Debord, Guy

Abstract

Filmmaker (six films), writer, drinker, part-creator of the Situationist International (SI) and Marxist revolutionary, Guy Debord (1931–1994) remains one of the most influential of Parisian intellectuals postwar, drawing on Dada, as an art of negation, and Surrealism, which he critiqued as having allowed itself to become popular (though with a certain admiration for some Surrealists, including the Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën). Acknowledged for critiquing Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), and giving, with those he was associated with, certain new terms which have altered critical theory forever, especially urban theory. Such terms as “situationism,” “psychogeography,” “spectacle,” and détournement (diversion, interruption) and dérive (drift: the art of losing the self in the city), each of which will be defined below, are essential for understanding the modern city and ways in which it has been written about, and the intellectual and revolutionary’s place within it.