Situationist Bibliography

Pre-SI and Early SI Texts
French SI Books
SI Texts in Other Languages
Guy Debord’s Films
Post-SI Works
Books About the SI
Online Archives

Pre-SI and Early SI Texts

Gérard Berréby (ed.), Documents relatifs à la fondation de l’Internationale Situationniste: 1948-1957 (Allia, 1985). This huge collection is now out of print, but Éditions Allia has published separate editions of most of the main texts from this period, as well as numerous other books by or about members of the SI or of pre-SI groups. Many are listed below; for others, see www.editions-allia.com.

Mirella Bandini’s L’Esthétique, le Politique: de Cobra à l’Internationale Situationniste (French translation from the original Italian [1977]: Sulliver, 1998) includes numerous documents and illustrations from the same period.

Ruth Baumeister (ed.), Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture (nai010 Publishers, 2013) includes Danish and Swedish texts translated by Paul Larkin and French texts translated by Ken Knabb. The latter translations are also online here. Baumeister has also written several books about Jorn.

Potlatch: 1954–1957 (Lebovici, 1985; Gallimard, 1996). The complete newsletters of the Lettrist International (LI), with a preface by Debord.

Jean-Louis Rançon (ed.), Visages de l’avantgarde (La Nerthe, 2020) presents and annotates some LI documents.

Serge Berna, Écrits et documents (Sandre, 2024; ed. Jean-Louis Rançon). Berna was the guy who masterminded the 1950 Notre-Dame scandal.

Gil J Wolman’s Défense de mourir (Allia, 2001) includes all his LI texts and metagraphs plus numerous later works.

Guy Debord & Asger Jorn, Fin de Copenhague (1957; Allia, 2001). A collage collaboration.

Guy Debord & Asger Jorn, Mémoires (1958; Allia, 2004). See also Boris Donné’s in-depth study of this book, Pour Mémoires (Allia, 2004).

Guy Debord’s Lettres à Marcel Mariën (La Nerthe, 2015) were addressed to the editor of Les Lèvres Nues, the Belgian surrealist journal that included several texts by Debord and other LI members. The complete Les Lèvres Nues (1954-1958) were reissued by Allia in 1995.

Guy Debord, Enregistrements magnétiques, 1952–1961 (Gallimard, 2010; ed. Jean-Louis Rançon) includes two CDs of Debord’s tape-recorded works.

Ivan Chtcheglov’s Écrits retrouvés (Allia, 2006) includes recently discovered works. See also Jean-Marie Apostolidès & Boris Donné’s Ivan Chtcheglov, profil perdu (Allia, 2006), a preliminary biographical study of this intriguing early figure whose psychogeographical explorations and visions inspired Debord.

Jean-Michel Mension’s La Tribu (Allia, 1998), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as The Tribe (City Lights, 2001), is an illustrated series of reminiscences of the LI scene in Paris in the early 1950s with Debord, Wolman, Chtcheglov, Berna, Michèle Bernstein, Jean-Louis Brau, Éliane Brau, etc.

Ralph Rumney’s Le Consul (Allia, 1999), translated by Malcolm Imrie as The Consul (City Lights, 2002), also includes some material on that scene, but it’s mostly about Rumney’s later life as artist and bohemian.

Michèle Bernstein’s two quite interesting novels, Tous les chevaux du roi (1960; Allia 1998), translated by John Kelsey as All the King’s Horses (Semiotext(e), 2008), and La Nuit (1961; Allia, 1999), translated by Clodagh Kinsella as The Night (Book Works, 2013), narrate the same story (loosely based on Bernstein and Debord’s life in the late 1950s) in two different styles, the first parodying Françoise Sagan, the second parodying the nouveau roman.

Patrick Straram’s Les bouteilles se couchent (Allia, 2006) is a fictional portrayal of the scene described in the Mension book, centering around the legendary Chez Moineau café.

Patrick Straram’s Lettre à Guy Debord (Sens & Tonka, 2006) was written in 1960, after Straram had moved to Quebec.

Libero Andreotti & Xavier Costa (eds.), Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996; translated by Paul Hammond & Gerardo Denis) and Tom McDonough (ed.), The Situationists and the City: A Reader (Verso, 2010) are two anthologies of LI and early SI articles, the latter volume being the most comprehensive. See also Simon Sadler’s study The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998).

Gérard Berréby (ed.), Textes et documents situationnistes, 1957-1960 (Allia, 2003) includes all the SI’s publications from its first three years except the journals.

French SI Books

Internationale Situationniste: 1958-1969 (Van Gennep, 1970; Champ Libre, 1975; Fayard, 1997). 700-page facsimile reprint of all twelve issues of the French journal. Selections were translated by Christopher Gray in Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (Free Fall, 1974; Rebel, 1998). Ken Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981; revised and expanded edition, 2006; third edition: PM Press, 2024) is more accurate and much more comprehensive.

Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Gallimard, 1967). Anonymous partial translation as Treatise on Living for the Use of the Young Generations (1970). Complete book translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life by John Fullerton & Paul Sieveking (Practical Paradise, 1972), and by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Rebel Press/Left Bank, 1983; revised 1994; Rebel Press, 2001; new translation: PM Press, 2012).

Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Buchet-Chastel, 1967; Champ Libre, 1972; Gallimard, 1992). Translated as Society of the Spectacle by Fredy Perlman et al. (Black & Red, 1970; revised 1977; reprinted by AK Press, 2005); and as The Society of the Spectacle by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone, 1994), and by Ken Knabb (online, 2002; Rebel Press, 2004; revised and annotated edition, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014; new edition: PM Press, 2024).

