basic elements of Marx's thought, only its emphasis and its consequent lacunae.

The result of capturing human thought and action in the moment of work was that Marx reintroduced metaphysics and dualism: "The thought of Marx is metaphysical as soon as it wants to transcend oppositions and dualism; it is metaphysical--as is all Western and European thought since Descartes--in that it privileges the physical and

34 For a similar critique of the Marxist concept of work by a phenomenologist, see Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans.  C. Kelbley (Evanston, 1965) 197-219.
35 Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 172.

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sensible in relation to the 'metaphysical.'"[36] Marx was still thinking in terms of the antagonism of man and nature.  Now, in the twentieth century, with the conquest of nature practically over, it was possible, Axelos argued, to see what had been concealed from Marx by virtue of his Lebenswelt.  Planetary thought could now place man's poetic self-creation on the same plane with his relation to nature, avoiding metaphysics.  We must note that Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, to a very large degree, had set forth the same proposition, except for his Cartesian residues.  The conclusions that Axelos drew from his critique of Marx were exactly those of Sartre: avoiding the metaphysics of idealism and materialism, planetary thought discovered the most appropriate dimension of thought and action in play.

The planetary thought of Axelos led to the same conclusion as Sartre had reached, both in a later work called Le Jeu du monde and in Vers la pensée planétaire.  Unlike Sartre, Axelos did not develop clear ideas about how human reality opened to being in play, rather be took off in poetic excursions:

Nothing ever elucidates completely.  Prelude, development and especially ending remain problematic.  We are always embarked, en route.  We are . . . in the interlude.  What we are and what we are not is the interlude, not only between two games, but in the game.  Man is taken in the game of the world.  Enjoying it on many levels.  Himself and the game. [37]

36 Marx, penseur de la technique, op. cit., 136.  Cf. 120, 126, 144.
37 Vers la pensée planétaire, op. cit., 322.

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ing play did have for Axelos was its connection with the dialectic: play was the living openness of the dialectic, not the finitude of death.  Certainly Axelos' image of play had nothing to do with Rand Corporation War Games, with families engaged in Monopoly, with a Freudian concept of play as acting out.

Ironically, Axelos' existential Marxism relied on the somber broodings of Heidegger--with his preoccupation with death and care (Sorge), with the inauthenticity of everyday life in the technical world, where people lost themselves in things and were blind to the terribly serious business of the quest for Being--only to emerge with a philosophy of play.  In French fashion, like Fourier and Sartre, Axelos' vision of the game of the world did have a lightness of tone far removed from the spirit of his Teutonic teacher.[38]

5. Fougeyrollas' Heideggerian Marxism

The same age as Edgar Morin, Pierre Fougeyrollas had joined the Party at the same time, in 1942, but he stayed in it until the Hungarian invasion.  With his training in philosophy, Fougeyrollas confronted Marxism with the new technological world in Le Marxisme en question of 1959.  Here he diverged from existing Marxism far more than any other major figure in the Arguments group.

In basic agreement with Sartre, Fougeyrollas announced that true Marxism was not represented by Stalin's diamat but by the historical concept of the alienation and liberation of man.  The trouble was that even this true Marxism contained "metaphysical residues" that Fougeyrollas thought urgently required revision.  In the spirit of the Arguments group, he argued that "the age of systems was over" and that a drastically new type of thought was needed, one that was not dogmatic but "problem-

38 Cf. Le Jeu du monde (Paris, 1969) 419-444.

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atic," one that raised questions.[39] Borrowing from Calvez, he disputed Marx's attempt to reduce all forms of alienation to economic alienation.  The elements of the superstructure were in part relative to the economic base, but they also were "other" than this base and required distinct theories of explanation.  Fougeyrollas' book on politics, La Conscience politique dans la France contemporaine (1963), demonstrated empirically that political consciousness was in large measure independent from "socioeconomic interests.[40] Political consciousness was an effort to construct an integrated, total worldview, manifesting man's capacity to create "norms" beyond any reduction to the economic base.  For Fougeyrollas, as for Sartre, Marxism did not account for the capacity of consciousness to transcend the given.

In addition to reducing all forms of alienation to the economy, Marx's thought contained elements of metaphysical optimism --and eschatological myth.  His vision of the "total" end of alienation was, for Fougeyrollas, a mystifying hope that was not justified by historical reality and did not further whatever liberation from alienation was possible. " . . to suppose that man, once he achieved economic and social liberation, would become ipso facto the total man announced by Marx, is surely an imprudent affirmation."[41] Fougeyrollas wanted a more modest Marxism that would allow for an indefinite process of overcoming alienation, as well as the acceptance of theories, like Freud's, that accounted for specific types of alienation in the superstructure.

Fougeyrollas' critique of Marx's concept of alienation was in part influenced by his pessimistic mood; he had lost faith in the working class, Russian socialism, and the French CP.  His call for the acceptance of theories that accounted for the autonomous alienations in the superstructure, as well as for the recognition of the active role of consciousness in history, were typical of existential Marxism.  But his insistence that ali-

39 Le Marxisme en question, 160-161.
40 La Conscience politique dans la France contemporaine, 15-16.
41 Le Marxisme en question, 26.

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enation was without end was not clarified.  He never indicated specifically why men had to lose the power over their own experience or in what respects or conditions this was so.  To argue for this, one has to resort to some metaphysical principle in order to sustain the idea of the incapacity of men to control their lives.  In Fougeyrollas' case, his belief in eternal alienation was based on an impression from his own experience of the direction of history.  Marx's faith in the full eradication of alienation under Communism was dissonant with his mood in the early 1960s.

In his book on the mass media, L'Action sur l'homme: cinéma et télévision (1961), Fougeyrollas reached what was, from a Marxist viewpoint, the worst possible diagnosis that the primary mutilation of men occurred no longer at work, but in leisure activities.  With history gone so far amuck, the basic principles of Marxism were more a hindrance than a help.  Fougeyrollas accepted many of the conclusions of liberal, end-of-ideology social scientists.  Not only was the working class apparently uninterested in a Marxist revolution, but Fougeyrollas was persuaded by Jean Fourastié and others that advanced technology eliminated the working class and created a "new middle class, rather than a new working class of technicians, engineers, and clerical workers.

In two other studies, La Philosophie en question (1960) and Contradiction et totalité: surgissement et deploiements de la dialectique (1964), Fougeyrollas attended to the questions of the Arguments group.  La Philosophie en question studied the meaning of the realization of philosophy, while Contradiction et totalité took a close look at the nature of dialectical thought.

The earlier work presented the Arguments group's typical blend of Heidegger and Marx: man was faced with a crisis due to the technification of his existence that traditional philosophy could not clarify.  Nevertheless, the only resort men have, faced

42 Ibid., 134.

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with their current dilemma, is the invention of a new philosophy:

Without doubt, the anguish of contemporary man resides in the technification of his existence and the anguish of philosophical conscious- ness comes from facing the enigma of Being without properly identifying it. It seems to us, however, that philosophical activity is the highest recourse of this man menaced by dehumanization and that the anguished existence of this same man is the supreme recourse of a philosophy that has decided to extract itself from thematic multiplicities in order to rediscover its original unified problematic. [43]

Contradiction et totalité was part of a new concern with the nature and meaning of the dialectic which arose in the early 1960s when it was recognized that neither Hegel nor Marx had adequately resolved its problems.  Sartre pioneered this effort with Critique de la raison dialectique.  The sociologist Georges Gurvitch, in Dialectique et sociologie (1962), sought to apply his "hyper-empiricism" to a theory of the dialectic that would avoid the alleged dogmatisms of Marx in his "decending" materialist dialectic and of the ascending" dialectic of idealism: " . . . Marx's dialectic, despite all its realism and all its empiricism, remains ascending and apologetic. It is the triumphant march toward a humanity reconciled with itself in a realized dream of terrestrial paradise.  It is the apology for the suppression of all servitude, all constraints all obstacles.  It is the apology for the end of history. . . ."[44]  Recognizing these dangers in the dialectic, Fougey-

43 La Philosophie en question, 55.
44 La Vocation actuelle de la sociologie (Paris, 1950) Vol. 2, 321.  For a critical review of Dialectique et sociologie, cf.  A. Gucinski, Telos, 1:1 (Spring, 1968) 49-52.

