Of Crosses, Suns, and Roses: How Hegel Illuminates Lefebvre’s Solar Image

Henri Lefebvre’s writings continue to accrue interest in twenty-first-century Anglo-American scholarship, which confirms Stuart Elden’s forecast of Lefebvre’s posthumous rebirth in contemporary research. This ongoing generation of scholarly output comes as no surprise to those who share Elden’s palingenetic pronouncement and aims toward ameliorating erstwhile inaccessibility of the French philosopher’s work. Lefebvre’s prolific writings were produced over a broad sweep of twentieth-century intellectual activity spanning eight decades (1924–92) with thoughts expressed inside nearly seventy published books and hundreds of articles that appeal to readers interested in various aspects of philosophy, politics, and sociology, thus attracting, and allowing for, the kinds of interdisciplinary, cross-pollinating, and synthesizing scholarship currently being produced. By the same token and seeking to contribute to this growing body of commentary, this article proposes an interpretation of Lefebvre’s famous distinction as a dialectician by striving to illuminate the message of his provocative image of the “Crucified Sun” via Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s equally suggestive metaphor of the “Crucified Rose.” Consequently, this article examines the Franco-German interface between Lefebvre and Hegel through three complecting lines. The first serves to orient the reader with respect to Lefebvre’s classification as a post-Hegelian dialectician of social phenomena. The second weaves together the Lefebvrean and Hegelian cruciform images as symbolizing the unity of present struggle with future reward, that is, as metaphors which, while suggesting sacrifice and death, can still vivify hope for a better world. And finally, as an alternative to commentators who suggest that Friedrich Nietzsche showed Lefebvre how to deliver the sun from the cross, it is argued that Lefebvre’s desire for radical social transformation cannot be fulfilled by Nietzschean views that equate alienation with resentful weakness and instead requires a Hegelian mindset that needs the figurative sun to stay nailed to its cross in order to continually resurrect its reconciling potency.