The Revolution of Everyday Life (PM Press)

There is a grain of truth in the simplified notion that Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem represented two poles of the Situationist International: `The Society of the Spectacle’ versus `The Revolution of Everyday Life’ – the two programmatic books of the Situationists, both published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, each serving in its own way to kindle and color that revolutionary moment. `The Revolution of Everyday Life’ offers a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “‘society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. If Debord’s analysis armed the revolutionaries of May with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their desperation directly and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” This is a completely revised translation intended to capture the period flavor as well as the continuing pertinence of Vaneigem’s “classic of subversion.”