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rollas attempted to modify it to suit the requirements of "fragmentary thought."

Fougeyrollas' articulation of the dialectic was representative of the Arguments group's orientation.  Rejecting dialectical materialism, he was concerned to show that the dialectic was quintessentially a critical weapon, the antithesis of dogmatism.  Against Sartre, he proclaimed that the dialectic was not a type of reason and not a method.  He proceeded to reformulate the dialectic, somewhat arbitrarily and abstractly, as he admitted,[45]  as consisting of two poles, one of contradiction, the other of totality.  In essence, the dialectic was a totality in contradiction.  Contradictions were of two types: alterity, the mere otherness of things juxtaposed as in nature, and alienation, the lost otherness of human contradictions.  For its part, totality was divided into globality (the extent of the totality) and integration (the unity of the totality).  Furthermore, there were no inherent contradictions and no closed totalities: contradictions-in-themselves and totalities-in-themselves were only concepts.  Real contradictions and real totalities were always partial, always to be transcended, leaving the dialectic in a permanent state of openness.  Thus, Fougeyrollas laid the groundwork for a dialectic that would allow continuous criticism, and continuous development in society.  A "problematic," " open," "planetary" thought was now constituted.  For a connection with Marxism, Fougeyrollas termed his thought a true dialectical anthropology while as a philosophy it was a "transcendental phenomenology."[46] Both Marxist and existentialist, it would guarantee the unlimited freedom and negativity of consciousness.  Fougeyrollas was bent on "deontologizing" the dialectic to assure the avoidance of a new dogmatism.  However, an attack on dogmatism easily becomes itself a dogmatism, and Fougeyrollas' failure to deduce adequately his basic categories

45 Contradiction et totalité, 7.
46 Ibid., 133.

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left him open to this charge.  Still, a beginning had been made on what is one of the thorniest problems of existential Marxism.

6. Chatelet's Concept of Satisfaction

Unlike Axelos, Chatelet's existential Marxism relied less on Heidegger than on Sartre.  Even so, Chatelet's debt to Sartre was primarily on the negative side of agreement with the existentialist's critique of Stalinist philosophy. [47] In addition, Chatelet was much less prepared to modify Marx than were Axelos and Fougeyrollas.  By the mid-1960s, he defected somewhat from existential Marxism to the structuralist Marxism of Althusser, the only about-face of its kind among the existential Marxists.

In Logos et praxis, Chatelet complained that the important question of the suppression and realization of philosophy raised by Marx had been neglected by Marxists.  The purpose of his own work would be "to define how Marx, in opposing traditional philosophy, conceived theoretical work . . . "[48] From the outset, Chatelet, in existential Marxist fashion, attacked Marx for forgetting the "active side of consciousness," the truth that it was necessary "to do philosophy." In the end, he, like Sartre, discovered liberating praxis in the heart of consciousness, with the concept of satisfaction.  Again like Sartre, Chatelet found the activity of consciousness as the source of the uniqueness of man, his difference from the technological world of things, manifesting a concern for a type of alienation that was fundamentally technological.

To uncover the meaning of Marx's pronouncement about the "world's becoming philosophical" and "philosophy's becoming worldly," Chatelet studied the origins of philosophy in Greece.  In La Naissance de l'histoire (1962) he investigated the relation be-

47 Logos et praxis, 11-56, "Le Matérialisme dialectique et la critique contemporaine." For Chatelet's appreciation of Critique de la raison dialectiqtic, Ibid., 198-199.
48 Logos et praxis, 7-8.

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tween the beginning of philosophy and the cultural decision to "make history." He found the two interconnected: be found, in short, philosophical consciousness as basic to a new self-conscious stage of human becoming.  The book

. . . wants to show that the ultimate basis on which the comprehension . . . of historicity and the cultural decision to make history can develop is the 'Seizure by man of the political dimension of his fate, the consciousness that he has of being an active subject in this sensible-profane world in the heart of a community on which he depends, that is, the knowledge of real freedom .[40]

The meaning of the origin of philosophy, and hence the meaning of the end of philosophy, was articulated in Logos et praxis.  Philosophy began in the attempt to solve a problem in the Greek community: Logos was related to Praxis.  Before philosophy, the Greeks believed that ideas were governing principles of action, a kind of practical wisdom.  In the class structure of Greece, conflicts developed between different groups in civil society who were acting on their different ideas.[50] Contradictions of ideas were hence related to class conflicts.  Philosophy was born in the attempt to resolve the problem of conflict in the polis, the universal, political realm beyond civil society, by seeking to resolve the contradictions in the ideas held by different groups.

Philosophy originated with the concept of Logos that was beyond the world of ideas, and this Logos was implicated in the political question of preserving the polis by ending class warfare.  The philosopher and the citizen, those concerned with general

49 La Naissance de l'histoire, 10.
50 Logos et praxis, 58-61.

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welfare beyond the particular interests of his group, were born in the same historical act.  Such was the richness of philosophy in its origins.  The particular way in which it sought to solve the question, however, was the source of its poverty overcome only by Hegel and by Marx.  Philosophy sought to prove the generality and universality of Logos over against the particularity of ideas in order to provide a basis for reconciliation.  Aiming at the universal truth of Logos, this new form of thought was compelled to rise above the practico-sensible world of the polis.  Since Logos could not really resolve the class conflicts (there was no universal class like the Proletariat to carry out its program), it entered the "ivory tower" of pure theory.  More and more, philosophy resorted to the ideal realm for the locus of justice, digressing from its original connection with Praxis.

Chatelet went on to show that the philosopher's Logos did develop an answer to social conflict with the concept of satisfaction.  Philosophy discovered the source of conflict in the polis as the lack of the true satisfaction of each human being in the community (for example, Plato's concept of justice in The Republic).  The philosophical breakthrough did not come until Hegel placed the concept of satisfaction at the end of his Phenomenology, where the dialectic of human becoming had at last resolved the contradictions between the ideal and the real.  The Greeks too had discovered the concept of satisfaction as the true fulfillment of man's potentials, yet they limited it to fulfillment in reason alone.  If men actualized their potentials for rationality and identified with the universal, the polis would be saved.

After Hegel had put the concept of human realization in motion, Marx found the true answer to the riddle of philosophy.  Marx eliminated the question left hanging by the Greeks--the contradiction between Logos and Praxis--by indicating how philosophy could be surpassed only in its realization.  He made his astounding discovery by dem-

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onstrating that

the necessity of the transcendence of philosophy is based . . . on
the recognition of the historical and human importance of the
philosophical decision, that the failure of philosophy has as its profound
cause a fact: the historical situation of man through a long epoch that
permits him to conceive of freedom but not of realizing it, to perceive
the role of universal thought but not make it practical, to propose
solutions to the problems of natural and social alienation but not to
work to make these solutions effective; that the situation of philosophy
today has evolved just because of the success of industrial society.  Thus
the negation of philosophy is the realization of its deepest objective . . . to
make exist empirically, the universal life . . . . [51]

For Chatelet, Marx transcended philosophy only through the aid of Hegel.  By placing Hegel, and for that matter Marx, in the tradition of Greek philosophy, Chatelet, like Axelos and Fougeyrollas, skirted, for better or worse, the Judeo-Christian elements in their thought.  The existential Marxist acknowledged Marx's deep debt to Hegel for the latter's historical anthropology, his dialectic, his concept of human realization as satisfaction.  Still, Marx broke significantly with Hegel by "grasping man in his empirical reality."

