Home | DADA Companion | Questions, Remarks | Blog
  •  
  •  
  • IMAGE CREDITS
    portrait banner: Guy Debord

secondary literature

  •  
  • BIBLIOGRAPHIES
  • PRINTED
  • Shigenobu Gonzalvez
    Guy Debord ou la beauté du négatif. Les petits libres; no. 22 (Mille et une nuits : Paris 1998). Bibliographie (p. 69-132), chronologie des oeuvres (p. 133-142).
  • Roberto Ohrt
    'Biblio-Geographie', in Phantom Avantgarde. Eine Geschichte der Situationistischen Internationale und der modernen Kunst (Hamburg 1990) 312-330.
  • Roberto Ohrt
    'N'ecrivez jamais. Bibliographie zu den Situationisten 1990-1999', in Roberto Ohrt (Hrsg.), Das grosse Spiel. Die Situationisten zwischen Politik und Kunst (Nautilus : Hamburg 2000) 171-220.
  • A current bibliography is published as 'Liste des brochures et ouvrages parus en 2000 [-   ]', in Archives & documents situationnistes / [réd. en chef Christophe Bourseiller] N° 1 (novembre 2001) [-   ].
  •  
  • MONOGRAPHS
  • Jean-Marie Apostolidès
    Les tombeaux de Guy Debord. Précédé de 'Portrait de Guy-Ernest en jeune libertin'. Essais/Exils (Exils : Paris 1999). Reprinted in 2006 by Flammarion (Champs 711).
  • Christophe Bourseiller
    Vie et mort de Guy Debord 1931-1994 (Plon : Paris 1999). Reprinted in 2001 by Agora, Paris (Pocket n° 247). Reviewed by Greil Marcus 'The Game of War. The Life and Death of Guy Debord' for Common Knowledge 8, Issue 2 (Spring 2002) 419 and Lucy Forsyth for Art Monthly 51, nr. 240 (October 2001).
  • Len Bracken
    Guy Debord. Revolutionary (Federal House : Venice CA 1997).
  • Boris Donné
    (Pour mémoires). Un essai d'élucidation des 'Mémoires' de Guy Debord (Editions Allia : Paris 2004).
  • Phil Edwards
    Guy Debord. An incomplete adventure. Modern European Thinkers (Pluto Press : London 1998).
  • Andrew Hussey
    Game of War. The Life and Death of Guy Debord (Jonathan Cape : London 2001). Reviewed by Phil Baker for The Guardian (Saturday August 25, 2001) and by Esther Leslie for Radical Philosophy 113 (May/June 2002) 48-51; see also a short interview by Barry Shane for Three Monkeys Online. The Free Current Affairs & Arts Magazine (August 2004).
  • Anselm Jappe
    Guy Debord / traduit de l’italien par Claude Galli (Via Valeriano : Marseilles 1995; re-edited in 2001 by Denoël). Translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith and published by University of California Press, Berkeley CA 1999 (with a foreword by T.J. Clark). Reviewed for Do or Die No. 9 (2001) 201-202, by Kristin Ross for Bookforum (Fall 1999) 36 and by Esther Leslie for Radical Philosophy 113 (May/June 2002) 48-51. Read online: An Imbecile’s Guide to Guy Debord’s Concept of the Spectacle, first published as 'Part 1. The Concept of the Spectacle' in Anselm Jappe’s Guy Debord; this edition published as Treason Pamphlet by Treason Press (February 2004).
  • Anselm Jappe
    L'Avant-garde inacceptable. Réflexions sur Guy Debord. Lignes Essais (Editions Lignes : Paris 2004).
  • Vincent Kaufmann
    Guy Debord. La révolution au service de la poésie (Fayard : Paris 2001). Includes bibliographical references (p. 393-401). Translated in English by Robert Bononno as Guy Debord. Revolution in the Service of Poetry and published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Reviewed for the Canadian Journal of Sociology Online (December 2006).
  • Vincent Kaufmann
    Guy Debord. adpf-publications - la petite bibliothèque (2003). Also in print.
  • Andrew Merrifield
    Guy Debord / Andy Merrifield (Reaktion Books : London 2005). Read also the interview by Mark Thwaite with Andy Merrifield in Ready, Steady, Book.
