In Debord, Time and Spectacle Tom Bunyard provides a detailed philosophical study of the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Drawing on evidence from Debord’s books, films, letters and notes, Bunyard reconstructs the Hegelian and Marxian ideas that support Debord’s central concept of ‘spectacle’. This affords a reconsideration of Debord’s theoretical claims, and a reinterpretation of his broader work that foregrounds his concerns with history and lived time. By bringing Situationist theory into dialogue with recent reinterpretations of Marx, this book also identifies problems in Debord’s critique of capitalism. It argues, however, that the conceptions of temporality and spectacle that support that critique amount to a philosophy of praxis that remains relevant today.
Tom Bunyard, Ph.D. (2012), Goldsmiths, is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Programme at the University of Brighton. He has published several articles on the relationship between Debord, Hegel and Marx, and works on critical theory and philosophy of history.
AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: RadioactivitySubjectivity, Temporality and Spectacle1 Interpreting the Theory of Spectacle2 Five Aspects of Debord’s Theoretical WorkThe New Beauty: 1951–623 ‘We are Artists Insofar as We are No Longer Artists’4 The Everyday and the Absolute5 ‘Avant-Gardes Have Only One Time’‘Everything that had Formerly been Absolute Became Historical’6 Debord and French Hegelianism7 Subjects and Objects: Debord, Lukács and the Young Marx8 Life and Non-lifeIn Pursuit of the Northwest Passage: 1963–739 Never Work!10 ‘I am Nothing and I Should be Everything’11 The ‘Fetishism of Capital’The Integrated Spectacle: 1974–9412 Moving with History’s ‘Bad Side’13 Strategy and Tactics in the Integrated Spectacle14 The Knight, Death and the DevilBibliographyIndex
