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ix PREFACE The Personal and the Political A Different Kind of Blue The late Herbert Muschamp, onetime columnist at the New York Times, once suggested my and Henri Lefebvre’s work on the city sprang from a variation of what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called “the depressive position.” Muschamp was one of America’s most influential (and controversial) architectural critics, a brilliant, exuberant urban commentator, a chip off Lefebvre’s own block. He and I became friends in 2002, around the time of the publication of my books Metromarxism and Dialectical Urbanism, although after I’d relocated to France it was more often a fellow-traveler kind of thing, a friendship across a divide of water, ideology, and time. When I asked Muschamp to write a foreword to my book on Lefebvre, he happily complied. It was in that foreword that he embarrassingly threw me into the same bag as our greatest philosopher of the city, the French Marxist Lefebvre. Muschamp died from lung cancer in 2007. He was fifty-nine. His death created a gaping hole in U.S. urbanism. A rare voice was silenced, a cosmopolitan and romantic voice for whom the city meant, above all, freedom—political and sexual freedom.1 Muschamp was pained whenever he saw those freedoms taken away. He loved New York yet wasn’t afraid to condemn the city, to correct popular misconceptions: that it was an island off an island, imagining itself a liberal stronghold when, Muschamp insisted, the record strongly indicated the reverse. New York had given us Rudolph Giuliani’s chronic hostility toward the First Amendment; fake premodern architecture and other monstrosities “designed” to make land pay; new magazines featuring cover stories on assorted religious crazies; and a host of other Red State (Republican) backlashes against 1960s sensibilities. Muschamp never got over the jingoistic (and bottom-line) fiascoes of post-9/11 Ground Zero or the idiocies of the Bush years. His loss was personal for me as well, a loss of a supporter and source of inspiration. Yet when Muschamp was alive I’d never reflected too much on his allusion to Melanie Klein. I’d likely smiled or laughed when I first read it. Muschamp ’s writing could be fun as well as instructive in its humor, lighter touch, depth, and profundity. With hindsight and age, now that he’s gone, I can see x • preface he was right on both counts—right about me and Lefebvre. The city we hate is also the city we love. A sort of negative attachment gets played out; it is the business of the city, Muschamp said, to offer something for everyone to hate, “even to present itself as completely hateful to some people most of the time.”2 He’d spotted it in me, and he’d spotted it in Henri Lefebvre. Muschamp knew, as I did, that biography and criticism often meant disguised forms of autobiography , indirect ways to voice your own opinions through other people, through “authority figures.” My book Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction had been written in a Savoyard mountain village next to a huge slither of rock called Le Vuache in the pre-Alps. I’d quit New York a few years earlier, fled and downsized to the countryside where I thought I needed to be, where I thought I could draw breath and gather myself up again. I’d been pushed, of course, because of New York’s exorbitant cost of living, but I’d jumped, too, out of the city and even out of academia, making the leap by my own volition. Henri Lefebvre himself had spent his last years in a small Medieval town at the foot of the Pyrenees where he’d stomped around as a kid. Guy Debord likewise eloped from Paris, settling in a lost and lonely Auvergne, where he lived like a reclusive monk behind a high stone wall; he even developed a penchant for wearing traditional smock blouses. (I’d been fascinated by Debord’s wall and his fleeing from Paris in the 1970s, and I wrote a book about it that mirrored my own urban flight.) Lefebvre and Debord penned some of the most beautiful lines ever written about Paris; but they also laid into the city, its politicians and planners, its bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, doing so with a spleen that made Baudelaire seem mild-mannered. Here, then, was Klein’s (and Muschamp’s) depressive position thesis getting worked through, channeling itself dialectically. That depressive position was...

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