Donald Nicholson-Smith

Born in Manchester, England, Donald Nicholson-Smith is a longtime resident of New York City. A sometime Situationist  (1965-67), he has translated Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Zone) and Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (Blackwell), as well as works by Guillaume Apollinaire, Antonin Artaud, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Thierry Jonquet, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, etc. His film work includes the English-language version of René Viénet’s anti-Maoist classic Peking Duck Soup (1977).

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Praise

“In this fine book, the Situationist author, whose writings fueled the fires of May 1968, sets out to pass down the foundational ideals of his struggle against the seemingly all-powerful fetishism of the commodity and in favor of the force of human desire and the sovereignty of life.”
—Jean Birnbaum, Le Monde

“A startling and invigorating restatement for the present ghastly era of humanity’s choice: socialism or barbarism.”
—Dave Barbu, Le Nouveau Père Duchesne

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Praise

“A clear-headed account . . . far and away the best we have so far.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“The only book on Debord in either French or English that can be unreservedly recommended . . . particularly useful for its extensive treatment of the Marxian connection that is usually ignored in culture-oriented accounts of the Situationists.”
—Ken Knabb, editor of Situationist International Anthology

“Jappe successfully gets to grips with the content of Debord’s and the SI’s activity in a way that is accessible and doesn’t require a vast amount of prior knowledge or an extensive vocabulary of obscure jargon in order to understand it. Debord has got a somewhat undeserved reputation for having an impenetrable and complex writing style—a myth which Jappe goes a long way towards refuting by examining the major concepts in Society of the Spectacle and other works, and putting them in the context of a wider historical basis and in terms of the SI as a whole.”
—Do or Die

“Political writing is always instrumental as well as utopian. Debord’s is no exception. Only sometimes writing has to reconcile itself to the idea that its time of instrumentality—its time as a weapon—lies a little in the future. Jappe’s book is true to its subject, above all, because it reads Debord, and helps us read him, with that future in mind.”
—T.J. Clark, from the Foreword

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About

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.”

“I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.”

Book Events

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Reviews

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Interviews

• RAOUL VANEIGEM: still the most inspirational man alive

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Mentions

• Boredom Is Always Counterrevolutionary: Donald Nicholson-Smith + Iain Boal at CIIS

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Blog

• The Reality of Denial and the Denial of Reality
• Money, Sex and Power: On a Sham Biography of Guy Debord