The Game of War The Life and Death of Guy Debord

Since his death in 1994 (when he put a bullet through his heart in his lonely farmhouse) Guy Debord has been hailed as one of the key thinkers of the age. In Britain and the United States, his theories on the 'spectacle' of modern life were simultaneously hailed as deadly truths by underground subversives and accorded the highest academic prestige. In the same way, the Situationist International (SI), a volatile group of artists, revolutionaries and intellectuals which he led through the 1950s and 1960s, is considered to be the most important art movement since Dada and the Surrealists. Debord himself was a welter of contradictions, whose public life was entirely predicated upon the singlemindedness of his revolutionary intentions, but who privately sought oblivion in infamy, exile and alcoholism. Implicated in the events of May 1968, Italian terrorism and the murder of his friends, and under surveillance by the French secret police for over a decade, he mixed in elite art, business and political circles, and has had admirers and devotees of all political colours and ranks. This biography is an appraisal of a lone and defiant figure whose story follows and, at one historic moment in 1968, appears to lead the drift of art and politics in post-war Paris. 'It could almost be believed that I was the only person to have loved Paris,' Debord said. Then, almost with a shrug, 'but no one has twice raised Paris to revolt.'