51 Ibid., 187.

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Chatelet viewed Marx's achievements in overcoming philosophy in absolute terms: by making human satisfaction depend upon the conquest of nature, Marx had solved, once and for all, the riddle of history.  The specific tasks of Marxism in suppressing and realizing philosophy were concrete and limited: it did not need to create a new ontology, a new theory of knowledge, or become "an encyclopedia of the sciences." Its aim was limited to

showing that humanity cannot realize its fundamental goal (that of
universal, empirical satisfaction implying the growth of the power of
man over nature, the multiplication of human needs, the possibility of
satisfying them and the definitive abolition of historical violence) except
by recognizing in its fundamental-being as active materiality struggling
against a material world whose intelligibility is henceforth furnished by the
experimental sciences.[52]

Although Chatelet clarified the meaning of the realization of philosophy, be relied far too heavily on the empirical fact that history was progressing toward final satisfaction, that the Proletariat indeed embodied the mission of humanity.  Furthermore, Chatelet did not confront Marx's reliance on an abstract anthropology, Feuerbach's species-being.  If philosophy was transcended in concrete satisfaction, the nature of the being who was satisfied was left somewhat up in the air.  Chatelet was also less satisfactory than Axelos in rethinking the new type of thought that was introduced by Marx.

Chatelet did, however, stress the existential side of Marxism, its concern with active consciousness, with the role of subjectivity in the becoming of man.  At the conclusion of Logos et praxis, he acknowledged the existentialist concept of death.  Marx's dialectic

52 Ibid., 178.

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of need and work were "insufficient" to explain human history.  Bowing to Kierkegaard and Heidegger, be noted that "In truth, the consideration of the empirical requires that this tragic dimension of human existence be recognized."[53] Death constitutes "an irreducible existential dimension , a kind of "alienation." but one qualitatively different from the alienation of nature and society.  Still, Chatelet evasively refused to place human finitude as the "determining element in the present human problematic." [54] But he never specified just how the alienation of finitude was different from those of nature and society.  Without explaining why death was not a determinant in history, he proclaimed his act of faith in the revolution:

It is not a matter of pretending that individual problems, that
the essential problem of the individual, his imperfection, his anguish
 and his finitude, are without importance or will be resolved by the
construction of a really coherent, human world.  On the contrary, what
Marxism affirms, it seems, is that these problems cannot be resolved it
would be naive to wish to predict it in any way--except in a universe where
the individual finally finds himself free, in the wealth of his particular
determinations.  What is important is knowing the present problematic
of humanity and lucidly participating in the struggle for the creation of
a society that permits the indefinite development of human potentials,
that makes man exist as man, that realizes effective freedom . . . [55]

53 Ibid., 190.
54 Ibid., 192.
55 Ibid., 195.

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7.  Lefebvre's Concept of Everyday Life

a. The Break with the CP

Lefebvre was among the first CP intellectuals to confess his sins in an auto-critique.  In 1949 be apologized for making Marxism into a theory of knowledge, for relying too heavily on Hegel and the young Marx, and for thinking too much like a philosopher [56] --just those intellectual traits which were to make him the leader of rejuvenated Marxism.  A glance at his long publication list reveals that Lefebvre retreated to the relatively uncontroversial sphere of literary criticism (a tactic also used by Lukacs in a time a political orthodoxy) from the years of his autocritique until his break with the CP in 1956: he published works on Pascal, Diderot, Musset, Rabelais, and a Contribution à l'esthétique.  Before the onset of Zhdanovist restraints, Lefebvre did his best to expound and spread a view of Marxism grounded in the concept of alienation.  Back in 1934 with Norbert Gutermann, be introduced selections from the 1844 Manuscripts in a text that held its freshness enough to be reprinted in the 1960s ; [58] he wrote three introductions to Marx's thought,[59] advocating a Marxist humanism; and he wrote two theoretical works on aspects of Marxist thought left in obscurity under Stalin-alienation and the dialectic.[60]  With so much to be done by way of rethinking Marxism, the yoke endured from the late 1940s until 1957 must have weighed heavily on Lefebvre.

His discontents with official Marxism were expressed immediately upon his expul-

 56 La Nouvelle critique, 4 (1949) 730.
 57 La Somme et le reste (Paris, 1959) 122.
 58 Introduction aux morceaux choisis de  K. Marx (Paris, 1934), reprinted by Gallimard in 1964.
  59 Marx et la liberté, 1947; Pour connaître la pensée de  K. Marx, 1947; Le  Marxisme in Que sais-je? in 1948.
  60 Le  Matérialisme dialectique in 1939 and Logique formelle, logique dialectique in 1947.

238
 

sion from the Party in an article in Les Temps Modernes in 1957, "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," [61] and two books, Problèmes actuels du marxisme in 1958, and an auto-critique which won the Prix de critiques, La Somme et le reste in 1959.  In these works Lefebvre rehearsed the sad humiliations of an intellectual under Stalinism.  Like Morin, he was brought before the Central Committee and interrogated about his "lack of discipline," meaning that he published articles without the express approval of the Party.  In this interview there was no intellectual debate about Marxism and no explicit criticism of the ideas.  This was in the spring of 1956, before the Hungarian invasion.  Twenty-eight years of Party membership were terminated with punishment deserved by a naughty child.

Once expelled from the confines of Stalinism, Lefebvre immediately rediscovered his pre-Party interest in existentialism, the same existentialism he had so crudely derided in 1946.  Searching to gain his theoretical equilibrium before embarking on new directions, be again reviewed the corpus of Marxism, only to expound a heretical existential Marxism.  His studies of 1957-1959 labored to untangle official Marxism and redirect critical thought toward a philosophy of freedom.  "Human consciousness owes to Marxism a new ideal, that of concrete freedom." [63] He sensed a new world situation: "'We must now take up the work and construct an open palace with all sides to the light, to the air, to the people."[64]  The new questions be posed became the program of the Arguments group and of existential Marxism: the nature of Marxist philosophy, the relation of theory and practice, the questions of objectivity and of the State, those of the super-structure and of consciousness.

 61 (August, 1957) 104-137.
 62 La Somme et le reste, 155.
 63 Problèmes  actuels du marxisme, 6.
 64 "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," op. cit., 137.

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b. Marxism and Philosophy

Outside the Party, Lefebvre, who was trained in philosophy, could look at the question of philosophy in earnest.  He presented Marx's texts on philosophy along with his interpretation of them in a little book in the philosophes series in 1964.  A year later, be published his Métaphilosophie in the Arguments collection.  Over all, he wavered considerably between viewing Marxism as a new kind of philosophy and as a type of sociology.[65] All in all, be devoted more attention to a Marxist sociology.

In Métaphilosophie the familiar pattern of the Arguments group was restated: Marx's highest achievement was in calling for and partially achieving the transcendence of philosophy.  Traditional philosophy was lost in a distinct form of alienation that derived from the separation of thought and action.  Lefebvre stressed especially the prerequisite of the withering away of the State for the realization of philosophy.[66] His anti-Statism was pointed at Stalinist Russia, but it was also a mark of the importance given to the superstructure by existential Marxism.

