This is the first serious intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957-1972) and author of The Society of the Spectacle, perhaps the seminal book of May 1968 in France. Anselm Jappe rejects recent attempts to set Debord up as a "postmodern" icon, arguing that he was a social theorist in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition—not a precursor of Jean Baudrillard but an heir of the young Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923). Neither hagiographical nor sectarian, Guy Debord places its subject squarely in his historical context: the politicizing Letterist and Situationist "anti-artists" who, in the European aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the Surrealist legacy. The book offers a lively, critical, and unusually reliable account of Debord's "last avant-garde" on its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory. Jappe also discusses Debord's films, which are largely inaccessible at present. This English language edition of the book has been revised by the author and features an updated critical bibliography of Debord and the Situationists.

Guy Debord

Biographies & Memoirs

Jappe, Anselm

Leaders & Notable People

University of California Press

This is the first serious intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957-1972) and author of The Society of the Spectacle, perhaps the seminal book of May 1968 in France. Anselm Jappe rejects recent attempts to set Debord up as a "postmodern" icon, arguing that he was a social theorist in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition—not a precursor of Jean Baudrillard but an heir of the young Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923). Neither hagiographical nor sectarian, Guy Debord places its subject squarely in his historical context: the politicizing Letterist and Situationist "anti-artists" who, in the European aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the Surrealist legacy. The book offers a lively, critical, and unusually reliable account of Debord's "last avant-garde" on its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory. Jappe also discusses Debord's films, which are largely inaccessible at present. This English language edition of the book has been revised by the author and features an updated critical bibliography of Debord and the Situationists.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

The Adventures of the Commodity explores conceptions of a capitalist society that is ordered entirely around the exigencies of the commodity, money and labour. A distinctive introduction to critiques of capitalism and commodity society, this book illuminates the difficult concept of 'abstract' labour. Merging this with the social critique known as the "critique of value", first developed by Robert Kurz and the German journal, Krisis, in the 1990s, Anselm Jappe highlights in particular a central, and often contested, aspect of this critique: the claim that, for several decades now, capitalism has entered into a crisis that is not cyclical, but terminal. If a society that is founded upon the fetishism of the commodity, on the value created by the abstract side of labour and represented in money, this is the result of the fact that its primary internal contradiction has reached a point of no return: the replacement of living labour, the only source of 'value', by ever-more sophisticated technologies.

Adventures of the Commodity, The: For a Critique of Value (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Bloomsbury Academic

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. This PM reprint edition benefits from a new author’s preface and a bibliographical update.

PM Press

The 2008 global financial crisis has led to the re-emergence in public discourse of the idea that capitalism could end. For many, it was proof of the notion that capitalist civilisation has an endemic tendency towards crisis that will ultimately bring about its demise. Must we assume, however, that such an eventuality would inevitably result in the liberation of humanity, as many orthodox Marxists claim? Through a collection of specially revised essays, first published in France between 2007 and 2010, Anselm Jappe draws on the radical new perspective of “the critique of value” as a critical tool with which to understand today’s world and to re-examine the question of human emancipation. The Writing on the Wall offers a powerful new analysis of the decomposition of capitalism and its critics.

The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics

Business & Money

Economics

Zer0 Books

Credit à mort

NOUVELLES LIGNE

Les aventures de la marchandise

LA DECOUVERTE

Schade um Italien. Zweihundert Jahre Selbstkritik.

Eichborn

Pensar desde la izquierda: Mapa del pensamiento crítico para un tiempo de crisis

Mouffe, Chantal

Agamben, Giorgio

BADIOU, ALAIN

Balibar, Étienne

Neyrat, Frédéric

NEGRI, Antonio

Hallward, Peter

Bensaïd, Daniel

Hardt, Michæl

Toscano, Alberto

iek, Slavoj

Rancière, Jaques

Errata Naturae Editores

Para los autores de este libro, la actualidad del pensamiento de Marx está en lo que tiene de más radical: la crítica de la mercancía y del dinero, del trabajo y del Estado. Lo obsoleto es, por el contrario, lo que suele aceptarse hoy como políticamente correcto: la apología del progreso, de la democracia y de la modernidad. Y también, para más escándalo, la lucha de clases: la revolución no surge de la lucha de clase contra clase, sino de la rebelión contra los fetiches abstractos de Dinero y Capital a los que hemos cedido el dominio sobre nuestras vidas. Los ensayos aquí reunidos forman una suerte de breviario de la crítica radical de la sociedad de la mercancía, de sus instituciones el mercado y el trabajo, la ciencia y el arte y sus ideologías, desde el marxismo hasta las filosofías posmodernas; también hablan de los antecedentes de esa crítica, desde Hegel y Leopardi hasta los situacionistas.

El absurdo mercado de los hombres sin cualidades: Ensayos sobre el fetichismo de la mercancía

Kurz, Robert

Ortlieb, Claus Peter

Pepitas de calabaza

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