ABSTRACT
Guy Debord (1931–1994) was the at once redoubtable and somehow engagingly megalomaniac tete pensante (or “mastermind”) of the International Situ-ationist movement (1957–1972), an aesthetically intense, anarchistically and nihilistically inclined group of writers and artists who became famous during the May 1968 student uprising in Paris. Yet who had already long called attention to themselves through their writings, art, films, provocative antics, intentional urban “drifting”, and vociferous internal squabbles. The original book has been translated into English as The Society of the Spectacle at least three times, and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle is also now available. In fact, nearly all of Debord’s oeuvre can be perused in English, either on the printed page or through Internet websites. The Society of the Spectacle is par excellence one of those cult books to which intellectuals of all persuasions refer yet which very few have actually studied, harboring the impression that the memorable title sufficiently encapsulates the contents.