René Viénet, Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968). Includes numerous documents and illustrations. Translated as Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, May ’68 (Autonomedia/Rebel Press, 1992). Though published in Viénet’s name, this book was actually collectively written by Debord, Khayati, Riesel, Vaneigem, and Viénet.

Guy Debord & Gianfranco Sanguinetti, La véritable scission dans l’Internationale (Champ Libre, 1972; Fayard, 1998). Mostly written by Debord. Analysis of post-1968 developments in the society and within the SI and the “situ milieu.” Translated by Michel Prigent & Lucy Forsyth as The Veritable Split in the International (Piranha, 1974; revised: Chronos, 1990); translated by John McHale as The Real Split in the International (Pluto, 2003).

Débat d’orientation de l’ex-Internationale Situationniste (Centre de Recherche sur la Question Sociale, 1974; Éditions du Cercle Carré, 2000). Internal SI documents, 1969-1971.

SI Texts in Other Languages

Most of the more original and important SI texts appeared in French. (The SI Anthology is drawn entirely from French texts except for the two Italian texts on pp. 431-432 and 464-468.) SI publications in other languages often represented the more eclectic, artistic, and opportunistic tendencies (notably in Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands) that were repudiated early in the SI’s history. In the later period, what would have become the British section never got off the ground, and the American and Italian sections scarcely lasted much longer, coming as they did in the middle of the post-1968 crises that were soon to lead to the SI’s dissolution.

The American section’s main publications were Robert Chasse’s pamphlet The Power of Negative Thinking (New York, 1968) (a critique of the New Left, originally published shortly before Chasse joined the SI) and one issue of a journal, Situationist International #1 (New York, 1969). After their December 1969 resignation/exclusion, Chasse and Bruce Elwell produced a critical history of the American section, A Field Study in the Dwindling Force of Cognition (1970), which the SI never answered. The American journal was translated into French by Fabrice de San Mateo (Les Réveilleurs de la Nuit, 2012).

The Italian section published one issue of a journal, Internazionale Situazionista #1 (1969), and carried out a number of interventions in the crises and struggles in Italy. A complete French edition, Écrits complets de la Section Italienne de l’Internationale Situationniste (1969–1972), was translated by Joël Gayraud & Luc Mercier (Contre-Moule, 1988). Contre-Moule also published Archives Situationnistes, volume 1 (1997), consisting of French translations of all the German and British SI texts.

The Scandinavian section published three issues of the Danish-language journal Situationistisk Revolution (1962, 1968, 1970). Some of its other activities were described in Internationale Situationniste #10, pp. 22–26.

Most of the major SI writings have been translated into English, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Some have also been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, and probably other languages. This bibliography, however, mentions only the English translations.

Guy Debord’s Films

Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Films Lettristes, 1952). 75 minutes.

Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (Dansk–Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni, 1959). 20 minutes.

Critique de la séparation (Dansk–Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni, 1961). 20 minutes.

La Société du Spectacle (Simar Films, 1973). 80 minutes.

Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film “La Société du Spectacle” (Simar Films, 1975). 25 minutes.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (Simar Films, 1978). 100 minutes.

All are 35mm, B&W.

Shortly before his death, Debord also made a 60-minute video: Guy Debord, son art et son temps, in collaboration with Brigitte Cornand (Canal Plus, 1994).

Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes: 1952–1978 (Champ Libre, 1978; Gallimard, 1994) contains illustrated scripts of all six films. There is also a separate annotated edition of the voice-over text of In girum (Lebovici, 1990; Gallimard, 1999). The Gallimard annotated edition includes some additional documents as well as a number of reviews of In girum that were originally collected under the title Ordures et décombres déballés à la sortie du film “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (Champ Libre, 1982). Des contrats (three of Debord’s film contracts) was published by Le Temps Qu’il Fait (1995).

The In girum script was translated by Lucy Forsyth (Pelagian, 1991). Translations of the other five films by various translators were collected in Richard Parry (ed.), Society of the Spectacle and Other Films (Rebel Press, 1992). Complete Cinematic Works (AK Press, 2003; to be reprinted by PM Press in 2026) includes Ken Knabb’s translations of all six scripts plus stills, documents, and extensive annotations.

All six of Debord’s films plus the Cornand video were reissued in a three-DVD set (Gaumont Vidéo, 2005). That set is no longer available, but there are various versions of the individual films online. For links to them plus the latest news on Debord’s films, see www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films.

Thomas Y. Levin’s informative early study Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord (1989) is online here. Grey Room on Debord’s Cinema (MIT Press, 2013), a special issue including eight articles, is online here. There are also at least four books in French: Antoine Coppola’s Introduction au cinéma de Guy Debord et de l’avant-garde situationniste (Sulliver, 2003); Guy-Claude Marie’s Guy Debord: de son cinéma en son art et en son temps (Vrin, 2009); Fabien Danesi’s Le cinéma de Guy Debord (Paris Expérimental, 2011); and Fabien Danesi, Emmanuel Guy & Fabrice Flahutez’s La Fabrique du cinéma de Guy Debord (Actes Sud, 2013).

Post-SI Works

GUY DEBORD, La Planète malade (unpublished 1971 article; Gallimard, 2004), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as A Sick Planet (Seagull, 2008), online here.

