Anselm Jappe currently teaches art history and political and economic theory at the Coll�ge International de Philosophie in Paris and at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Sassari in Sardinia. His essays have been published in the collection The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics. T.J. Clark is a British art historian and writer, who has taught in universities such as Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations include works by Jean Piaget, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, and Raoul Vaneigem. As a young man he was a member of the Situationist International in Paris and a comrade-in-arms of Guy Debord's.
"A clear-headed account... far and away the best we have so
far."
--Times Literary Supplement "The only book on Debord in either
French or English that can be unreservedly recommended...
particularly useful for its extensive treatment of the Marxian
connection that is usually ignored in culture-oriented accounts of
the Situationists."
--Ken Knabb, editor of Situationist International Anthology "Jappe
successfully gets to grips with the content of Debord's and the
SI's activity in a way that is accessible and doesn't require a
vast amount of prior knowledge or an extensive vocabulary of
obscure jargon in order to understand it. Debord has got a somewhat
undeserved reputation for having an impenetrable and complex
writing style--a myth which Jappe goes a long way towards refuting
by examining the major concepts in Society of the Spectacle and
other works, and putting them in the context of a wider historical
basis and in terms of the SI as a whole."
--Do or Die "Political writing is always instrumental as well as
utopian. Debord's is no exception. Only sometimes writing has to
reconcile itself to the idea that its time of instrumentality--its
time as a weapon--lies a little in the future. Jappe's book is true
to its subject, above all, because it reads Debord, and helps us
read him, with that future in mind."
--T.J. Clark, from the Foreword
Ask a Question About this Product More... |