Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels

Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1978. First authorized German edition. 8vo (21×12,5cm), printed silver card wrappers with french flaps. 128pp. Translated by Jean-Jacques Raspaud. Text in German. Slight edge wear and rubbing to covers, else fine.

Guy Debord was a French theorist, cultural critic, artist, filmmaker, and the leading figure of the Situationist International. His book La société du spectacle was published in 1967 and critiques a society that, in his opinion, is increasingly obsessed with images and appearances instead of reality, truth and experience.

One year after Debord published his manifesto, the May 1968 revolts broke out and Situationist slogans could be found on many banners on the streets of Paris, which the Situationists considered their personal success. Guy Debord‘s The Society of the Spectacle is in the tradition of Marxist theory and was published exactly 100 years after Das Kapital. It is a critique of post-war capitalism that had a similar influence on the revolt of 1968 as Horkheimer and Adorno‘s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

This scarce copy is the first German edition, translated by Jean-Jacques Raspaud and authorized by Debord.