Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents

(Paperback)

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This volume is a revised and expanded version of a special issue of the journal October (Winter 1997) that was devoted to the work of the Situationist International (SI). The first section of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second section contained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. The emphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time (1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two former members of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith. Guy Debord and the Situationist International supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard-to-find essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus and Tom McDonough and doubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and more representative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated by hagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically the history and legacy of the SI.

Reviews

"Ambitious and exciting....a fine compendium of the most poetic of political writings." - Publishers Weekly"

Author Bio

Tom McDonough is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of "The Beautiful Language of My Century"- Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (MIT Press).