—Préface à la quatrième édition italienne de “La Société du Spectacle” (Champ Libre, 1979; later included in the Gallimard edition of Commentaires). Translated by Lucy Forsyth & Michel Prigent as Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition of “The Society of the Spectacle” (Chronos, 1979).

—A los libertarios/Aux libertaires (1980). Anonymous declaration supporting imprisoned Spanish anarchists. Included in Appels de la prison de Ségovie (Champ Libre, 1980).

—Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (Lebovici, 1985; Gallimard, 1993). Translated by Robert Greene as Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici (Tam Tam, 2001). Gérard Lebovici, founder of Éditions Champ Libre, friend of Debord, and financer of Debord’s last three films, was assassinated in 1984. (The murder was done professionally and the assassins were never identified.) Éditions Champ Libre (renamed Éditions Gérard Lebovici after the assassination, and then Éditions Ivrea) had published numerous books on Debord’s recommendations — a rich selection of works both radical and classical, past and present, which had a significant impact during the 1970s and 1980s. Most of them are still available from Éditions Ivrea: www.editions-ivrea.fr/fr/2-catalogue.html

—(with Alice Becker-Ho), Le “Jeu de la Guerre”: Relevé des positions successives de toutes les forces au cours d’une partie (Lebovici, 1987). Account of a board game (invented by Debord) with strategical commentaries. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as A Game of War and published in a box with game board and cardboard pieces (Atlas Press, 2007).

—Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Lebovici, 1988; Gallimard, 1992). Translated by Malcolm Imrie as Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso, 1990).

—Panégyrique, tome premier (Lebovici, 1989; Gallimard, 1993). Autobiographical reflections. Translated by James Brook as Panegyric, Volume I (Verso, 1991). A revised edition of that translation was published along with Volume 2 (trans. John McHale) as Panegyric, Volumes 1 & 2 (Verso, 2005).

—“Cette mauvaise réputation . . .” (Gallimard, 1993). Responses to various rumors and misconceptions about Debord. Translated by Bill Brown (2010), online here.

—Oeuvres (Gallimard, 2006; ed. by Jean-Louis Rançon in consultation with Alice Debord). This huge omnibus volume (1904 pages!) in the Gallimard “Quarto” series contains virtually everything Debord ever wrote — all of his books and all of his published articles, plus dozens of previously unpublished texts (from theses on the Congolese revolutionary movement to notes on poker strategy), plus selections from his correspondence.

—Correspondance, volume 1: 1957–1960 (Fayard, 1999). Translated by Stuart Kendall & John McHale as Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960) (Semiotext(e), 2009).

—Correspondance, volume 2: 1960–1964 (Fayard, 2001).

—Correspondance, volume 3: 1965–1968 (Fayard, 2003).

—Correspondance, volume 4: 1969–1972 (Fayard, 2004).

—Correspondance, volume 5: 1973–1978 (Fayard, 2005).

—Correspondance, volume 6: 1979–1987 (Fayard, 2007).

—Correspondance, volume 7: 1988–1994 (Fayard, 2008).

—Correspondance, volume “0”: 1951–1957 (Fayard, 2010). In addition to the earlier letters, this volume also includes various letters that were discovered too late to be included in the previous volumes. The whole series was edited by Patrick Mosconi in consultation with Alice Debord.

—Le Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille (Fayard, 2004). Facsimile edition of certain early letters that were not included in the above-mentioned series.

Jean-François Martos’s Correspondance avec Guy Debord (Le Fin Mot de l’Histoire, 1998) includes letters between Debord and Martos from 1981-1991. This book is no longer available, having been legally condemned for infringing on the copyright of Librairie Arthème Fayard, which had arranged with Debord’s widow Alice (Becker-Ho) Debord to publish the multivolume edition cited above. See Martos’s Sur l’interdiction de ma “Correspondance avec Guy Debord” (Le Fin Mot de l’Histoire, 1999).

La Librairie de Guy Debord is a five-volume series (edited by Laurence Le Bras et al. and published by Éditions L’Échappé) reproducing all of Debord’s personal notes on his readings, with detailed annotations:

—La Librairie de Guy Debord: Stratégie (L’Échappé, 2018). Debord’s notes on Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Clausewitz, etc.

—La Librairie de Guy Debord: Poésie, etc. (L’Échappé, 2019). Debord’s notes on Homer, Li Po, Villon, Shakespeare, Swift, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Apollinaire, Breton, Joyce, etc.

—La Librairie de Guy Debord: Marx/Hegel (L’Échappé, 2021). Debord’s notes on Marx, Engels, Lukács, Korsch, Wittfogel, etc., and on Hegel and related works.

—La Librairie de Guy Debord: Histoire (L’Échappé, 2022). Debord’s notes on various histories and historians.

—La Librairie de Guy Debord: Philosophie (L’Échappé, in preparation).

Debord also translated into French: Protestation devant les libertaires du présent et du futur sur les capitulations de 1937 (text by the most radical anarchist current during the Spanish civil war: Champ Libre, 1979); Stances sur la mort de son père (classic Spanish poem by Jorge Manrique: Champ Libre, 1980; Le Temps Qu’il Fait, 1995); and Sanguinetti’s Véridique rapport (see below).

GIANFRANCO SANGUINETTI (pseudonym Censor), Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (Milan, 1975). The anonymous first edition of this book, seemingly written by an enlightened conservative arguing that an alliance with the Communist Party was in the best interest of the Italian ruling class, was mailed to some 500 politicians and journalists and stirred up a lot of confused debate and speculation. A few months later Sanguinetti created a second scandal by revealing that he was the author. Translated into French by Guy Debord as Véridique rapport sur les dernières chances de sauver le capitalisme en Italie (Champ Libre, 1976). Translated into English by Len Bracken as The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy (Flatland, 1997).

