"Totality and the Common: Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot on Everyday Life"

by Jen Hui Bon Hoa (2014)

Abstract

In Anglo-American scholarship, the everyday is often defined as that which escapes regimes of signification and bureaucratic regulation. Although Henri Lefebvre is generally cited as the principal theorist of everyday life, this definition is clearly modeled on Maurice Blanchot's ideas—which I argue are fundamentally at odds with Lefebvre's. This essay examines the disjunctions between Blanchot's ontological and Lefebvre's sociological approaches to everyday life, focusing on their discussions of community and the public sphere. Through this comparison, I identify two models of political resistance at stake in contemporary debates about community: one centered on elusiveness to authority and totalizing regimes of representation, and the other on solidarity and collective action.

Key Passage

For Blanchot, the problem with the Marxist hermeneutic is that it takes social values merely to be ideological expressions of material realities of production and scarcity. It thus reduces individuals to impersonal forces of labor and need, social relations to instrumentalizing transactions, and the ethical to the economic. In Mascolo’s approach to the communist project, however, Blanchot identifies a solution to the paradox of viewing human relationships as a realm purely of means, while striving toward the goal of freedom and equality. (p.71)

Keywords

Lefebvre. Blanchot, Everyday Life, Political Résistance, Community, Representation, Solidarity

Themes

On Blanchot

Links to Reference

• http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.88.2014.0054
• http://dx.doi.org/10.5749/culturalcritique.88.2014.0054
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.88.2014.0054?casa_token=S1-6_OMtoSgAAAAA:Cri3LPXtAN7ewV9pqsjk3TPo1bTGGGtzOgLC--AYxNPOx2YExp5I0EgkfNmpj-mTKQB0vfaHJ29AaOguTewK0wmMocREIUWqFEXdjQ8X5JqeLQv_2hE
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5749/culturalcritique.88.2014.0054.pdf?casa_token=vIfmh52v8VkAAAAA:MDQEz32FRM3oOpCHusAMKJzkZjDg-IUxrIPpSxGI_Q6uevsQ3nfLBk66MJ4CjrSsFoi65Y6Tl7ARFHSLAWfg6gudKxpfW3uwh16LfzPwZH2K30e_KpU

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