Hegel’s paradoxical posture, which subordinates the meaning of all reality to its historical culmination, while at the same time revealing this meaning by proclaiming itself to be that culmination, arises from the simple fact that the great thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries strove in his philosophy merely for reconciliation with the results of those revolutions. It thus transcended separation – but it did so in thought only. Such historical thought was still part of that consciousness which comes on the scene too late and supplies a justification after the fact. He sought to understand a world that made itself.
Inasmuch as he did no more than interpret that transformation, however, Hegel was merely the philosophical culmination of philosophy.
The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has lived constitute a comprehensive summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid and also all that it will permit."- Guy Debord (1988)ħ6 F OR HEGEL IT was no longer a matter of interpreting the world, but rather of interpreting the world’s transformation. Quite simply, the spectacle's domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation moulded to its laws.
Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord's text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image / information culture."In all that has happened in the last twenty years, the most important change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.
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