—Del terrorismo e dello stato (Milan, 1979). Translated into French by Jean-François Martos (1980) and by Jean-François Labrugère and Philippe Rouyau (1980), and thence into English by Lucy Forsyth and Michel Prigent as On Terrorism and the State (Chronos, 1982).

RAOUL VANEIGEM, Terrorisme ou révolution (introduction to Ernest Coeurduroy’s Pour la révolution, Champ Libre, 1972). Translated as Terrorism or Revolution (Black Rose, 1975); reprinted in Collection of Desires (Paper Street, 2003).

—(pseudonym Ratgeb), De la grève sauvage à l’autogestion généralisée (Éditions 10/18, 1974). First two chapters translated by Paul Sharkey as Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle (Bratach Dubh, 1981; Elephant, 1990). Third chapter translated by Ken Knabb as Total Self-Management (website, 2001). The whole book (combining those two translations) was reprinted in Collection of Desires (Paper Street, 2003) under the title From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-Management and posted online here.

—(pseudonym J.F. Dupuis), Histoire désinvolte du surréalisme (Paul Vermont, 1977). Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as A Cavalier History of Surrealism (AK Press, 1999).

—Le livre des plaisirs (Encre, 1979). Translated by John Fullerton as The Book of Pleasures (Pending Press, 1983); reprinted in Collection of Desires (Paper Street, 2003).

—Le mouvement du Libre-Esprit (Ramsay, 1986; L’or des fous, 2005). Translated by Randall Cherry & Ian Patterson as The Movement of the Free Spirit (Zone, 1994).

—Adresse aux vivants sur la mort qui les gouverne et l’opportunité de s’en défaire (Seghers, 1990).

—La résistance au christianisme: Les hérésies des origines au XVIIIe siècle (Fayard, 1993). Translated by Bill Brown as Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century (Eris, 2023).

—Avertissement aux écoliers et lycéens (Mille et Une Nuits, 1995). Translated by JML/Not Bored as A Warning to Students of All Ages (2000) and reprinted in Collection of Desires (Paper Street, 2003).

—Nous qui désirons sans fin (Le Cherche Midi, 1996).

—Pour une Internationale du genre humain (Le Cherche Midi, 1999).

—Déclaration des droits de l’être humain (Le Cherche Midi, 2001). Translated by Liz Heron as A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings: On the Sovereignty of Life as Surpassing the Rights of Man (Pluto, 2003; translation revised by Donald Nicholson-Smith: PM Press, 2019).

—Le Chevalier, la Dame, le Diable et la mort (Le Cherche Midi, 2003).

—Rien n’est sacré, tout peut se dire (La Découverte, 2003).

—Salut à Rabelais! (Complexe, 2003).

—Modestes propositions aux grévistes (Verticales, 2004).

—Voyage à Oarystis (Estuaire, 2005).

—Journal imaginaire (Le Cherche Midi, 2006).

—Entre le deuil du monde et la joie de vivre: Les situationnistes et les mutations des comportements (Verticales–Gallimard, 2008).

—Lettre à mes enfants et aux enfants du monde à venir (Le Cherche Midi, 2012). Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as A Letter to My Children and the Children of the World to Come (PM Press, 2018).

—Rien n’est fini, tout commence (Allia, 2014). A lengthy series of conversations with Allia publisher Gérard Berréby in which Vaneigem looks back on his early life and his experiences as one of the key figures in the SI. Includes lots of anecdotes about Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Attila Kotányi, René Viénet, Mustapha Khayati, J.V. Martin, and other SI members. Illustrated with hundreds of photos. Extensive excerpts from the book were translated by Bill Brown as Self-Portraits and Caricatures of the Situationist International (Colossal Books, 2015).

(This is just a partial list of Vaneigem’s post-SI works — he has been very prolific.)

RENÉ VIÉNET, La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? (1973). 90-minute kung-fu film with altered soundtrack. Keith Sanborn produced a videocopy with English subtitles titled Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

—Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires (1977). 120-minute film, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as Peking Duck Soup.

Viénet also produced several other films, mostly about Mao’s China.

Books About the SI

In French:

Jean-Louis Brau’s Cours camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi! (Albin Michel, 1968) and Éliane Brau’s Le Situationnisme ou la nouvelle Internationale (Debresse, 1968) are confused and unreliable, but perhaps of historical interest since the authors were in the 1950s LI scene.

Jean-Jacques Raspaud & Jean-PierreVoyer’s L’Internationale Situationniste: protagonistes, chronologie, bibliographie (avec un index des noms insultés) (Champ Libre, 1971) is a handy reference guide and index to the French journals.

Jean-François Martos’s Histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste (Lebovici, 1989) is an “orthodox” view, recounting the SI’s activities and perspectives largely by way of quotations from the SI’s publications.

Pascal Dumontier’s Les situationnistes et Mai 68 (Lebovici, 1990) is an insightful and well-documented account of this period of the SI’s practice.

Cécile Guilbert’s Pour Guy Debord (Gallimard, 1996) is a lightweight aesthetic appreciation.

Gianfranco Marelli’s L’amère victoire du situationnisme (French translation from the original Italian, Sulliver, 1998) examines the SI from an anarchist perspective, focusing on the co-option of certain aspects of the situationists in the aftermath of May 1968.

