Guy Debord

This is the first intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957–1972) and author of The Society of the Spectacle, the seminal book of the May 1968 uprising in France. Anselm Jappe offers a powerful corrective to the continual attempts to incorporate Debord’s theoretical work into “French theory.” Jappe focuses, to the contrary, on Debord’s debt to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, to Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, and more generally to left-Marxist currents of council communism. His close reading of Debord’s magnum opus is unique among the great flood of writing on the Situationists in recent decades. At the same time, Debord is placed squarely in context among the Letterist and Situationist anti-artists who, in the aftermath of World War II sought to criticize and transcend the legacy of Dada and Surrealism. Jappe’s book offers a lively account of the Situationists as this “last avant-garde” made its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary agitprop. This PM reprint edition benefits from a new author’s preface and a bibliographical update.

Anselm Jappe?currently teaches art history and political and economic theory at the College International de Philosophie in Paris and at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Sassari in Sardinia. His essays have been published in the collection?The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics.?T.J. Clark is a British art historian and writer, who has taught in universities such as Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.?Donald Nicholson-Smith's?translations include works by Jean Piaget, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, and Raoul Vaneigem. As a young man he was a member of the Situationist International in Paris and a comrade-in-arms of Guy Debord’s.