  •  
  • PERIODICALS
  • cipM Cahier critique de poesie
    No. 9 (June 2005) Guy Debord. Contributions by Boris Donné, Alain Giffard, Jean-François Bory, Jacques Donguy and others. Includes bibliography by Emmanuel Ponsart.
  • Lignes. Art, littérature, philosophie, politique
    Ed. by Michel Surya, Daniel Dobbels ... and others and published by Editions Hazan, Paris. No. 31 (Mai 1997). Special Guy Debord number with contributions by Jean-Paul Curnier, Daniel Dobbels, Jean-Michel Frodon and others.
  • Magazine Littéraire
    N°399 special number 'Guy Debord et l'aventure situationniste' (May 2001).
  • October
    Number 79 (Winter 1997) special issue: Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste. Contributions by Thomas F. McDonough, T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, Claire Gilman, Vincent Kaufmann, and others. Reprinted in Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents (MIT Press : Cambridge MA 2002).
  • SubStance 90 Special issue (1999) Guy Debord. Ed. and introduction by Pierpaolo Antonello and Olga Vasile. Roberto Ohrt on Debord, Stephen Hastings-King on l’Internationale Situationniste, Allyson Field on Discrepant Cinema, Odile Passot on the Novels of Michèle Bernstein, Mario Perniola on Debord’s Aesthetics, Anselm Jappe on "The End of Art", Steven Best and Douglas Kellner on Cybersituations, Asger Jorn on the Problem of the Accursed.
  •  
  • ARTICLES, ESSAYS and PAPERS
  • Libero Andreotti
    'Play-tactics of the Internationale Situationniste, in October No. 91 (Winter 2000).
  • Stephen Hastings-King
    'Internationale Situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary', in SubStance Issue 90 (Volume 28, Number 3), Special Issue Guy Debord (19990 26-54.
    • [abstract] Socialisme ou Barbarie is a crucial, though little discussed, referent in the evolution of Guy Debord. The relationship was central for Debord, and worked on several levels. After months of discussion with SB militants, Debord joined the group for a few months during 1960-1961. The merger was inconclusive and strained. However, in the pages of the journal L'Internationale Situationniste, SB played an important role as the symbol of the "new revolutionar movement" with which Debord increasingly identified. Initially, SB was simply part of the political landscape. However, once Debord became more involved, SB became much more central, an the 'Situ' journal much more deferential toward the older group. Debord was a sympathetic observer of SB, and his accounts form one of the few views of the group from an outside perspective [Project Muse].
  • Andrew Hussey
    '"Requim pour un con". Subversive Pop and the Society of the Spectacle', in Cercles 3 (2001) 49-59.
  • Anselm Jappe
    'Sic Transit Gloria Artis. "The End of Art" for Theodor Adorno and Guy Debord' / translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, in SubStance Issue 90 (Volume 28, Number 3), Special Issue Guy Debord (1999) 102-128.
  • Vincent Kaufmann
    'Guy Debord. Di Revolution im Dienst der Poesie', in Supplement der Wochenzeitung Jungle World Nr 53 (24 December 2003).
  • Vincent Kaufmann
    'The Lessons of Guy Debord', in October No. 115 (Winter 2006) 31-38.
  • Tom McDonough
    'Guy Debord or, The Revolutionary Without a Halo', in October No. 115 (Winter 2006) 38-45.
  • Tom McDonough
    'Situationist Space. Guy Debord's The Naked City', in October No. 67 (Winter 1994) 58-77.
    • [abstrarct] The Naked City, a map by Debord, illustrates the Situationists' concern with the construction and perception of urban space. The map consists of 19 cut-out sections of a map of Paris, printed in black ink, which are connected with red arrows. With its invention of quarters, its shifting about of spatial relations, and its large white blanks of non-actualized space, The Naked City visualizes a fragmented city that is both the result of multiple restructuring of a capitalist society, and the very form of a radical critique of this society. The author also discusses the concept of the 'dérive', which reflects the pedestrian's experience of the city.
  • Christian Nolle
    Books of Warfare. The Collaboration between Guy Debord & Asger Jorn from 1957-1959 (February 2002).
  • Roberto Ohrt
    'Asger Jorn, Guy Debord und die SI', in spex (1995).