Frédéric Shiffter’s Guy Debord, l’atrabilaire (Distance, 1999), revised ed. Contre Debord (P.U.F., 2004), is earnestly clueless.

Christophe Bourseiller’s Vie et mort de Guy Debord (Plon, 1999) is a gossipy biography based in large part on interviews with people who knew Debord or who crossed his path at one point or another. The various anecdotes, rumors, and interpretations are often hostile and contradictory, and needless to say should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Laurent Chollet, L’Insurrection situationniste (Dagorno, 2000). I saw this volume in a Paris bookstore when it first came out, flipped to a section purporting to give detailed info on the American situ scene, found nine glaring errors of fact in a single paragraph, and did not bother to buy it.

Shigenobu Gonzalvez’s Guy Debord ou la beauté du négatif (Mille et Une Nuits, 1998; expanded edition: Nautilus, 2002) includes the most extensive Debord bibliography up to that point.

Christophe Bourseiller (ed.), Archives et documents situationnistes (Denoël, 2001-2005) was a book-length journal of which five annual volumes appeared. The journals include useful bibliographical information along with other material of varying and often merely tangential interest or reliability (e.g. interviews with people who may or may not have had much to do with the SI or much understanding of what it was really about).

Sergio Ghirardi’s Nous n’avons pas peur des ruines: les situationnistes et notre temps (Insomniaque, 2004) discusses the situationists from a more “Vaneigemist” perspective: the author focuses on Vaneigem’s characteristic themes and often echoes Vaneigem’s rhetorical style.

Jean-Marie Apostolidès’s Les tombeaux de Guy Debord (Exils, September 1999; enlarged ed. Flammarion, 2006) is an interesting but sometimes dubiously speculative psychological interpretation of Debord, based on inferences from his more autobiographical works and from Michèle Bernstein’s two novels, Tous les chevaux du roi and La nuit. The book has virtually no bearing on Debord’s revolutionary ventures, which, the few times they are mentioned, are simplistically reinterpreted to fit in with the author’s psychological thesis. Caught up in his own admittedly difficult project of discovering the hidden essence of Debord the person, Apostolidès quite unjustifiably projects this obscurity onto Debord’s radical work: “As for revolution, he always presents it to us in a hypothetical form, as a promise or as an ungraspable event upon which we can only meditate” (p. 147). Can he really be talking about the person who more lucidly than anyone else during the last century challenged people to abandon passivity and idle speculation and take part in a revolutionary project that by its very nature must be concrete and participatory? At the end of his book Apostolidès opines that it’s time to “go beyond the stage of the spectacular reception of Debord’s works (whether laudatory or depreciatory) to another stage, that of interpretation” (p. 161). In practice this sort of “interpretation” is usually simply another way of spectating. There is another tack that supersedes all these tortuous academic problematics — that of using Debord’s works for revolutionary purposes, as they were clearly and explicitly intended to be used. Those who do so will have no trouble understanding what matters about him, without worrying overly much about his personal foibles. For those who don’t, revolution will indeed remain “hypothetical” and “ungraspable.”

Stéphane Zagdanski’s Debord ou La diffraction du temps (Gallimard, 2008) is erratically opinionated (among other things, the author is very pro-Heidegger and very anti-“sixties”) but sometimes insightful.

Bessompierre’s L’amitié de Guy Debord (Les Fondeurs du Brique, 2010) is a sympathetic personal account by a friend.

Jacob Rogozinski & Michel Vanni (eds.), Dérives pour Guy Debord (Van Dieren, 2011) is a collection of articles by diverse authors about various aspects of Debord.

Patrick Marcolini’s Le mouvement situationniste: une histoire intellectuelle (L’Échappée, 2012) surveys the SI’s influence on later currents and movements in Europe and America (political, academic, artistic, literary, architectural).

André Trillaud’s Debord, etc. (Éditions 13 bis, 2013) is freewheeling and irreverent, sometimes pertinent, sometimes dubious. The author (now deceased) was an old friend of mine, and over the years I have found his wide-ranging writings to be almost invariably provocative and refreshing. But in this book more than many of his others, I think that his insights are mixed with too many facile pseudocritiques.

Emmanuel Guy & Laurence Le Bras (eds.), Guy Debord: un art de la guerre (BNF/Gallimard, 2013) is a profusely illustrated collection of informative articles based on Debord’s personal archives, which were acquired in 2012 by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Éric Brun’s Les Situationnistes: Une avant-garde totale (1950-1972) (CNRS, 2014) is a ponderous sociological study.

Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot’s L’Internationale Situationniste: de l’histoire au mythe (1948–2013) (P.U.F., 2015) is an extensive examination of the “reception” and “mythification” of the SI in the decades following its dissolution.

Jean-Marie Apostolidès’s Debord le naufrageur (Flammarion, 2015) is the most exhaustively researched Debord biography. Unfortunately, like his previous study, Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord (see above), it is marred by the author’s obsessive focus on psychoanalyzing Debord. Some of his speculative interpretations seem plausible, but others do not. Meanwhile, he has relatively little to say about Debord’s subversive ventures beyond attributing them to his supposed character traits. In a volume of nearly 600 pages, there are only nine rather muddled pages on the May 1968 revolt and nothing whatsoever on the Strasbourg scandal.

