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133 I n an interview in 1970 Lefebvre recalled a 1943 conversation in Aix-de-Provence with Léon Brunschvicg, his former professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Commenting on the news of the German offensive on the Eastern Front, Brunschvicg conceived the battle of Stalingrad as a series of singular events in which a German soldier encounters a Soviet soldier and one kills the other one. This was consistent, argued Lefebvre, with Brunschvicg’s understanding of thinking as being about judgments, thus about singular things, rather than about universal concepts. Clearly, Brunschvicg’s view of the battle was not totally wrong, according to Lefebvre, who continued laughing, but he completely missed the level of strategy and the masses that make history something other than a chain of individual events.1 This conversation was not just about history but also about thinking in general , and it revealed Lefebvre’s persistent conviction about the necessity of universal concepts for the understanding of social reality, including the concept of space, which he took as the privileged perspective for an account of the “modern world.”2 How is this universality of space to be understood? Since space is itself socially produced and has historical conditions of existence, its universality can be conceived neither as a Platonic idea nor as a Kantian transcendental form of sensibility. Rather, Lefebvre argues that space is one of the universal forms of social practice, as commodity and labor are in the analysis of Marx.3 Like commodity and labor, space has a paradoxical quality of being at the same time, and in many ways, both “abstract” and “concrete”: space appears to be a general means, medium, and milieu of all social practices, and yet it allows accounting for their specificity within the society as a whole. This relationship between abstract and Critique Space as Concrete Abstraction 3 134 Critique concrete cannot be reduced to the familiar scheme of a concept and its exemplification : the universality of space is not simply a result of a conceptual abstraction that, following the Latin etymology of abstrahere, draws away or removes what is inessential, accidental, and contingent.4 Rather, space—just like commodity and labor—is a “social,” “real,” “actual,” or “concrete” abstraction; that is to say, its universality is produced by processes of an abstraction attributed to a range of social practices and reflected in the specific “abstract” experience of modern space. Lefebvre’s argument that space is a universal form of social practice belongs to the most fruitful parts of his theory, at the same time revealing its most fundamental tensions, which reflect those in the writings of Marx, his main guide in this argument. In particular, what comes to the fore in Lefebvre’s theory of concrete abstraction is the oscillation in Marx’s work between an attempt to deduce history from a single principle of social development and a retrospective analysis of historical conjunctions, overdetermined by a range of social practices. While the former perspective bears the mark of Hegel’s idealism, the latter defines a materialist approach: two currents that Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar distinguished in the work of Marx. For Lefebvre, these two currents can be bridged, and the concept of concrete abstraction is the main theoretical leverage in this attempt. While neither fully successful nor fully conclusive, this research program allowed him not only to develop a historical account of the space of capitalism but also to formulate the core concepts of his theory and his approach to spatial analysis.5 These philosophical references should not suggest that this chapter exchanges a conceptual speculation for the previously reconstructed understanding of the production of space and its triads from within Lefebvre’s rethinking of the research on dwelling. What I am aiming at here is less a philosophical genealogy of his work and more an interrogation of the position of empirical research within his general theory of space. In other—disciplinary—terms, I discuss Lefebvre’s attempt at a transdisciplinary theory of space, which is in excess over every specialized discipline but for which the theoretical, historical, and empirical studies developed within specific disciplinary fields and methodologies are indispensable .6 Such theory would not subscribe to a positivistic project of a synthesis of partial knowledges, but would aim at a production of the concept of space as an object of research by drawing from various disciplines and relating their results to one another and, through this, reconfiguring...

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