Guy Debord

"Guy Debord, as founding member and pivotal figure of the Situationist International, pursued one of the twentieth century's most arch and exciting assaults on modern life. His 1967 Society of the Spectacle (followed, twenty years later, by Comments on the Society of the Spectacle) was a fierce critique of late-capitalist culture and became the signal text for those involved in the political events of May 1968 and beyond." "Panegyric is Debord's autobiography, and here for the first time in English is the second, illustrated volume published together with the spare and classical text of the first. A rare combination of poetry and precision, it tells of something even rarer: a life that refused to adjust to the dominant malignancies of its time."--BOOK JACKET.

"Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International and fomenter of the May 1968 revolt in France, was also the creator of six tantalizingly inaccessible films. Following the still-unsolved assassination of the films' producer in 1984, all of them were withdrawn from circulation for nearly twenty years. Ken Knabb's new translation of Debord's complete film scripts accompanies the long-awaited rerelease of these astonishing works, which are like nothing else in cinema history." "Viewers of Debord's first film were outraged to discover that it had no images whatsoever. His subsequent films have plenty of striking images, but most of them are "detourned" from ads, newsclips, or other films. One is an adaptation of his own book, The Society of the Spectacle, easily the most important radical text of the twentieth century. Others evoke his adventures in the bohemian underworld of 1950s Paris, which he contrasts with the increasingly ignorant, ugly and alienated world that has since been produced by modern capitalism. In each case Debord simultaneously attacks the film medium itself, challenging spectators to create their own adventures instead of passively consuming the pseudo-adventures that are presented to them."--BOOK JACKET.

Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth cenlury. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord's text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image/information culture.

Presents an update to "Society of the Spectacle" that offers insights into the phenomenon of the spectacle, which is the use of mass media, consumerism, capitalism, and political systems to create a world distorted from reality.