>
>        First of all, I don't think Chomsky's talks with Piaget were a
>"debate"; Chomsky claims that Harvard packaged his conversation with
>Piaget as a "debate" to sell copies. It was more like a discussion.
>        I'm surprised you mentioned Lefebvre; I've always been intrigued
by his
>ideas and, yes, I would enjoy hearing much more from him than it seems
>one is able to find nowadays. Has anybody else here read anything by
>Lefebvre, and can you recommend any English translations of his works? I
>have been interested with this ex-leader and theorist of the French
>Communist party since I read Greil Marcus's wonderful accounts of his
>ideas in the enlightening book _Lipstick_Traces_. Greil Marcus writes:
>
>        "[Lefebvre felt that] Instead of examining institutions and classes,
>         structures of economic production and social control, one had to
>         think about 'moments' -- moments of love, hate, poetry,
>         frustration, action, surrender, delight, humiliation, justice,
>         cruelty, resignation, surprise, disgust, resentment, self-loathing,
>         pity, fury, peace of mind -- those tiny epiphanies, Lefebvre said,
>         in which the absolute possibilities and temporal limits of anyone's
>         existence were revealed. The richness or poverty of any social
>         formation could be judged only on the terms of these evanescences;
>         they passed out of consciousness as if they had never been, but in
>         their instants they contained the whole of life.
>                                        .   .   .   .   .   .   .
>         But if those moments could be given a language, a political
>         language, they could form the basis for entirely new demands on
>         the social order. What if one said no to boredom, and demanded sur-
>         prise, not for a moment, but as a social formation?"
>                                        [_Lipstick_Traces_, pgs. 144-145]
>
>This, in my opinion, is where Postmodernism begins to come to play on
>sociopolitical revolutionary theory -- and Chomsky has said he does not
>think highly of the French Postmodernists (according to Barsky's book),
>which I feel is a shame. Is Lefebvre still alive? What is he doing?
>
>                                        --Brian
>                                        mailto:[log in to unmask]
>
> There is a wonderful book by Lefebvre called the Production of Space but
I am no position to judge the quality of the translation.This book and
others formed the basis of a fairly sophisticated Marxist sociology
concerned with "everyday life".Lefebvre, I think,  broke with PCF in the
late 50's but  always remained a Marxist.

From my very limited reading of Lefebvre I would say he has been very
influential and certainly not only with "post-modern philosophers".There
are obvious parallels with some of the ideas about the revolution of
everyday life advocated by the Situationists (I'm sure that is the sort of
intellectual geneology that Greil Marcus was probably tracing anyway).As
far as i know he reproduced some of their ideas as well resulting in a
series of denunciations from Guy Debord.

One could also point to the work of the Marxist geographer David Harvey as
being indebted to Lefebvre.Harvey's "the condition of postmodernity" is an
interesting analysis of the experience of space/time in the late twentieth
century.I would be surprised if Fredric Jameson's work owes something to
Lefebvre's.

As an aside "french post-modernism" is a broad church which includes some
extremely reactionary ideologues who are enemies of emancipatory politics
so perhaps Chomsky's reluctance to endorse their ideas is well based.Mind
you there are a number of thinkers who are commonly labelled postmodernists
who undoubtedly have stimulating and useful things to say.

Anyway,Ya Basta for now.

Fergal