Having rejected philosophy, Lefebvre scanned the European intellectual tradition for signs of a new direction.  Conscious of the inadequacies of Marx, he looked primarily to the existentialists, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and especially Sartre.[67] Like Marx, they had begun the quest for dialectical reason, except they bad developed a concept of the active side of consciousness in the process of human becoming.  Here Lefebvre relied heavily on the studies of Axelos and Chatelet, including, like them, the pre-Socratic Heraclitus in his list of héritiers.

For Lefebvre, the new mode of thought, metaphilosophy, would have several original characteristics.  It would be anti-systematic; it would be neither ontological nor

 65 Sociologie de Marx (Paris, 1966).  English trans. (N.Y., 1969).
 66 La Métaphilosophie, 28.
 67 Marx, philosophe (Paris, 1964) 45; La Somme et le reste, 140; La Métaphilosophie, 133 ff.

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The Arguments Group

anthropological.[68]  It would conceive itself as part of the project of "transforming the world," thereby regenerating the Sartrean "reflection on freedom." Metaphilosophy would begin with Marx's greatest accomplishment, the concept of alienation, which was more relevant than ever since men were suffering from a second-degree alienation, being alienated from their alienation and living "happily" yet without realizing their freedom.

By the 1960s Lefebvre could no longer accept Marx's concept of alienation as a finished product.  In its Marxist form it was too "weak" to account for such disturbing new phenomena as the revival of astrology and the "religion of the cosmonauts."[69] The reality of human alienation was much more complex than Marx had understood, since each region of social life contained entire networks of alienation in their own right.  An elaboration of the specific forms of alienation would be a primary task of metaphilosophy.  Concrete studies of contemporary forms of alienation would eliminate the residue of "ontologism" in Marx's articulation.  Its other fault was apparent in recent studies, like Rubel's, where alienation was ethical, an error Lefebvre himself had made in his earlier concept of "the total man." At bottom, each of these misconceptions blunted the revolutionary force of the concept since they cut it off from praxis.

The primary thrust of metaphilosophy, for Lefebvre, was to renew the vital link between theory and practice.  This revision, however, called for modifications of Marx's concept of praxis, since it accounted only for instrumental interactions like the following: labor activity, political functions, interactions of social classes, analytical and logical rationality, technology and bureaucracy.[70] The concept of praxis left out a great deal of human experience.  What Lefebvre added was an existentialist concept that he called poesis, the experience and creation of human nature. The concept of poesis inclu-

68 La Métaphilosophie, 262; Position, 161.
69 Position, 11.
70 La Métaphilosophie, 12-14.

241
 

ded the creation of the city, the idea of "absolute love," psychoanalysis, the decision to change one's life--in short, the creation of new "situations." He then added a concept of "mimesis" to account for routine aspects of daily life.  Finally, to avoid certain tendencies in Hegelian Marxism toward historicism, he recognized certain "residues," stressing the fact that "each activity that differentiates itself tends to constitute itself into a system, a 'world,"' containing something "precious" and "essential" that has been and might continue to be preserved.  In sum, metaphilosophy revealed historical action as consisting of praxis, poesis, mimesis, and residues.

A general fault in Lefebvre's thinking was his proliferation of categories without clarifying them, as, for example, in his revision of the concept of praxis.  Métaphilosophie resisted this tendency by unifying the new ideas under the concept of daily life.  In the last analysis, the relation of theory and practice confronted the "fundamental contradiction" between philosophy and the non-philosophical, daily life.  The alienation of philosophy was measurable by the degree to which it gave privilege to certain aspects of reality and devalued others.  Philosophy's goal of universality, taken over by Marx, was arrested by the non-intelligibility of daily life.

It belongs to meta-philosophical thought to imagine and to propose
forms, or rather a style that can practically construct and realize the
philosophical project by transforming daily life. . . . The project of a
radical transformation of daily life cannot be separated from the
transcendence of philosophy and its realization.[72]

The first mention of the concept of daily life appeared as far back as 1936, with the publication of La Conscience mystifiée.  The volume was to be the first in a series called Cinq essais de philosophie matérialiste, of which the third would have the title Critique

 71 Ibid., 17-18.
72 Ibid., 118-119.

242
 

de la vie quotidienne.  Lefebvre published such a volume subtitled Introductions in 1947, followed by a second volume subtitled Fondements d'une sociologie de la quotidienneté in 1961, and, finally, a precis of a projected third volume, La Vie quotidienne dans la monde moderne in 1968.  With perseverance, he elaborated the concept of daily life throughout his career.

In 1933-1934, the concept of daily life was simply a negative notion of oppressed, ordinary existence.  At this time, however, Lefebvre was already demanding that Marxists take into account the need for a cultural revolution that would "recover in its original force the theoretical elan toward the universal and achieve it practically in a universal human community. . . ."[73] This was the same notion that was called in the 1960s the realization of philosophy.  Lefebvre already had the germ of an existential Marxism, stressing the need for a "method of precise comprehension of the possible," in which "romanticism" was "useful." Even in the 1930s, Marxism for him was a form of humanism that did not "fix" human reality into an "eternally present" essence.  The chief concern of Marxism was not with the economic structure but with "revolutionary consciousness." La Conscience mystifiée, written amidst the struggle against fascism, did not take the concepts of the young Marx very far but simply restated them in relation to present events.

Critique de la vie quotidienne: introduction was more a document in the rediscovery of Marx's concept of alienation than a departure from Marx toward a new concept of daily life.[74]  It tasted of the Resistance spirit of national renovation, based on a traditional image of French politics and society.  In the Introduction Marx's philosophy of alienation was seen as already presenting a fully developed concept of daily life.[75] Lefebvre coined the concept only to remind Marxists that the revolution required a transformation of

 73 La Conscience mystifiée, 50, 127, 22.
  74 Cf. E. Mounier's favorable review in Esprit, 16:148 (Sept., 1948) 423-26.
  75 Critique, I(Paris: Grasset, 1947) reprinted (Paris:  L'ârche, 1958) 160.

243
 

consciousness that depended on the material base of daily life.  The concept of daily life was to be distinguished from the regions of experience invoked by romantics and surrealists in art and existentialists in philosophy.  The significance of daily life was that it alone was a measure of the progress of the dialectic of alienation and human becoming.  Lefebvre announced that man would be fully human only when daily life became a festival.  For an example of daily life as a festival, he romantically invoked Ancient Greece during its holidays, when repressive norms were forgotten and "tout est permis." Under capitalism daily life was characterized by alienation, fetishism, and the lack of human satisfaction.  This was still a very abstract analysis that did not concretely touch the core structures of the quotidian.

