"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

On the one hand, we must strive to realize the communist ideal of a world that no longer treats people as things, albeit through pragmatic political action that “engages us, profoundly, dangerously, in the worldof things, of ‘useful relations,’ of ‘efficient’ works, in which we always risk losing ourselves”. On the other hand, we must nurture the noninstrumental relationships of our personal lives and protect them from the strategic calculations of the political sphere. This model of social relations, though it can as yet only be realized at the level of private life, constitutes an indispensable expression of “communist generosity”  As we have seen, this generosity, which consists in the ecstatic relation to otherness, grounds Blanchot’s theory of community.The injunction to live these two irreconcilable lives—the private and the political—clearly informed Blanchot’s own practices. Emphatic in his theoretical work about the necessity of privacy to noninstrumental social relations and vigilant in protecting his personal privacy, Blanchot nonetheless committed himself publicly to a number of political projects [...] (p.72)

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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