ABSTRACT
A number of Henri Lefebvre’s most celebrated conceptualizations can be read as a direct response to the revalorization and revaluation of the aesthetic undertaken by both the philosophical and avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. I will here connect Lefebvre’s rapport with Surrealism to a reconfigured understanding of the aesthetic, whereby the aesthetic becomes an appropriating mechanism rather than autonomous realm of experience.With Surrealism, I will claim, relationality emerges as an expressive event that forces the advent of an encounter between fields of experience that had remained differentiated by the logic of reification and specialization.1 I will then read Lefebvre’s theoretical intervention in May 1968, The Explosion, as his mature formulation of the mechanisms that set relationality, the event, and the encounter to work.The enforced contingency and spontaneity of the events of May will function as correction to both aesthetic and philosophical transcendence.