     (2) The Concept of Modernity

In the second and third volumes of his study of daily life Lefebvre situated daily life in a fresh social theory of modernity.  History had not gone according to Karl Marx's timetable; socialist revolutions had occurred in underdeveloped societies serving only as a vehicle of modernization.  In the West, consequently, "the whole structure defined by Marx a hundred years ago is collapsing for want of a revolution that would have sustained and furthered the 'human totality.' " [76] Some trends noticed by Marx were continuing: the socialization of society, the integration of the planet, the concentration of wealth. On the other hand, monopoly capitalism had replaced competitive capitalism; superstructure and base interpenetrated each other and lost their distinct outlines; old social classes had been transformed; new ideological structures and modes of alienation had arisen.  Technological alienation was common to capitalist and socialist countries alike.  The old proletariat, no longer immediately revolutionary in any sense, was being progressively depoliticized; its economic demands bad lost their

76 Everyday Life in the Modern World, 70.

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political character; threatened by automation, workers sought stability of employment first; their needs resembled, more and more, those of the petty bourgeoisie.  With new abundance of material goods, new scarcities--of space and of desire--emerged, and "the center of interest" had been displaced from work toward leisure and the family.  New groups, bearing new forms of alienation, bad emerged--white-collar workers, women, young people--who might become part of a new radical force, though they did not constitute social classes.  Capitalism had attempted to "integrate" the classical working class and had partially succeeded.  By 1967 Lefebvre stated flatly that the working class no longer had revolutionary aims.  Yet the proletariat had not vanished as the liberals claimed: on the contrary, its condition of powerlessness had been generalized and regrouped into a new working class. [77]

If one adds to these social changes imperialism and the World Wars, one has blended a new social reality, the age of modernity.  Lefebvre, still considering himself a Marxist, was no longer certain of the cliches of the past, no longer "convinced about an absolute end to alienation." The new world of modernity was not, for him, a unified social formation, but a transitional period toward eventual revolution.  Only in 1968 did he have a clear enough sense of this society to give it a name, "the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption."[78] However organized this society pretended to be, it lacked a unifying direction, a true integration, a style. The emergence of daily life went band in hand with the disintegration of style, the aesthetic unification of the most trivial acts into a meaningful cultural whole.  Even the working class of the nineteenth century, with its burden of toil and poverty, retained a style.  Modem daily life stood between boredom and the rebirth of style into a festival, a gathering together "of culture's scat-

 77 Position, 107; Everyday Life, 59.
 78 Everyday Life, 68-109.

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tered fragments for a transfiguration of everyday life."[79] Returning to his infatuation with surrealism in the 1920s, Lefebvre took his concept of style from the Internationale léttriste, a more recent form of anti-conformist romanticism interested in iconoclastic posturing, not in politics.

Since the turn of the century, there had occurred a "chute des réferentiels," a collapse of old social and intellectual reference points, without any replacement.  Groping hesitantly for a concept that would distinguish the strange new world of 1960 from the past, Lefebvre pointed to the lack of social coherence in modernity.  Older societies engaged everyone in a common culture, while modernity privatized the masses.  Hence the unique contradiction of modernity: on the one hand, the progress of technology led to the organized socialization of all experiences; on the other, a new type of existence, daily life, emerged and stagnated outside the general movement of history.  People were at once organized into activities that were complex and controlled; yet in these activities they were totally unaware of themselves as social, public beings.

     (3) Daily Life Revisited

In the second volume of the Critique (1961), Lefebvre broke from Marx's tutelage and elaborated the idea of daily life beyond the general bounds of the concept of alienation.  Although the second volume was a proliferation of categories that approached incoherence, a working definition of daily life was presented along with the main themes and methods for empirical research.

Negatively, daily life was non-work experience, life outside the means of production.  In the Marxist framework, daily life was situated at the frontiers between the base and the superstructure, considerably revising the central distinction of historical materialism.  The region of daily life was placed at a blind spot of old Marxism where

79 Gombin, op. cit., 79.

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praxis did not a ply: it was "the region of the appropriation by man . . .of his own nature," [80] or poesis.  Abandoning the Marxist image of society as structures resting on a base, Lefebvre termed daily life a "level," suggesting a polyvalent image, with each level having its own significance.  The level of daily life was now more prominent than the place of production because it was there that "the human" was "discovered" and "created." In the twentieth century daily life was penetrated by technical objects to an unprecedented degree, but it was also, the point of the negation of capitalism.  The privatized realm of daily life, where the masses made their most fateful choices, was essentially free, autonomous, ungoverned, and uncontrolled, regardless of the efforts of bureaucratic capitalism.  Lefebvre's daily life replaced Marx's work-place as the vulnerable heart of society, the point where human will could choose revolution, where new types of alienation were most oppressive and blatant.

With daily life as the organizing concept, Lefebvre could discover historical tensions that were not named by previous Marxists.  Daily life was characterized by boredom and passivity, wherein the masses viewed their society as a "spectacle." What maintained the precarious balance between the masses' passivity and their dutiful, punctual, if apathetic, performance of their functions was the role of new commodities and the mass media in their lives.  The automobile privatized life; the TV, radio, and newspapers pacified it.  The new commodities, different from the fetishes described by Marx, who thought of -them primarily within their circulation from production to sale, articulated a whole structure of meanings that intensified alienation.

Confronting the world of consumerism, Marcuse and the Frankfurt School had turned to psychoanalysis to grasp the libidinal quality of commodities as substitute

 80 Critique, II, 51, 336.

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gratifications of Eros.[81] Lefebvre looked instead to their linguistic significance.  What characterized daily life in modernity was the increasing predominance of signals over signs and images over symbols.  The basic social interaction in daily life was that between the isolated consumer and the isolated object of consumption.  Consumer commodities were essentially signals whose meaning was self-contained.  The semiotic field of daily life reduced the consumer to reflexes, automatic responses, i.e., to passivity.  The traffic signal, with its simple but inexorable code, was the paradigm of communication in daily life: stop, go--commands without any space for interrogation, much less refusal.  Like gadgets whose functions are built into their structure, offering no options to the operator, messages in the mass media are organized to wipe out the receiver's independence and judgment. Advertisements promised self-realization through consumption, like an After-Shave advertisement showing a vibrant youth on a

81 There were obvious similarities between Marcuse's one-dimensional society and Lefebvre's daily life; also, their similar roles as theorists of the New Left.  Lefebvre acknowledged the affinity but criticized Marcuse for finding no negation parallel to his own concept of daily life.  Marcuse's role, by the way, in the development of existential Marxism in France was notable.  The first full study of Marcuse's thought in French appeared only after the upheaval of May, 1968: J. M. Palmier, Sur Marcuse (Paris, 1968).  And the first journal to devote an entire issue to Marcuse did not come out until 1969 and was able to entitle its issue, "Marcuse, cet inconnu," La Nef, 36 (Jan-March, 1969) with articles by Lefebvre, Goldmann, and others. Nevertheless, it was the existential Marxists of the Arguments group who pioneered the reading of Marcuse in France with their translations of Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, and An Essay on Liberation, all of which appeared in the collection Arguments.

The Arguments group was interested in another leader of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, who was translated in the journal in 1959.  Nevertheless, extensive translating of Frankfurt School works did not come until the early 1970s.  A systematic comparison of the two groups is beyond the scope of this study.  Nevertheless, the following three themes would be central: the Frankfurt School's concept of critical theory and the concept of planetary thought of the Arguments group; each group's treatment of superstructural elements, such as art, communication, and so forth; finally, a comparison between Marcuse's concept of one-dimensional society and Lefebvre's concept of everyday life.

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sailboat, with the caption: "A real man's life is marvelous!  It's truly marvelous to find every morning the tonic freshness of your After-Shave. . . . "[82] This advertisement was a signal image unifying signifiers (the beautiful man, the boat, After-Shave) with signifieds (self-realization) that could be gobbled up in one act of consumption.  Then, too, there was the negative threat of the advertisement, its "terrorism": "Use this After-Shave, or you will be nobody and know it." An incredible reversal occurs in which the object is active and the subject is passive in the interaction.  With signs, the subject had some degree of freedom to connect the signifier to the signified in a synthetic appropriation of meaning.  When symbols structured communication, there was still more meaning because the symbol had a value in itself, not merely referring to the signified object.  Signals offered none of these advantages.  Moreover, in daily life, signals were communicated in isolation, detotalizing the semantic experience.

