Henri Lefebvre’s Conception of Nature-Society in the Revolutionary Project of Autogestion

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/KAM.20.25550

Keywords:

Henri Lefebvre, autogestion, everyday life, nature-society mediation, metabolic rift

Abstract

Henri Lefebvre’s intricate material-dialectical approach to the nature-society problematic, taken together with his advocacy of a praxis oriented to total transformation from the ground up through autogestion, offers a unified, critical, and dialectical approach to political ecology. Unfortunately, his work in these areas has too often been interpreted as divided and fragmentary, splitting his radical analysis of the production of space-time from his critical praxis related to autogestion. We offer a corrective to this by elaborating briefly on his use of Marx’s material-dialectical approach, outlining how Lefebvre brings this method to bear on the nature-society problematic, and how his theorization of autogestion points to a radical praxis aimed at overcoming the social-ecological contradictions of capital. His engagement with Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, and his advocacy of a radical project of autogestion as part of the critique of everyday life, serve to place the underlying issue of alienation in spatial terms, offering geography a transformative perspective that avoids positing closed systems and attempting to exhaust the various meanings assigned to nature. In this, Lefebvre demonstrates how the nature-society problematic overflows issues of ontological framing and language, calling for a unity of radical theory and practice to overcome the separations.

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Published

2022-12-15

How to Cite

Napoletano, B., Urquijo, P., Clark, B., & Foster, J. B. (2022). Henri Lefebvre’s Conception of Nature-Society in the Revolutionary Project of Autogestion. Kamchatka. Revista De análisis Cultural., (20), 115–145. https://doi.org/10.7203/KAM.20.25550
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