Laurence Le Bras & Emmanuel Guy (eds.), Lire Debord, avec des notes inédites de Guy Debord (L’Échappé, 2016) includes 250 pages of Debord’s notes in preparation for his films and for various unrealized projects, followed by numerous scholarly articles. Luc Mercier’s Présent fait aux lecteurs de “Lire Debord” (Paris, 2023) is a recommended supplement. It corrects errors in the book, fills in references the editors were unaware of, and in the process elucidates numerous aspects of Debord and his projects. A PDF of it can be obtained from Luc at lmercier@mageos.com.

André Bertrand & André Schneider’s Le Scandale de Strasbourg mis à nu par ses célibataires, même (Insomniaque, 2018) is an excellent, detailed, and abundantly illustrated account of the Strasbourg scandal by two of its main perpetrators.

Daniel Denevert’s Dérider le désert (Éditions La Grange Batelière, 2018) is a collection of articles from 1980-2015. You can read a translation of one of the articles here. Daniel (now deceased) was a close friend and collaborator of mine during the 1970s, and my translations of several of his texts from that earlier period are also online at this website. Those earlier texts were largely focused on the SI and the situ milieu. The articles in this book present critical observations on current events without much explicit reference to the situationists, but certain underlying situationist themes remain evident. Les coulisses du naufrage (2020), a smaller collection of more recent articles by Daniel (including some remarks on the Gilets Jaunes movement and on the Covid crisis), is available from the same publisher.

Anselm Jappe, Un complot permanent contre le monde entier: Essais sur Guy Debord (L’Échappée, 2023) gathers some informative essays by the author of the best book on Debord (see in the English section below).

Vanessa Theodoropoulou’s Le monde en situation: La révolte sensible de l’Internationale Situationniste (Les Presses du Réel, 2024) is a comprehensive study of the constructive, imaginative, geographical, and behavioral “genres” invented by the early situationists.

Pol Charles, Vaneigem l’insatiable (L’Age d’homme, 2002).

Laurent Chollet, Les situationnistes: L’utopie incarnée (Gallimard, 2004).

Larent Six, Raoul Vaneigem: L’éloge de la vie affinée (Luce Wilquin, 2005).

Grégory Lambrette, Raoul Vaneigem (Libertaires, 2007).

Jean-Claude Bilheran, Sous l’écorce de Guy Debord, le rudéral (Sens & Tonka, 2007).

Toulouse-la-Rose, Debord contre Debord (Nautilus, 2010).

Fabien Danesi, Le mythe brisé de l’Internationale Situationniste (Les Presses du Réel, 2011).

Emmanuel Guy, Le Jeu de la guerre de Guy Debord: L’émancipation comme projet (Éditions B42, 2020).

Bertrand Cochard, Guy Debord et la philosophie (Hermann, 2021).

Emmanuel Roux, Guy Debord: Abolir le spectacle (Michalon, 2022).

In English:

Richard Gombin’s Les Origines du gauchisme (Le Seuil, 1971), translated by Michael Perl as The Origins of Modern Leftism (Penguin, 1975), includes a relatively objective assessment of the SI’s role leading up to May 1968.

David Jacobs & Chris Winks’s At Dusk: The Situationist Movement in Historical Perspective (Perspectives, 1975; reissued 1999) is a Frankfurt School–influenced critique of the situationists by two ex-members of the situ group Point-Blank. I find it both turgid and unconvincing, but maybe I’m biased since it also includes some criticisms of “Knabbism.”

Jean Barrot’s What Is Situationism: Critique of the Situationist International (Unpopular Books, 1987) contends that Debord did not really understand capitalism. As Anselm Jappe put it: “The writer has clearly read neither Debord nor Marx.”

Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 1989) concentrates mostly on the presituationist ventures of the 1950s. The author relates those ventures enthusiastically, impressionistically, and ahistorically to other extremist cultural movements such as Dada and early punk, while showing little interest in or understanding of the SI’s revolutionary aims and perspectives.

[In my autobiography I go into the above book in more detail: “To put it briefly, in both his Village Voice article and his subsequent book, Lipstick Traces, Marcus relates to the situationists aesthetically, as a fascinated spectator. For all his awe of their extremist ideas, he shows little interest in the carefully calculated tactics and organizational forms through which they tried to implement those ideas instead of merely impulsively ‘expressing’ them like his other heroes, the dadaists and the punks. His personal, impressionistic approach is more illuminating than the fatuous accounts of most academic and cultural critics, but he shares the latter’s main blind spot: preferring the situationists’ early, more intriguingly exotic phase, while seeing their later revolutionary perspective as an embarrassing anachronism. Such critics invariably assure us that, whatever revolutions may have happened in the past, it’s all over now and will never happen again. After ridiculing the SI’s advocacy of workers councils (which was far less simplistic than he implies), Marcus blasély concludes: ‘If the situationist idea of general contestation was realized in May 1968, the idea also realized its limits. The theory of the exemplary act . . . may have gone as far as such a theory or such an act can go’ — ignoring how close the May movement came to going much farther (see the sections ‘What could have happened in May 1968’ and ‘The ultimate showdown’ of The Joy of Revolution, chapter 3) and never mentioning subsequent movements such as Portugal 1974 or Poland 1980 (which in some respects did go farther) or any of the individual currents attempting to actually use and develop the situationists’ achievements. I myself am oddly pigeonholed as a ‘student’ of the SI, as if there was nothing left for any of us latecomers but to produce learned dissertations or wistful elegies on the heroic ventures of bygone times.”]