  • Roberto Ohrt
    'The Master of the Revolutionary Subject. Some Passages from the Life of Guy Debord', in SubStance Issue 90 (Volume 28, Number 3), Special Issue Guy Debord (1999) 13-25. Translated by Ronald Helstad
  • Odile Passot
    'Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine', in SubStance Issue 90 (Volume 28, Number 3), Special Issue Guy Debord (1999) 71-88. Translated in German as 'Porträt von Guy Debord als junger Libertin' and published in Roberto Ohrt (Hrsg.), Das grosse Spiel. Die Situationisten zwischen Politik und Kunst (Hamburg 2000) 27-60.
    • [abstract] With the publication of his Memoirs in 1959, Guy Debord began, insistently, to paint his own portrait, which he retouched again and again in the years that followed. Debord gave much of his work an autobiographical dimension, intermingling in this way objectivity and subjectivity, theory and practice. Despite his desire for transparency, however, Debord composed his texts according to a secret code, which must be broken in order to understand what he really means. Debord has, in fact, covered his tracks, so that only those who take the trouble to crack the code will understand his work. Despite the familiar faces in his films, his winks and private jokes, Debord gives little of himself away [Project Muse].
  • Martin Puchner
    'Debord and the Theater of the Situationists', in Theatre Research International 29, Nr. 1 (March 2004) 4-15.
  • Michael Stone Richards
    'A Reflexion on the French and American Perception of Guy Debord', in Parachute 93 (1999) 56-58.
  • Anthony Vidler
    'Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented', in October No. 115 (Winter 2006) 13-30.
  •  
  • top


  • Guy Debord has been described as a filmmaker, a provocateur, a Hegelian philosopher, an urban critic, an anarchistic "doctor of nothing" [his own phrase], and a good, old-fashioned drunk. Born in Paris in 1931, Guy Debord grew up in the Mediterranean city of Cannes as the child of a formerly well-to-do family. In the summer of 1951 he and his fellows descended on Cannes from Paris, to bring chaos to the famous Film Festival, and to exploit it as propaganda for their own film productions. They called themselves the "Lettrists", a group of avant-garde artists and flâneurs who drew inspiration from the Surrealists but felt that the earlier movement had gone stale. European counterparts to the American Beats, they experimented with language and performance, and cultivated a bohemian elitism.
  • In 1957 the Lettrist International merged into the Situationist International (SI), with Debord as its self-proclaimed leader. The group extended its Lettrist aspirations by seeking to combine creative expression more directly with political agitation. As a Situationist filmmaker Debord toyed around with détournement, a process that involved appropriating and recombining bits of footage, and dubbing subversive messages over the resulting collage - in this way, he believed, he could "divert" images from their intended use and reclaim their vitality. Dérives, a favored Situationist activity, did to the cityscape what Debord's films did to the image. These extended strolls, through their randomness and passage through dilapidated districts, undermined the order of urban planning and called attention to class disparity (Debord preferred to call it "psychogeographical observation").
  • Throughout the late '50s and early '60s, Debord published occasional diatribes and calls to action mainly in his own Internationale Situationniste. With the publication of The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, a crystallized summation of his political ideas, he seemed to have a larger audience in mind. In this slim manifesto he updated Marx's critique of capitalism to suit the media age and sought a place for the Situationists in the revolutionary tradition. In Debord's view, Western society had evolved to a stage in which commodities emerged as a totalizing force called "spectacle", or "capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image." Over the course of 221 aphoristic proclamations, he examined the role of spectacle in everyday life and looked at how it dictated the terms of political, personal, and economic interactions. In modern society, Debord believed, alienation was so pervasive that daily life had become vulnerable to "colonization" by the unifying illusion that spectacle provided. By monopolizing the "realm of appearances," the managers of spectacle could consolidate power and continue accumulating capital unfettered, "out of reach and beyond dispute." Debord challenged those opposed to this progression to liberate themselves from the binds of spectacle and take up the "historical mission of installing truth in the world."
  • The Situationists earned wider notoriety after May '68, but Debord had scant interest in playing guru for a band of merry pranksters, and he wasn't able to spur a practical, ongoing workers' struggle. Instead of railing against alienation, he wound up alienating his acolytes and, ultimately, his closest allies. The Situationist International split up in the spring of 1972, after which Debord receded almost entirely from public life. On 30 November, 1994 Debord shot himself.
  • Source
    Shortened version of 'As the world détourns' (excerpt). Mark Sorkin looks for Guy Debord in Bush's America', in Radical Society 32, nr. 1 (Spring 2006).