This work was published with the help of the French

      Ministry of Culture – Centre national du livre

      Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français

      chargé de la culture – Centre national du livre

      This English-language edition published by Verso 2020

      Originally published in French as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche: ou, le Royaume des ombres© Editions Casterman, 1975 Translation © David Fernbach 2020 Introduction © Stuart Elden 2020

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-373-1

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-694-7 (HB)

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       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Lefebvre, Henri, 1901-1991, author.

      Title: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or, The Realm of Shadows / Henri Lefebvre ; translated by David Fernbach ; introduction by Stuart Elden.

      Other titles: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. English

      Description: English-language edition. | Brooklyn : Verso Books, 2020. | Includes index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019001975| ISBN 9781788733731 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788736947 (hardback : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. | Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. | Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.

      Classification: LCC B2948 .L3513 2020 | DDC 193--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001975

      Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

      Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

      Contents

Three Stars, One Constellation: Introduction to Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche by Stuart Elden

1 Triads

       2 The Hegel File

       3 The Marx File

       4 The Nietzsche File

       Conclusion and Afterword

       Notes

       Index

      The system of logic is the kingdom of shadows … to dwell and work in this shadowy realm is the absolute cultivation and discipline of consciousness.

      – Hegel

      The spirit of theory, once it has won its inner freedom, tends to become practical energy: it leaves the realm of shadows and acts as will on outward material reality.

      – Marx

      I will complete my statue: for a shadow came unto me – the stillest and lightest of all things once came unto me! The beauty of the Superhuman came unto me as a shadow.

      – Zarathustra

Three Stars, One Constellation: Introduction to Hegel, Marx, NietzscheStuart Elden

      __________________

      Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or, The Realm of Shadows was first published in 1975, between The Production of Space (1974) and Lefebvre’s four-volume study De l’État (1976–8).¹ The same year saw him publish a new autobiography, a re-edition of some of his essays on structuralism, and an edited collection on Fourier.² Lefebvre was in his seventies at the time, and showed no signs of slowing down – several other significant studies followed, including the third volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, the posthumous Elements of Rhythmanalysis and the untranslated Une pensée devenue monde: Faut-il abandonner Marx?, La Présence et L’absence and Qu’est-ce que penser?3

      Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche is a summation of Lefebvre’s considerable debt to these three thinkers, and its organization is clear. It is structured as three main chapters, ‘files’ or ‘dossiers’ on each thinker, framed by a long introductory chapter on ‘triads’ and a conclusion. Lefebvre suggests that the modern world is Hegelian, Marxist and Nietzschean, and while each of those claims separately is not paradoxical, put together they suggest an irreconcilable tension. How these aspects might be understood, and their relations teased out, is the focus of the study. Each thinker grasped something of the modern world, and shaped Lefebvre’s own reflections accordingly.

      Lefebvre makes the claim that Hegelian thought can be summarized by the word and concept of the state, Marxism through the social and society, and Nietzsche through civilisation and its values. The state and its relation to civil society is of course the focus of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, and there is much else in his work, but Lefebvre stresses the political here. To take the state as the focus would be a Hegelian view of the world, but there is also a Marxist view, where the state’s relations to civil society, classes and industrial change are paramount. Yet this too neglects things that Lefebvre thinks are important, and he finds these in Nietzsche. This would include the assertion of life against impersonal political and economic processes, a stress on the importance of the arts of poetry, music and theatre, coupled with the hope of the extraordinary, the surreal and the supernatural.

      The term royaume des ombres, the ‘realm’ or ‘kingdom of shadows’, or the underworld, is from Hegel’s Greater Logic, although it is also used in Marx, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche declares that the overman appears like a shadow. These three passages form the epigraphs to the present work.⁴ This poetic aspect is found throughout this book, Lefebvre likening the three thinkers to three stars in the sky – three stars in a single constellation:

      Three stars gravitate, eliminating lesser or invisible planets, above this world in which shadows dance: ourselves. Stars in a sky in which the sun of intelligibility is no more than a symbol and no longer offers anything in the way of a firmament. Perhaps these stars vanish behind clouds hardly less obscure than the night …

      In myth, from the poetry of Homer to the Divine Comedy, the realm of shadows possessed an entrance and exit, a guided trajectory and mediating powers. It had gates, those of an underground city, overshadowed by the earthly city and the city