{"product_id":"guy-debord-situationist-international-texts-documents-mit-press-2002","title":"GUY DEBORD, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, MIT Press, 2002","description":"\u003cp\u003eEdited by Tom McDonough. The MIT Press \/ October Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002. 18.5 × 23 cm. xx + 492 pp. Hardcover with illustrated dust jacket. Illustrated throughout in black-and-white. English text. ISBN 0-262-13404-7. First hardcover edition. Condition: very good. Light rubbing and edge\/corner wear to the illustrated dust jacket consistent with handling and age; internally clean and well preserved.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcDonough opens with his own framing essay, “Ideology and the Situationist Utopia,” followed by Greil Marcus’s “The Long Walk of the Situationist International.” Then come the primary texts — Debord’s own “The Great Sleep and Its Clients,” “One More Try If You Want to Be Situationists,” and “Theses on Cultural Revolution,” alongside translated material from Michèle Bernstein, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati and René Viénet that had mostly been unavailable in English before this book and the \u003cem\u003eOctober\u003c\/em\u003e issue it grew out of. The volume closes with Jonathan Crary’s “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory” and, in the final position, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith’s “Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International” — an essay written by two former SI members arguing directly against turning the group into just another chapter of avant-garde art history.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a revised and expanded version of \u003cem\u003eOctober\u003c\/em\u003e’s Winter 1997 special issue on the Situationist International — itself already a landmark, since it made unavailable Situationist texts legible in English for the first time. McDonough’s 2002 expansion roughly doubles the translated primary material and adds essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Thomas Y. Levin, Kristin Ross, Vincent Kaufmann and Claire Gilman, among others. The back cover carries endorsements from Alexander Alberro, Andrew Hussey and Serge Guilbaut — Guilbaut’s blurb unusually blunt for academic jacket copy, urging readers to buy the book or, failing that, steal it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Situationist International existed from 1957 to 1972 in direct opposition to exactly the kind of institutional absorption this book represents. Debord died in 1994. Within less than a decade, Situationism had migrated from a difficult, scattered revolutionary inheritance into university syllabi, museum exhibitions and academic publishing — this volume one of the primary vehicles of that migration, produced by an imprint that is itself part of the machinery of art-historical canonisation the Situationists spent fifteen years trying to refuse.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe object doesn’t hide this. The cover reproduces a degraded, enlarged photographic fragment, overprinted with type, already once-removed from whatever image it started as — the transfer from raw material to institutional object made visible on the dust jacket itself. Clark and Nicholson-Smith’s closing essay pushes back against the very recúpération the book performs by existing. The argument over how the SI should be remembered isn’t just described in this volume — it’s built into its structure, right down to which essay gets the last word.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDebord’s vocabulary — spectacle, mediated experience, image-saturated everyday life — reads less like a specialised 1960s critique now than a description of an ordinary Tuesday.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis volume is discussed in \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/blogs\/journal\/recirculation-007-how-things-enter-history\"\u003eRE:Circulation No. 007 — How Things Enter History\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54567477739858,"sku":"TNR-2026-0652","price":50.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Debord_Guy.GuyDebordandthesituationistinternational.TextsandDocuments_editedbyTomMcDonough.2002.jpg?v=1788687685","url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/products\/guy-debord-situationist-international-texts-documents-mit-press-2002","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}