Revisiting Guy Debord's seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel's speculative logic to both, he traces Debord's intellectual debt to Hegel in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), this book illustrates the lasting impact of Debord's critical theory of 20th-century capitalism and reveals new possibilities for the critique of capitalism.

Revisiting Guy Debord's seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel's speculative logic to both, he traces Debord's intellectual debt to Hegel in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), this book illustrates the lasting impact of Debord's critical theory of 20th-century capitalism and reveals new possibilities for the critique of capitalism.

The Situationist International Anthology is the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English. In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Picking up where the dadaists and surrealists had left off, the situationists challenged people’s passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of détournement (“rerouting, hijacking”). Seeking a more extreme social revolution than was dreamed of by most leftists, they developed an incisive critique of the global spectacle-commodity system and of its “Communist” pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents all over the world. This volume presents a rich variety of articles, leaflets, graffiti, and internal documents, ranging from experiments in “psychogeography” to lucid analyses of the Watts riot, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other crises and upheavals of the sixties. For this new edition all the translations have been fine-tuned and the bibliography has been updated to include comments on dozens of newer books by and about the situationists.

Reading The Phenomenology of Spirit through a linguistic lens, Jeffrey Reid provides an original commentary on Hegel's most famous work. Beginning with a close analysis of the preface, where Hegel himself addresses the book's difficulty and explains his tortured language in terms of what he calls the “speculative proposition”, Reid demonstrates how every form of consciousness discussed in The Phenomenology involves and reveals itself as a form of language. Elucidating Hegel's speculative proposition, which consists of the reversal of the roles of the subject and predicate in such a way that the copula of the proposition becomes the lively arena of dialogical ambiguity and hermeneutical openness, this book offers new onto-grammatical readings of every chapter of The Phenomenology. Not only does this bring a new understanding to Hegel's foundational text, but the linguistic approach further allows Reid to unpack its complexity by relating it to contemporary contexts that share the same language structures that we discover in Hegel. Amongst many others, this includes Hegel's account of sense-certainty and the critique of the immediacy of consumer culture today.

The first English translation of the French cult classic that lampoons France’s most popular intellectuals of the post-1968 period and their ideas, which became forces of counterrevolution. Eric-John Russell’s translation of Jaime Semprún’s brutal takedown of France’s best-known intellectuals of the post-1968 period, A Gallery of Recuperation, is one of the first full English versions of any of Semprún’s books. Originally titled Précis de recuperation, the book is a scathing critique of ten major thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Semprún uses this catalog of careerism to reflect on the concept of recuperation—capitalism’s uncanny ability to coopt anticapitalist critiques and subvert subversion. His central question: What happens to revolutionary ideas, including Marxism itself, in the hands of professional intellectuals? Semprún’s idiosyncratic and playful style of polemics takes existentialism, humanism, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis to task, casting new light on the figures who have become dominant staples of modern Anglophone academia, and proving the necessity of critiquing intellectuals’ roles within contemporary capitalism. A cult classic among the French radical left and scholars of the Situationist International and May 1968, A Gallery of Recuperation never made the impact it should have. Russell’s translation marks a major step in recognizing Semprún’s work beyond its French context.

Contemporary philosophical research interconnects classical domains of philosophy, the arts, literature and social sciences. This collection of essays explores the operational role of experimentation, dissidence and heterogeneity in this process. It offers fundaments for the criticism of monolithical tendencies often put forward under the banner of the ‘Speculative Turn’ or New Realism, by means of exploring the contribution and influence of authors such as J. G. Hamann, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Guy Debord. These philosophers, historically placed within the margins of the philosophical mainstream, were decisive in the emergence of the philosophical thought and practices of Deleuze, Wittgenstein and Bataille, as shown here. The reader will also find re-evaluations of the contributions of Vico, Spinoza or Kant to posterity, next to new readings of authors like Foucault, Hadot, Benjamin and Adorno with regards to their significant experimental and dissident positions.

Appearing between two historical touchstones--the alleged end of communism and the 100th anniversary of Nietzsche's death--this book offers a provocative hypothesis about the philosopher's afterlife and the fate of leftist thought and culture. At issue is the relation of the dead Nietzsche (corpse) and his written work (corpus) to subsequent living Nietzscheanism across the political spectrum, but primarily among a leftist corps that has been programmed and manipulated by concealed dimensions of the philosopher's thought. If anyone is responsible for what Geoff Waite maintains is the illusory death of communism, it is Nietzsche, the man and concept. Waite advances his argument by bringing Marxist--especially Gramscian and Althusserian--theories to bear on the concept of Nietzsche/anism. But he also goes beyond ideological convictions to explore the vast Nietzschean influence that proliferates throughout the marketplace of contemporary philosophy, political and literary theory, and cultural and technocultural criticism. In light of a philological reconstruction of Nietzsche's published and unpublished texts, Nietzsche's Corps/e shuttles between philosophy and everyday popular culture and shows them to be equally significant in their having been influenced by Nietzsche--in however distorted a form and in a way that compromises all of our best interests. Controversial in its "decelebration" of Nietzsche, this remarkable study asks whether the postcontemporary age already upon us will continue to be dominated and oriented by the haunting spectre of Nietzsche's corps/e. Philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and those interested in western Marxism, popular culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the intersection of French and German thought will find this book both appealing and challenging.