Guy Debord

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Guy-Ernest Debord (born December 28, 1931 in Paris , † November 30, 1994 in Bellevue-la-Montagne , Haute-Loire department ) was a French author , filmmaker , artist and revolutionary and an influential founding member of the Situationist International .

Political position

Guy Debord was a radical critic of capitalism and the capitalist ideology of consumerism , which he denounced as a staging of "false needs". In his main work Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels (1967) he developed a theory of the spectacle : "The spectacle is capital in such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image."

Debord's book exerted an important influence on the New Left movement around Paris in May 1968 , especially in France . His anti-capitalist , situationist outlook is close to anarchism , but also adopts other argumentation models from the part of the workers' movement that was only critical of the Soviet Union . The central concern of Debord was the abolition of the "great separation" of individuals from one another through a revolutionary practice of self-administration . Debord always emphasized the artistic dimension of the revolution , the necessity of upheaval in everyday life.

Situationist International

Together with Asger Jorn , Debord founded the Lettrist International , which emerged from the split in the Lettrist movement in Paris in the 1950s and from which the Situationist International emerged in 1957 . In this actually grassroots group, Debord assumed a dominant position that was often criticized.

The SI - that is ten to forty, over the total time around 70 members - exerted a significant influence on the student movement of the time in the 1960s . When sympathizers of the SI were elected to the student council in Strasbourg in 1966, however, the SI resisted the claim that it had made to assume a leadership role vis-à-vis the students. Instead, she published what was then a highly scandalous brochure on the misery in the student milieu . In 1972 the SI dissolved itself, mainly at the instigation of Guy Debord, after numerous previous exclusions of the remaining members.

Artistic activity

Debord made several films in which he played with the possibilities of the experimental film , sometimes including the audience reactions and the darkened cinema hall in the screening: One of his films, Hurlements en faveur de Sade ("Howling for de Sade "), consisted of Silence and a minute-long black screen that occasionally changed to white, with quotations about youth or revolution as well as legal texts; the howling was represented by the loud protests of the indignant audience.

Debord developed the board game Le Jeu de la Guerre (war game) in 1977 ; an attempt to market it failed. Debord's widow, Alice Becker-Ho, owns the rights to the game. In 1987, Debord and Becker-Ho published a book about a game of the game, which was published in German by Merve Verlag in 2016 .

Life

Debord had a long-lasting relationship with Alice Becker-Ho , who was involved in the Situationist International from 1963. They married in 1972 and remained a couple until Debord's death. Together they developed a board game in 1977 and wrote a book of the same name, Le Jeu de la Guerre (War Game), which was published in 1987.

After his publisher Gerard Lebovici was murdered by an unknown assassin in Paris in 1984, Debord spent the next ten years in a secluded village in Auvergne, where he committed suicide in 1994 after a long illness.

exhibition

  • January 6 to April 18, 2005 (participation): Archilab: New Experiments in Architecture, Art and the City, 1950–2005. Mori Art Museum , Tokyo 2005. (Catalog)
  • 2013: Guy Debord. Un art de la guerre . Bibliothèque nationale de France , Paris 2013. (Catalog)

Quote

Debord wrote of the proletarian revolution: “It can begin easily wherever autonomous proletarian assemblies will abolish the separation of individuals, the commodity economy and the state by recognizing neither the authority nor the property of anyone outside themselves and by overriding their will make all laws and all specializations. However, the revolution will only triumph if it asserts itself worldwide without leaving even the smallest space to any existing form of alienated society. "

Filmography

  • 1952: Hurlements en faveur de Sade (75 min)
  • 1959: Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (18 min)
  • 1961: Critique de la Séparation (19 min)
  • 1973: La Société du Spectacle (80 min)
  • 1978: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (105 min)

Works

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ben McGrath: Dept. of Isms: War Games. In: The New Yorker . January 7, 2009, accessed December 10, 2010 .
  2. ^ Paul Buckermann: Situationist Army Equipment. Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord's book on the war game appears in its first German translation. Jungle World, March 10, 2016, accessed October 15, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Debord, guy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Debord, Guy-Ernest (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French artist and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 1994
Place of death near Bellevue-la-Montagne, Haute-Loire department