In daily life, Lefebvre asserted, the masses endured a tension between two types of time.  In peasant society, cyclical time, associated with nature, was culturally dominant.  Industrial societies generated a new, cumulative time, linear and progressive, based on mechanical objects that lost the previous rhythmic quality.  Although cumulative time penetrated everywhere, daily life still required the time of reproduction of life, the continuous effort of its recreation.  Here was the spot where revolutionary action could always interrupt the routine.  "Everyday life is . . . the time of desire," of spontaneous renewal. [83]

Lefebvre's discussion of temporality in daily life resembled that of Georges Friedmann, an independent Marxist sociologist of work, who distinguished between a "milieu naturel" of pre-machine societies and a "milieu technique" in which rhythms,

 82 Everyday Life, 106.
83 Everyday Life, 61, 182.

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time, sensibilities, values were all dominated by machines.[84] Friedmann's categories were too static and too objectified for Lefebvre, though they were both concerned with the organization of work in modernity. Friedmann's answer to his own question "Oû va le travail humain?" was, like Lefebvre's, "a disparaître." From visits to America, Friedmann also found that workers' "center of gravity" "was displaced from work to non-work," although his nostalgia for craftsmanship prevented him from envisioning the same radical possibilities as Lefebvre for a society beyond work, a post-industrial festival of daily life.  In the second articulation of the concept of daily life, Lefebvre began to outline the central categories of a new Marxist sociology.

     (4) Language and Daily Life

Two books in the mid-1960s, Le Langage et la société (1966) and Position: contre les technocrates (1967), developed the theory of signals from the 1961 Critique.  Now Lefebvre sought to incorporate information theory, linguistics, cybernetics, game theory, and structuralism while exposing their ideological aspects.  In these recent trends, language was a new principle of intelligibility, discarding older concepts of substance and subject.  Lefebvre rejected the reductionism of the structuralists, their flight from history, their refusal to see language in the context of social action.  The linguists and structuralists, as he saw them, posed as neutral scientists who refused to set criteria of good and bad communications.  Hence, Lefebvre called them technocrats. [85]

Like all other human phenomena, language, for Lefebvre, was a work (oeuvre) of poesis, a creation and appropriation of meaning by man in an historico-social situation.

  84 G. Friedmann, Sept études sur l'homme et la technique (Paris 1966) and Oû va le travail humain? (Paris, 1950) 3rd ed., 1963.
  85 Critique, II, 348; Le Langage et la société, 35.  Lefebvre continued his critique of structuralism in articles through the 1960s, which were collected in Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris, 1971).

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Language was an essential expression of the subject.  Agreeing with Heidegger that language was either authentic or inauthentic, he set the spoken word (la parole) as the ideal of expression between equal men in a totally democratic situation.  From this standard, he looked at the evolution of communication to locate the structures that mutilated the ideal.

La Belle époque witnessed the already mentioned "chute des réferentiels," the core of absolute meanings dissolved: Newtonian absolute time and space and perspective line in painting all vanished, relations of production became bidden, ideas were "desubstantialized." Since then, the increasing disengagement of language from "the practico-sensible referential" drove communication toward non-sense and the absurd.  This process began mildly during the Renaissance with the birth of a commodity economy.

The commodity was, for Lefebvre, as for Marx, a form of exchange and communication though a particularly poor form because, with the mechanism of price and money, commodities detached both their "content" (the labor that went into them) and their "signified" (the need they were to fulfill) from the exchange interaction.  The buyer and the seller saw only the price: "The look plunges into the signifier (price) in a pure obsessive state. . . ." [86] Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities was thus translated by Lefebvre into linguistic terms.  With the dominance of a commodity economy, "chains of signifiers" were disconnected from "signifieds," yielding "a strange form of unconsciousness" in society.

In such a context, things had a self-contained existence.  When technology made abundance possible, it was easy for advertisers to invest commodities with images of satisfaction that did not reflect use value.  Words were replaced by images with the spread of mass media.  These images, of sexual virility, popularity, etc., were in the form of signals so that they pacified the consumers.  In their cars and in front of their

 86 Le Langage et la société, 345-346.

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televisions, consumers were bombarded with mystifying information in deeply alienated social relations.  The social world fragmented into a plethora of semiotic subsystems, like the world of high fashion, as discussed by Barthes in Système de la mode, with no cross-references or unification.  Integrated by the state and by corporate bureaucracies, everyday life at the same time completely fragmented.  The outcome was paradoxical: "loneliness in the midst of overcrowding, lack of communication in a proliferation of signs and information. . . . "[87] Daily life was a linguistic "zero point" where isolated, disconnected signs made their appearance, having only a displaced unity at the distant point of their invention.

The invention of the institution of writing (écriture) further detached communication from the personal, direct expression of la parole.  Writing was a form of "violence, terrorism, and domination,"[88] a one-way form of communication that enabled the ruling class to mystify its power through propaganda.  Lefebvre's preference for la parole over l'écriture, however, was riddled with difficulties.  To a critic of Lefebvre's position, like Derrida, for example, the celebration of la parole required a false identity of meaning and sign and, ultimately, an impossible metaphysics in which the absolute "presence" of both was asserted.  The utopia of la parole suppressed the absence, the gap, la brisure, between sign and meaning.  To Derrida, la parole was itself a form of l'écriture because it connected meaning and sign only through a system of differences, an articulated language.[89] The chances for miscommunication were no greater in written than in oral languages.

For Lefebvre, the signal, the commodity, the image, and writing all worked their deteriorating effects on communication in the context of the chute des réferentiels in which society had no common horizon of meaning.  No wonder that the working class

 87 Everyday Life, 185.
 88 Position, 50-52.
89 De La Grammatologie (Paris, 1967).

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had lost its sense of historical direction.  Lefebvre could now illuminate the demise of the proletariat in light of a consumer society, with organized domination through language:

What happened?  How can one expropriate the working class,
steal its objectives from it, its goals, its meaning?  A gigantic substitution
has taken place.  For work and for the worker as subject (individual and
collective) the consumer has been substituted who is no longer a subject
but a place, that of consumption.  Who speaks?  The one who teaches
consumption, the advertiser, the organizer of the everyday, the one who
initiates the coincidence of the image and the situation, between the ideal
and the real.  To whom does one speak?  To the consumer.  To his ideal.
When one speaks "to me" it is not to me but to the possible consumer, the
ideal. . . . To what end?  To consolidate a society still poorly defined, in
danger, in question, where the ruling classes . . . seek to reinforce the
integrative capacity that they had under competitive capitalism.[90]

 90 Position, 107.

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     The role of structuralism in the process was clear to Lefebvre.  Its basic proclamation of the end of man, the denial of the human subject, was no more than an ideological legitimization of the newest form of alienation.  The "anti-humanism" of Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser reflected the new situation in which the working class no longer saw its historical mission and the bourgeois ego was no longer integrated, autonomous, and self-conscious.  When structuralists announced that kinship systems, languages, and epistemologies were structures without subjects, they did not look for the alienation of the subject, his loss of control through direct or indirect class conflict, but simply proclaimed the givenness of their finding.  Lefebvre granted that the unconsciousness of history, the absence of a subject, made a philosophical anthropology very difficult.  To move from these facts to the theoretical demonstration of the necessity of the subject's absence, as structuralists did, was an ideological mystification par excellence, even if this result was not intended by them.  Lefebvre attempted to reformulate a socio-historical theory of the subject without ontologizing it, one of the main concerns of existential Marxism:

. . . it is not necessary to sacrifice the "subject." From philosophy we
detach the concept of the subject in order to transform it.  It doubles.  On
one side, we have social subjects, groups and classes.  On the other, we have
sociological agents, capable of elaboration and putting into action economic,
political and military strategies.  Society cannot be defined as a subject but as
an ensemble of social subjects (not without lacunae) and a network of socio-
logical agents (not without lapses).[91]

This double determination of social subjects and sociological agents was nothing but Merleau-Ponty's concept of ambiguity and Sartre's individual as both subject and object,

  91 Ibid., l00.

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albeit transferred from ontological to social terms.