Elisabeth Sussman (ed.), On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957-1972 (MIT/Institute of Contemporary Art, 1989), an illustrated catalog of the 1989-1990 exhibition on the SI in Paris, London, and Boston, includes an assortment of academic articles devoted primarily to the early artistic and cultural aspects of the SI’s venture.

Iwona Blazwick (ed.), An Endless Adventure, an Endless Passion, an Endless Banquet: A Situationist Scrapbook (Verso/ICA, 1989) includes an assortment of texts illustrating the (for the most part rather confused) influence of the SI in England from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Routledge, 1992) effectively demonstrates that the situationists had virtually nothing in common with Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, and other “postmodernists” and “deconstructionists” with which they are so often ignorantly confused.

Anselm Jappe’s Guy Debord (Via Valeriano, 1995), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (University of California Press, 1999; PM Press, 2018) is still 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 usually ignored in culture-oriented accounts of the situationists. (The bibliography of the 2018 edition also includes more detailed comments on many of the books listed here.)

Simon Ford’s The Realization and Suppression of the Situationist International: An Annotated Bibliography 1972-1992 (AK Press, 1995) lists over 600 post-SI texts, mostly in English, about or influenced by the SI. Ford also authored The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (Black Dog, 2005), which, like many of the other books listed here, does not live up to its extravagant title.

Stewart Home (ed.), What Is Situationism? A Reader (AK Press, 1996) presents an assortment of views, mostly hostile and uncomprehending, as is Home’s own previous book, The Assault on Culture (Aporia/Unpopular Books, 1988; AK Press, 2002).

Len Bracken’s Guy Debord—Revolutionary (Feral House, 1997) has the merit of focusing on the radical aspects of Debord’s ventures. It has the fault of being rather sloppy: the translations are uneven, speculations are not always clearly distinguished from facts, and the numerous typos do not inspire confidence in the author’s care for accuracy.

Ken Knabb’s Public Secrets (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997) includes The Joy of Revolution (a substantial text on the problems and possibilities of a situationist-type revolution) as well as considerable material about the SI and SI-influenced groups in the US and Europe.

Vincent Kaufmann’s Guy Debord: La révolution au service de la poésie (Fayard, 2001), translated by Robert Bononno as Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), is a comprehensive and insightful examination of the cultural and “poetic” aspects of Debord’s life and work. The political aspects are treated in a more perfunctory manner.

Andrew Hussey’s The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (Jonathan Cape, 2001) is riddled with factual errors. The author’s crude interpretations of Debord’s supposed personal motives are derived primarily from hostile sources and reflect a very superficial understanding of Debord’s projects and perspectives.

Tom McDonough (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist International (MIT Press, 2002) presents a misleadingly one-sided selection of 150 pages of SI articles (mostly early ones on art and urbanism, with virtually nothing from the last two-thirds of the group’s existence) insulated by a 300-page buffer zone of academic commentary. Were it not for the inclusion of a salutary polemic by T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith (“Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International”), readers of the book would get the impression that the situationists were primarily important as avant-garde artists, and that their revolutionary ventures were merely incidental and outdated eccentricities.

Andy Merrifield’s Guy Debord (Reaktion Books, 2005), though less obnoxiously glib than Hussey’s book, contains little new information on Debord.

Stefan Zweifel et al. (eds.), In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni—The Situationist International (1957-1972) (JRP/Ringier/Museum Tinguely, 2006), a profusely illustrated catalog of a Switzerland/Netherlands exhibition, includes several articles in English, mostly hostile and unreliable, and there are numerous typos, mistranslations, and other errors (e.g. several texts are erroneously listed as “translated by Ken Knabb”).

Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy (Minor Compositions, 2011) rightly notes the continued political relevance of Debord (in contrast to Baudrillard, etc.), but in his concluding “Theses on Debord” the author presents ludicrously caricatural summaries of Debord’s positions, with which he then pedantically explains his disagreements.

Mikkel Rasmussen & Jakob Jakobsen (eds.), Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Nebula/Autonomedia, 2011) provides plentiful evidence of the cluelessness and silliness of the Nashists, the Spurists, The Situationist Times, the “Second Situationist International,” etc., whose participants and sympathizers seem to have understood little or nothing of what Debord and the SI were actually about.

McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso, 2011) is an assortment of glib articles focusing mostly on the less political participants in and around the early SI. This is not an unreasonable project, and the reader may find a few interesting observations about Jorn or Constant or the Lettrists. But the author’s notion that the Nashists and their various cohorts can be regarded as more or less equally significant rivals of Debord and the SI is laughable.

McKenzie Wark’s The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the 20th Century (Verso, 2013) is another glib hodgepodge, this time looking at a variety of post-SI ventures by T.J. Clark, Sanguinetti, Viénet, Debord, Alice Becker-Ho, etc.

Frances Stracey’s Constructed Situations: A New History of the Situationist International (Pluto, 2014) is in no way a history of the SI, but simply another assortment of articles on a few aspects of the situationists’ ventures, the most interesting of which is “The Situation of Women.”

Olivier Assayas’s A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord and Two Essays on Guy Debord (SYNEMA, 2012; translated by Rachel Zerner & Adrian Martin) is by the noted filmmaker who organized the reissuing of Debord’s films in DVD format.

