Raoul Vaneigem

Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934) is a native of Lessines (Hainaut), Belgium, a small town whose traditional claim to fame was the production of paving stones but which in the twentieth century also produced the Surrealist painter René Magritte and the Surrealist poet Louis Scutenaire. Vaneigem grew up in the wake of World War II in a working-class, socialist, and anticlerical milieu. He studied Romance philology at the Free University of Brussels and embarked on a teaching career that he later abandoned in favor of writing.

In late 1960 Vaneigem was introduced to Guy Debord by Henri Lefebvre. Soon after, he joined the Situationist International, which Debord and his comrades-in-arms had founded not long before, and he remained in the group throughout the decade of the 1960s. There is a grain of truth in the stereotypical view that Debord and Vaneigem, as two leading lights of the SI, stood for two opposite poles of the movement: the objective Debord versus the subjective Vaneigem: Marxism versus anarchism: icy cerebrality versus sensualism: and, of course, The Society of the Spectacle versus The Revolution of Everyday Life—the two major programmatic books of the SI, written by the two men without consultation, both published in 1967, each serving in its own way to kindle and color the May 1968 uprisings in France. 

Other works by Raoul Vaneigem already published in English include The Totality for Kids (London: Christoper Gray/Situationist International, 1963-64 [“Banalités de base,” 1962-63]); Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle (London: Bratach Dubh, 1981 [De la grève sauvage à l’autogestion généralisée, 1974]); The Book of Pleasures (London: Pending Press, 1983 [1979]); The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York: Zone, 1994 [1986]); and A Cavalier History of Surrealism (San Francisco: AK Press, 1999 [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

“All opponents of globalization should carry it in their luggage.”
—Le Monde

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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

• A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings in Rain Taxi

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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

• Money, Sex and Power: On a Sham Biography of Guy Debord