<nettime> New Debord Translation

[Bureau of Public Secrets <knabb@slip.net>]

Ken Knabb's new translation of Chapter 4 of Guy Debord's THE SOCIETY OF
THE SPECTACLE is online at http://www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/debord/4.htm

Debord's book -- easily the most important radical book of the 20th
century -- has been translated into over a dozen languages. There have
been five or six different versions in English alone. This new translation
of Chapter 4 incorporates the best renderings from those previous
versions, but it is clearer and more accurate than any of them.

Chapter 4 is not only the most important chapter of the book, it is also
the easiest to understand because it deals primarily with concrete
historical events, revealing the practical implications of ideas that are
expressed more abstractly in the other chapters.

The topics dealt with include Hegel, Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Lukács,
anarchism, utopian socialism, reformism, fascism, Bolshevism, Stalinism,
Trotskyism, the Russian revolution, the Spanish revolution, Third World
movements, workers councils, revolutionary organization, and the nature of
the new revolt that Debord saw coming -- the revolt that burst into full
view in 1968, less than a year after the original publication of the book.


* * *

The Bureau of Public Secrets website features numerous texts by and about
Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International, the
notorious avant-garde group that helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in
France.


BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
http://www.slip.net/~knabb
knabb@slip.net




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