Jean-Pierre Voyer’s It’s Crazy How Many Things Don’t Exist: Selected Writings (Cruel Hospice, 2015; translated by Isaac Cronin, Roger Grégoire & Linda Lanphear) includes some rabid attacks on Debord for not recognizing Voyer’s amazing discovery that the economy and the spectacle “don’t exist.” Personally, I have found most of Voyer’s writings (after the initial promise of his pamphlet Reich: How to Use and perhaps one or two of his earliest books) to be delirious, but a few people still swear by him, including my ex-friend Isaac Cronin, who blames me and Donald Nicholson-Smith for a “purposeful and conspiratorial silence” through which we almost single-handedly suppressed Voyer’s ground-breaking message in the English-speaking world. I’m not quite sure how Donald and I managed to prevent Voyer’s partisans from publishing and publicizing his works in English during a period of more than 30 years — I guess I just didn’t realize how powerful and intimidating we were! — but with this book they have finally broken through the conspiracy of silence, so now you can find out for yourself what, if anything, you’ve been missing.

Marco Briziarelli & Emiliano Armano (eds.), The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism (University of Westminster Press, 2017) is a collection of academic articles.

Tom Bunyard’s Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (Haymarket Books, 2018) is difficult in places, but the patience and clarity of the presentation make it more accessible and informative than the Russell book (see below).

James Trier’s Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit (Brill, 2019), yet another would-be history of the SI, prides itself on correcting the “Debordian slant” of the SI Anthology (regarding which, see www.bopsecrets.org/recent/responses.htm#Anthology).

Sam Cooper’s The Situationist International in Britain: Modernism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2019) examines Alexander Trocchi, the English SI, King Mob, and later SI influences in the UK.

Tanya Loi’s We Make Revolution in Our Spare Time: The History and Legacy of the Situationist International (Public Reading Rooms, 2019) discusses various archives and collections of SI-related material.

Alastair Hemmens & Gabriel Zacarias (eds.), The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook (Pluto Press, 2020) is a comprehensive collection of informative articles on a well-chosen range of topics.

Eric-John Russell’s Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), an ambitious study relating The Society of the Spectacle to Hegel’s Science of Logic, is often so dense that I doubt if many readers will get past the first few pages unless they are already very familiar with Hegel.

Edward John Matthews’s two books, Arts and Politics of the Situationist International (Lexington Books, 2021) and Guy Debord’s Politics of Communication: Liberating Language from Power (Lexington Books, 2024) are sympathetic and sometimes insightful, but more often simplistic and repetitive.

Mehdi El Hajoui & Anna O’Meara (eds.), On the Poverty of Student Life (Common Notions, 2022) presents several articles on the famous Strasbourg pamphlet (including an interview with its main author, Mustapha Khayati) followed by an illustrated bibliography of more than a hundred editions in twenty-one different languages.

Dominique Routhier’s With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation (Verso, 2023) attempts to situate the SI in the context of the automation and cybernetics that were emerging in the 1950s and 1960s.

* * *

I haven’t attempted to mention, let alone review, the thousands of printed articles or online texts about the situationists, but you can find an amusingly diverse sampling of such reactions in The Blind Men and the Elephant. Having perused an immense quantity of those reactions over the years, I think it’s safe to say that while the situationists may not have always been right, their critics are almost always wrong; and that it’s more interesting and instructive to read the original texts rather than to rely on commentaries by journalistic or academic spectators. Despite the situationists’ reputation for difficulty, they are not really all that hard to understand once you begin to experiment for yourself.

Online Archives

www.notbored.org/SI.html. The translations at this site are often awkward and the commentaries by the host (Bill Brown) are sometimes questionable, but for nearly thirty years this has been one of the most comprehensive and dedicatedly maintained archives of SI-related material in English. You can find a lot of material there that has not been translated elsewhere.

https://libcom.org/tags/situationist-international. This large assortment of SI-related texts is just one section of a huge site which includes collections of texts on numerous other radical topics and movements.

The above two websites are among the most extensive and conveniently accessible on the Web. A few others:

https://1000littlehammers.wordpress.com/situationist. This site includes PDFs of many of the books praised or criticized in the present bibliography.

https://ubuweb.com/historical/si/index.html. This page links to PDFs of all 12 issues of the French journal Internationale Situationniste.

http://debordiana.chez.com/debordiana.htm. This site purports to include a large number of SI and pre-SI texts in many different languages, but the site organization is confusing and except for the French texts virtually all the links are dead. The site obviously hasn’t been updated in years. Still, you can find a large number of the original French texts in this section of the site: http://debordiana.chez.com/francais1.htm

https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com. This blog includes Anthony Hayes’s draft translations of many SI articles that are not otherwise available in English, along with related information. The blog-style organization makes it rather difficult to see what’s there at a glance, but if you browse you may come upon some things of interest.

https://situationnisteblog.wordpress.com. This blog is hosted by Mehdi El Hajoui, a collector of situationist documents. It includes images and descriptions of leaflets, posters, pamphlets, etc., that he has acquired as well as news about recent SI-related publications.

This online bibliography, compiled by Ken Knabb, is a continually updated version of the bibliography that has originally appeared in the various editions of the Situationist International Anthology. The present version, prepared for the new edition just published by PM Press (October 2024), has been reorganized and expanded to include comments on dozens of newer books by and about the situationists.

Note that this bibliography is focused on books by and about the Situationist International (the specific organization, 1957-1972) along with a few closely related pre-SI and post-SI works. The SI has also had a widespread influence on other individuals and groups all over the world, who are sometimes referred to as “situationist” in the broader sense of the term. To get some idea of the range of such groupings and their publications, see the Inventory of the Ken Knabb Papers at Yale.