     (5) The Festival of Daily Life

La Vie quotidienne dans la monde moderne (1968) summarized and integrated the studies of the 1960s, formulating a program of action.  Slogans were invented: "Technology in the service of daily life!" and "automation" on the economic level; the abolition of the state and self-administration on the political level; "Let daily life become a work of art!",  sexual and urban reform and "the festival rediscovered" on the cultural plane.[92] Daily life would include the tone of desire (from Mascolo), la parole (from linguistics), satisfaction (from Chatelet), poesis (from Heidegger), play (from Sartre and Axelos)--all suggesting the vision of Charles Fourier. [93] This utopianism was not another eschatology to Lefebvre since the projected "new life" was based on existing technical capacities, a careful dialectical and sociological analysis of the alienations of daily life, and a program for change.  There was to be a "democratic regrouping" of the Left, not another "government of the Left" that would only strengthen the state," rather a "de-structuring period" that aimed at "decentralization" allowing "new social forces to develop." Were it not for the events of May, 1968, one might be tempted to conclude that Lefebvre was a visionary romantic.

The festival of daily life hinged on the fate of "urbanism." In his theory of industrialization, Marx had not seen that the process of urbanization was not reducible to the economy.  In fact, the urban environment contained the most profound potentials of modernity: in the city, "creation of creations," "everyday life would become a creation

 92 Everyday Life in the Modern World, 194-206.
  93 Cf. Position, 40, Critique, II, 289, Introduction a la modernité, 77 for Lefebvre's statement of his debt to Fourier.  For an appropriate sample of Fourier's texts, cf., Mark Poster, ed., Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of C. Fourier (N.Y., 1971).

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(poesis not praxis) of which each citizen and each community would be capable." [94] The negative model of society, the spectacle of daily life, was the new city Mourenx, where all the alienations of daily life congealed in a singular sterility.  Urbanism, on the other hand, concretized the program of the festival into the poesis of creating new situations from desire.  Mourenx was planned to be totally functional, eliminating from the environment places of spontaneous encounter that were the hallmark of older cities.  Hence, Mourenx suffered from the nemesis of daily life, boredom.  Diverse social phenomena such as promiscuity and the presence of children, which in some settings made for rich experience, in Mourenx only inhibited sociability.

Yet Mourenx also demonstrated the power of daily life as the place of self-creation.  Mourenx was inhabited by the new working class who showed "a remarkable and profound aspiration for democracy in urban life, for the self-managed activity of the collectivity, for a socialization--directed against statism and centralized bureaucracy--including concrete liberties."[95] Subject to the most advanced automation of the workplace, the new working class no longer worked collectively, no longer operated with tools, no longer handled raw materials directly; its work was the "non-work" of the control and surveillance of machines.  The new workers did not repeat the "passivity, indifference, and corruption" of the old syndicalist "worker aristocracy." Instead they shifted the center of their concern to the city, to daily life, where they struggled with the self-consciousness of an emergent social class actively to control their environment and their lives, to have life become a festival of spontaneous, free encounters.  Nothing less than the fate of modernity was at stake in the struggle of the new working class to de-

  94 "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," op. cit., 104; Position, 48; Le Droit à la ville (Paris, 1968); La Révolution urbaine (Paris, 1970); Everyday Life, 135.
  95 "Les Nouveaux ensembles urbains," Revue française de sociologie, 1:2 (April-June, 1960) 200.  Cf.  Introduction à la modemité, 121-130.

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fine itself as a self-determining class.  A new urbanism was already in the process of birth.  Prophetically, one year before the explosion of May, Lefebvre asserted that the terrorism and over-repression of daily life could not long be sustained.

Lefebvre's vision of the festival resonated loudly among young radicals like Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle [96] and Raoul Vaneigem in Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations, both of the Internationale situationniste (1958-    ) group.  Their strategy of interrupting the routines of daily life with guerrilla theatre in order to "create situations" was traceable to Lefebvre, although they asserted that he also took much from them.  Another New Left group influenced by him was Noir et rouge (1956-), with its theory of workers councils as the model revolutionary organization. [97] In addition, a student journal from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Saint-Cloud, Aléthéia (1964-1967), reflected Lefebvre's theme of the need for a cultural revolution.  It published Heidegger and Marcuse in translation as well as Axelos and Chatelet.  Lefebvre's existential Marxism was thus a direct stimulus to a new radicalism that was geared to advanced capitalist society.

     d. Lefebvre and Sartre

Lefebvre's metaphilosophy of daily life was dependent upon Sartre's thought.  The parallels between the two were striking.  Metaphilosophy was explicitly a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism: "If we adopt the Hegelian and Marxist trend that is, the realization of the rational through philosophy, a critical theory of everyday life ensues;

  96 Trans. in Radical America, 4:5 (Fall, 1970) originally (Paris, 1967).  For Lefebvre's comments on the group cf., Critique, II, 17; Introduction à la modernité, 336; Position, 195 and Gombin, op. cit., 84-98.
  97 Gombin, op. cit., 127-151.

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if we adopt the Nietzschean theory of values . . . a constructive theory of everyday life emerges.  This is -the first step."[98]  Let us not forget that in Being and Nothingness Sartre initiated a philosophy of everyday life, locating it, exactly as did Lefebvre, as the place of re-creation.

In the 1960s, Lefebvre time and again turned to Sartre to agree or to modify his positions, elevating him as the major figure in contemporary philosophy.[99] Lefebvre now incorporated many aspects of Being and Nothingness and Critique directly.  Sartre was the first to mount a serious criticism of Stalinist philosophy; he "pulled no punches" by stating "what too many people thought and said only too quietly." [100]  What is more, Sartre's master, Husserl, was the first to notice and adopt as a problem the crisis of philosophy in technological society.[101] Changing his opinion from the 1940s, Lefebvre even agreed with Sartre that Engels' notion of an objective dialectic of nature was wrong.  His borrowings from Sartre were considerable: from the Critique, the idea that there were two kinds of thought, analytical and dialectical, and the dramatization of the concept of totality into totalizations and totalizing activities of the subject; from Being and Nothingness, the concepts of engagement, the situation, revolution as a "choice of oneself," the appropriation of "possibility" through a "project," inauthenticity as a critical concept, and a concept of "creative freedom." [102]

Lefebvre's reservations about existentialism were no longer those of the 1940s when Sartre was dismissed as an idealist; now Sartre made errors that could be corrected

  98 Everyday Life in the Modern World, 15.
  99 Critique, II, 30, 71, 187, 197, 213, 252-254, 256, 349; Position, 126, 145, 181-182; Introduction à la modernité, 363; Métaphilosophie, 77-90--these are merely selected examples.
  100 "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," op. cit., 57, 132, l35, La Somme et le reste, 81.
 101 La Somme et le reste, 135.
 102 Critique, II, 30, 46, 213, 252-254, 256; Critique I, 198; Position, 181.

