Situationist International: The Veritable Split in the International

Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the leading light in the Situationist International. He and the group were the first to criticize and comment on the role of the consumer in Western society. If Dada was an artistic movement that somehow pushed its artistic values into the political arena, then the Situationists were political and urban theorists who transformed politics into an art form. Debord’s masterpiece "Society of the Spectacle" is a stunning and witty critique on contemporary society where the workweek and consumerism alienate the individual. "Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici" is a book-length rant and a confrontational stance against the French media with regards to the murder of his good friend and financial supporter Gerard Lebovici. In 1984 Lebovici was called away from an appointment and three days later the police found his body behind the steering wheel of his Renault with four bullet wounds to the back of his head, in a vacant parking lot in Paris. Lebovici was an inventive businessman, movie producer, publisher, and a major financial supporter of Situationist activity -including ownership of a movie theater that screened the films of Debord and other Situationists. It's suspected that gangsters killed Lebovici, although to this day the murderer(s) have never been found. That didn't stop certain groups in the media connecting Lebovici's death with the Situationists. In this passionate rebuttal, Debord lashes out with great humor and intensity against the media and defends his good friend Gerard Lebovici. This book should not be seen as an account of an isolated, almost forgotten murder case, but as a general call-to-arms with respect to how the media controls and rewrites its ‘facts’.

“Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse.” —Michael Löwy First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite television and the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published twenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in a period when the “integrated spectacle” was dominant. Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through the dogma and mystification offered by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacular society. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord’s Comments convey the revolutionary impulse at the heart of situationism. (from the Verso website).Guy Debord: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. In the Verso series "Radical Thinkers" 1998. ISBN 978-1-84467-672-9

Guy Debord: Panegyric, Verso 1991, ISBN 0-86091-559-X“I have written less than most writers. But I have drunk far more than most drinkers.” “All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have joined in these troubles.” “My method will be very simple. I will tell of what I have loved; and, in this light, everything else will become evident … ” “Over the years, more than half the people I knew well had sojourned one or several times in the prisons of various countries; many, no doubt, for political reasons, but all the same a greater number for common law offenses or crimes. So I met mainly rebels or the poor.” Guy Debord’s silver-tongue-in-cheek autobiography mixes precision and pastiche in a whirlwind account of philosophy, exploit, and inebriation. From the stark professions of Volume I to the illustrated sequences of Volume 2, Panegyric confronts us with a figure who strategically, demonically tried to wrest life from the disabling modern “spectacle.” “These concise but extremely rich and provocative memoirs are the product of … philosopher whose scathing pen has never been so sharp.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A brief and elegiac memoir of a life lived in its shadows and cracks.” —Artforum “As cryptic and self-effacing a self-portrait as can be found anywhere & Panegyric is almost purely literary, in the sense that one need know or care nothing of the author to be captured by it: Debord is seeking to hijack his era into timelessness.” — London Review of Books Guy Debord was born in 1931 was born in 1931. A founding member of the Letterist International and the Situationist International, he was the editor of their key journals, Potlach and Internationale Situationiste. He committed suicide in 1994. His written and film works include The Society of the Spectacle.

Zeit seines Lebens galt Guy Debord als »Geheimagent der Subversion«, als einer, der entweder bewundert oder verabscheut wurde. In den fünfziger Jahren nahm er an den Aktivitäten der Lettristen teil, einer künstlerischen Nachkriegs-avantgarde, die durch spektakuläre Aktionen von sich reden machte. 1957 hatte er entscheidenden Einfluß auf die Gründung der Situationistischen Internationale, an der sich Künstlergruppen wie Cobra und später die Münchner Spur beteiligten. 1967 löste die SI den Skandal von Straßburg aus, der im Mai 68 zum Generalstreik führte. Guy Debord war als Theoretiker der SI und Autor von »Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels« über Nacht zur Berühmtheit geworden, aber er lehnte es ab, »zu einer Autorität« zu werden. Er führte sein Leben im Verborgenen weiter, aber die Gerüchte um seine Person hörten nie auf, vor allem, als sein Freund und Verleger Gerard Lebovici unter bis heute ungeklärten Umständen ermordet wurde. »Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels« und die »Kommentare« sind Debords politisch-philoso-phisches Vermächtnis, sein theoretisches Hauptwerk, in dem er die moderne Verlaufsform der spektakulären Herrschaft aufzeigt, aber auch die Etappen ihrer programmierten Selbstzerstörung.

Guy Debord (1931-94) was one of the most important and intriguing intellectual figures of the twentieth century.Filmmaker and poet, urban critic and political theorist, adventurer and activist extraordinaire during Paris' May 1968 uprisings, Debord was simultaneously behind and ahead of his times. Best-known as guru of the avant-garde revolutionary movement the Situationist International (1957-72), and for a classic indictment of post-war capitalist consumerism The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord's life and work remains fascinating to this day. Yet the man himself remained elusive and enigmatic throughout his life. Master urban tactician in the 1950s, political muckraker, organizer and theorist during the 1960s, vagabond throughout the 1970s, fleeing to Spain and Italy, he lived as a recluse during the 1980s and early 1990s in an isolated farmhouse in Champot (Auvergne), behind a high stone wall. Guy Debord crosses over that Champot wall, pushes back Debord's shutters and peers through his windows. It crosses his threshold, drinks his wine, and listens to him talk. Andrew Merrifield focuses on the particulars of Debord's life, shedding light on this admirable yet apparently impenetrable figure, a free spirit who was radically at odds with life but at the same time loved many things in it, and thought them worth fighting for. The book reveals the dynamics of the man, his ideas, and his times which have much to say to our own, equally troubled times. The ideas of Guy Debord, who died only 10 years ago, continue to expose the fragility of our democracy and the mismatch between people and political power today; this book shows that the lessons of Debord are as fresh, subversive, and relevant now as they were forty years ago.

Exploding as politically revolutionary at the heart of the Paris 1968 uprisings, the Situationist International has proved a tenaciously compelling radical movement in terms of asthetics and political theory.This crucially important book is not only a philosophical landmark, it is also a cult classic that has has established the Situationist movement -- of which Debord was the key member -- as one of the most influential of the twentieth century.This new translation by John McHale is the first officially authorised in English. The book has previously been available only in underground or online formats, so McHale's work promises to bring the work of the Situationists to an even wider audience.The Real Split in the International sees Debord not only evaluate the movement as a whole, but also signal the end of it. For him, it had become clear that the Situationist's success had produced -- within its own ranks as well as outside them -- a host of fans and 'onlookers' who amounted to little more than consumers of a radicality that had become fashionable. In this way the movement had begun to encompass the very 'society of the spectacle' that the Situationists had challenged. There was a danger that Situationist theory could turn into ideology -- Debord's reaction was to break up the movement. About The Translator John McHale has translated Alice Becker-Ho's Les Princes du Jargon, her L'Essence du Jargon and Guy Debord's Panégyrique Volume 2. He lives in London.Guy Debord was a revolutionary theorist, a film-maker, the indisputable head of the Situationists, and a key figure in the constellation of French theorists and intellectuals from the 1960s onwards. He committed suicide in 1995 at the age of 63. Identifying everyday life as the terrain of revolutionary activity, he added new and apposite dimensions to Marxist thinking in the late twentieth century:The Society of the Spectacle, his seminal work, characterised a society resting not only on the alienated labour of workers, but on the alienated lives of spectators.