Guy Debord
French libertarian Marxist and prominent figure in the Situationist International.
The Concept of the Spectacle - Anselm Jappe, Treason pamphlet
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
Debord, in the Resounding Cataract of Time - David Blanchard
A remembrance of the author's friendship with Guy Debord in the late 1950s and early 60s - with some theoretical reflections.
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.
Guy Debord obituary
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".
Theses on the Paris Commune - Situationist International
"...it is time we examine the Commune not just as an outmoded example of revolutionary primitivism, all of whose mistakes can easily be overcome, but as a positive experiment whose whole truth has yet to be rediscovered and fulfilled."
Introduction to 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.
Key texts: Society of the Spectacle
Groups: Situationist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie
Links on libcom.org
Guy Debord archive
The Situationists on libcom.org/thought
Situationist International archive
Guy Debord search results on libcom.org
Debord's New Book (review) - by The Red Menace
The Red Menace was produced by an informal group of communists and appeared for several issues in late 1980s London. It contained news and reviews of class struggle topics.
Pre-Situationist International Documents
Pre-Situationist International Documents
A series of documents by later SI members.
Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord
French Situationist Guy Debord's seminal analysis of consumer capitalism in the late 20th century.
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.
Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time
Debord and Sanguinetti look back over the history of the Situationists and rather optimistically attempt to place them in historical perspective.
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
Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program
This text is described in Internationale Situationniste #5 (p. 11) as "a platform for discussion within the SI, and for its linkup with revolutionary militants of the workers movement."
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).
