Book dossier

The revolution of everyday life

by Raoul Vaneigem, Raoul Vaneigem

There is a grain of truth in the simplified notion that Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem represented two poles of the Situationist International: the 'objective' Debord versus the 'subjective' Vaneigem; Marxism versus anarchism; icy cerebrality versus sensualism. In short, The Society of the Spectacle versus The Revolution of Everyday Life - the two programmatic books of the Situationists, written independently, both published in 1967 just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, each serving in its own way to kindle and colour 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'. Vaneigem first defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. The second part of the work, 'Reversal of Perspective', explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. This is a completely revised translation intended to capture the period flavour as well as the continuing pertinence of Vaneigem's 'classic of subversion'.