Spectacle, simulation and spectre: Debord, Baudrillard and the ghost of Marx

Parallax

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 63-72

  Hussey, Andrew ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0344414759     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13534640110064039     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. A provocative although clear account of the relation between Derrida's 'a-political project of deconstruction' and orthodox French Marxist thought is given in Gavin Bowd, L'interminable enterrement, Le communisme et les intellectuels français depuis 1956 (Paris: Digraphe, 1999), pp.173-175.
2. For more detailed accounts of Derrida's ties with Marxist thinkers and currents in the 1960s see also Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel 1960-1982 (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp.400-404, 417, 425, and
3. Patrick ffrench, The Time of Theory, A history of Tel Quel 1960-1983 (London: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.12, 15-16, 166, 71, 182.
4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, Peggy Kamuf (trans.) (London: Routledge, 1994), p.85.
5. See Michael Sprinker, 'Introduction', Ghostly Demarcations, A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1999), pp.6-7.
6. The relation between Debord and his post-modern peers is usefully analysed from a pro-Situationist perspective in Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp.131-134.
7. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Geoff Bennington and Ian MacLeod (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
8. Debord killed himself in 1994. His apparently mysterious death was the cause of much wild speculation in the press (for an account of this phenomena see Gavin Bowd and Andrew Hussey, 'From Being to Nothingness', in The Hacienda Must be Built: On the Legacy of Situationist Revolt, AURA 1996, pp.67-77). Baudrillard's own views are that Debord, along with Bataille, formulated the most negative form of critique, following Hegel and Kojève, in the Twentieth Century and that Debord's suicide was part of this process. 'Although I deplore the recent rétro fashion for Debord and the Situationists, and the way in which they have been misused by people who do not or cannot understand what they have to say about social spectacles, I still think that we should read Debord as a critic and as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth-century, precisely because he is not a post-modernist thinker, nor a prophet nor a precursor of the post-modern condition. He is the opposite: a suicide...' Jean Baudrillard, interview with author, Paris, May 2000.
9. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p.17.
10. This is one of the central arguments in Derrida's 1981 lecture 'Géopsychanalyse', reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Psyché, Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp.327-352.
11. ffrench, The Time of Theory, p.178.
12. This process is most clearly defined in Derrida's thinking on political parties: 'A movement is underway that we would be tempted to describe as a deconstruction of the traditional concepts of state, and thus of party and labor union. Even though they do not signify the withering away of the state, in the Marxist or Gramscian sense, one cannot analyse their historical singularity outside of the Marxist inheritance - where inheritance is more than ever a critical and transformative Alter, that is, where it is out of the question to be for or against the state in general.' Derrida, Specters of Marx, p.102.
13. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p.12.
14. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, pp.112-116.
15. Guy Debord, Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, Malcolm Imrie (trans.) (London: Verso, 1998), p.9.
16. Debord, Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, 9-10.
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p.116.
18. Jean Baudrillard, 'La monnaie vivante: singularité du phantasme' in L'Échange impossible (Paris: Galilée, 1999), pp.161-165.
19. 'Il n'y a plus d'acteurs ni de spectacteurs, tous sont immergés dans la même réalité, dans la même responsabilité tournante, dans un même destin impersonnel qui n'est que l'accomplissment d'un désir collectif.' ('There are no more actors or spectators, they are all immersed in the same circular responsibility, in the same impersonal destiny which is the only the accomplishment of a collective desire'), Baudrillard, L'Échange impossible, p.174.
20. Guy Debord, Cette Mauvaise Réputation (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p.45.
21. This same point of comparison between Baudrillard and Debord is made effectively by Mike Gane in Baudrillard's Bestiary (London: Routledge, 1991), p.112.
22. The relation between Debord, Baudrillard and 'post-modernist' critics is usefully analysed from a pro-Situationist perspective in Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp.131-134.
23. Jean Baudrillard, interview with author, Paris, May 2000.
24. Debord, Cette Mauvaise Réputation, p.117.