Great post. Lefebvre’s late text Rhythmanalysis is a great resource for such questions as well, and Kirsten Simonsen’s 2005 essay “Bodies Sensations, Space and Time: The Contribution from Henri Lefebvre” is another. It is interesting to see how far Lefebvre’s thoguhts on the body have migrated to other disciplines, for example I just read this essay by Michael Todd Friedman and Cathy van Ingen titled “Bodies in Space: Spatializing Physical Cultural Studies” published in 2011 in the Sociology of Sport Journal 28: 85-105.

Thinking culture

I’ve just returned to Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, but this time I tried to look at its depiction of the body in social space. Focusing on this one aspect I was surprised to find just how central the body is in Lefebvre’s analysis. In fact quite early on Lefebvre is very clear that the body is central to his conception of the production of space.

What comes across in this reading of Lefebvre’s book is an affective account of space. The sensory body is central to spatial production. Although Lefebvre us clear that this sensory production of space can be usurped by powerful conceptions and representations of space. This leads him to talk of the ‘spatial body’ as a sits in which practices and representations of space implicate one another and shape bodily experience. This is quite a complex and recursive vision of the body and of its…

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