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without destroying his overall thought.  His errors were that he did not pose the question of the realization of philosophy: his thought was still ontological and speculative; his concept of action was only a "doing" that omitted the oeuvre or object; he had still not "recovered the historical"; and his idea of freedom stemmed "too much from consciousness." [103]

These weaknesses of Sartre's existential Marxism did not deter Lefebvre from using it in his own work.  In a study of the bourgeoisie, be applied Sartre's existential phenomenology to a social class with such affinity to Being and Nothingness that it could have been appended to Sartre's book. [104] The bourgeois created his being only through having, through merit, leaving in permanent question a split between his mere appearance as a bourgeois and his being a bourgeois in essence, the way an aristocrat was always an aristocrat.  The fissure between being and having evoked the problem of morality for the bourgeois and led him to his original project of trying to be distinctive:

With the analysis of distinction we reach the quintessence of bourgeois
consciousness.  The bourgeois distinguishes; he sees far and clear; he
calculates; he reckons, he reasons.  He isolates.  He divides work,
individuals, groups, activities and realities.  He dichotomizes, atomizes
in all domains . . . Bourgeois thought always functions in the mode of
distinction and separation; it is analytic understanding. . . . At the same
time, the bourgeois wishes to be distinguished.  The concept of distinction
. . . denotes bourgeois subjectivity and the objective activity of the bourgeois.
It is a way of being.105

 103 Position, 182.
  104"Changements dans les attitudes morales de la bourgeoisie," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 31 (July-Dec., 1961) 26-27.  In fact, Lefebvre's phenomenological study of the bourgeoisie was no more than an amplification of Sartre's treatment of it in his Critique, 717-721.
 105 Ibid., 29.

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of Sartre's existentialism.

Like Sartre, Lefebvre read the present as a technological world, an automated world where the question of producing things, of conquering nature--in short, of working--was replaced by the work of self-creation.  The prime question concerned the superstructure: would the new working class recognize in itself the problem of the realization of philosophy?  Would it see its problem as one of authentic self-creation in the context of collective action and in the situation of urbanism?  Basically, what separated the two existential Marxists now was their personal, moral visions: Lefebvre was always the optimist, anticipating utopian possibilities; Sartre remained the eternal stoic, resisting the temptations of hope, refusing to sketch the lines of the future, preferring to capture the self-deceptions and illusions of the present.  Lefebvre and Sartre, each in his own way, were prophets of May, 1968.  Yet it must be noted that Lefebvre and the Arguments group in general were not generous toward Sartre, and the two major forms of existential Marxism remained isolated from each other.

8. The Question of Freud

The enormous impact of Freud's thought on the twentieth century eventually forced the French to give up their resistance to him.  Henri Lefebvre was probably the first French philosopher to read Freud seriously.  But he did so only during his brief interest in surrealism in the 1920s.  By the 1960s it bad been demonstrated clearly enough that Freud's thought was rich with potentials for explaining aspects of ideology--like the stubborn endurance of traditions and the tendency for lower classes to defer willingly to ruling classes -which were beyond the scope of Marxist theory.  As theory and as practice, Freudianism posed a challenge to all doctrines, but especially to Marxism.  The

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apparent meaning of Freudian psychology undercut the argument for social revolution, deflecting energies into individual readjustment.  A few heretics in the Marxist camp, like Wilhelm Reich and later Herbert Marcuse, denied the conservative image of Freud, making him a cultural revolutionary who advocated the, end of sexual repression and the authoritarian bourgeois family.  In France, the Arguments group was among the first Marxists to answer the Freudian challenge.  Arguments translated Marcuse's treatise on Freudo-Marxism, and published Georges Lapassade's L'Entrée dans la vie and Joseph Gabel's La Fausse conscience: essai sur la réification.  Hence it was the Arguments group that initiated the turn to the question of desire in social thought, the issue of a radical concept of libidinal economy that has been enormously popular in France since the mid-1960s.  The other main line of French Freudian interpretation, that of Jacques Lacan, who was unknown in Marxist circles until the mid-1960s, will be treated later in the chapter on structuralism.

I have chosen to discuss the study by Joseph Gabel rather than Lapassade because he best exemplifies a synthesis of psychological concepts with the question of the dialectic.  Gabel, who studied with Minkowski and Mannheim, reconciled Marxism and psychology by testing the parallels between the concept of reification, developed by Lukacs and Goldmann, with the psychological category of schizophrenia.[106] The Marxist concepts of dialectic and alienation were the categories that encompassed psychological reality.[107] The modes of alienation within the superstructure that Marx articulated (ideology, false consciousness, reification, fetishism) were analogous to the mental distortions revealed by psychologists.  The common denominator rested with

  106 Cf. also, Joseph Gabel, "La Réification: essai d'une psychopathologie de la pensée dialectique," Esprit, 10 (1951) 459-482.
  107 La Fausse conscience (Paris, 1962) 37.  English trans. in preparation.

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the anti-dialectical nature of both pathologies.  Drawing upon an enormous mass of psychological documentation, Gabel argued that reification and schizophrenia diverged from the dialectic in the same way.  False consciousness displayed the traits of schizophrenia, and schizophrenia, especially in Minkowski's definition, resembled reification.

The dialectic was seen as the basis of an axiology, a theory of the structure of values, demarcating the authentic and the inauthentic experience of values.  Alienated modes of thought all presented values spatially, de-vitalizing them, denying their temporal qualities, their openness to the future; studies of schizophrenic patients revealed the same spatializing qualities in their thought.  Melancholics, hysterics, psychotics--all the major types of abnormality--demonstrated the same de-realization or de-temporalization of experience.

It is important for our concern with existential Marxism to note that Gabel regarded the existential psychologies of Binzwanger (a Heideggerian) and Sartre as particularly close to Marxism.  In fact, he stated that existentialism was not a "romantic rebellion against reason" but a "dialectical reaction against depersonalization" in contemporary society.[108] Sartre's existentialism, stressing the temporal quality of consciousness, was fully dialectical and completely assimilable by Marxism.  "The thought of the existentialist school represents . . . a reaction against schizophrenization, anti-dialectic in collective consciousness and false consciousness."[109]

Gabel's conclusion matched the concern of the Arguments group for a Marxist theory of the superstructure:

The concept of morbid rationalism shows the preponderance of the spatializing-
reifying aspect of the seizure of the real--to the detriment of its temporalizing-
historical aspect-and is the common denominator of the various forms of econ-
omic and political alienation. . . . Moreover, the expression par excellence of non-

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dialectical consciousness (reified and unaxiological), morbid rational-
ism, appears as the schizophrenic type . . . . [110]

The Arguments group developed an existential Marxism by reworking the advances of the 1940s.  Hegel's dialectic of consciousness was preserved and transcended (aufgeheben) in Axelos' planetary thought, Lefebvre's metaphilosophy, Fougeyrollas' dialectic of contradiction and totality, Chatelet's empirical satisfaction.  Marx's concept of alienated labor was placed in an open totality, with, new modes of alienation uncovered, the autonomy of the superstructure maintained, and a concession that some alienation was irreducible.  Sartre's concept of freedom became social and historical with the concept of self-creation in an urban situation.  In sum, the theory of the Arguments group contained a self-imposed incompleteness, demanding that thought be kept open so that it could be related to practice.  Their theories preserved the necessary incompleteness of Marxist thought, refusing to become a closed, rational system.  The ultimate verification of the thought of the Arguments group lay with the action of people, who would or would not demonstrate its anthropology in fact.  The Arguments group had brought existential Marxism into being as a critical social theory that defined the needs of thought through the needs of human emancipation, that connected truth to being through the mediation of social transformation.

110 Ibid., 239.
111 Ibid., 73.
 
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