Guy Debord

Guy Debord - France, 1931-1994
Guy Debord was a film-maker, writer and libertarian socialist best known as the leading light of the Situationist International. He and the SI were among the first to analyse the phenomenon of consumer capitalism and its effect on people. He committed suicide in 1994.

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From; 'What Next' no. 30, 2005

Ken Knabb's translation of Guy Debord's book "Society of the Spectacle" in a pamphlet produced by Treason.

First published as ‘Part 1: The Concept of the Spectacle’ in Anselm Jappe’s Guy Debord,
University of California Press, 1999

This edition published by Treason Press, February 2004

Written in English by David Blanchard, 1995. First published in Drunken Boat. Also published in Revolutionary Romanticism; edited by Max Blechman, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1999.

An obituary of Guy Debord written immediately after his death in 1994. The article in Freedom newspaper was headlined "The author of Society of the Spectacle has killed himself

The Red Menace, Number Four, September/October 1989

DEBORD'S NEW BOOK

A review of Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, pubd. Editions Gerard Lebovici (27, rue Saint-Sulpice, 75006 Paris, France), 1988

Pre-Situationist International Documents

A series of documents by later SI members.

-The Alba Platform
-What was the Bauhaus?
-A User's Guide to Détournement
-Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action
-Formulary for a New Urbanism
-Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography

La Société du Spectacle was first published in 1967 by Editions Buchet-Chastel (Paris); it was reprinted in 1971 by Champ Libre (Paris). The first English translation was published by Black & Red in 1970. It was revised in 1977, incorporating numerous improvements suggested by friends and critics of the first translation.

Buy Society of the Spectacle now

1

IN A MOMENT of universal history, the Situationist International imposed itself as the thought of the collapse of a world, a downfall that has now begun under our very eyes.

2

I. Capitalism: A Society Without Culture

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Culture can be defined as the ensemble of means through which a society thinks of itself and shows itself to itself, and thus decides on all aspects of the use of its available surplus-value. That is to say, it is the organization of everything over and beyond the immediate necessities of the society's reproduction.

It seems necessary to define the post-war period in Europe as one of a generalized failure of attempts at change, in the realm of emotions as much as in the political realm.

The situationist movement can be seen as an artistic avant-garde, as an experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a new revolutionary contestation.