Vaneigem and the SI, on Immediatism Podcast

Five episodes on Immediatism podcast are readings of Situationist International texts, as the start of a new series (which will continue next time with the SI Anthology). Aragorn's piece discusses Debord's/SotS's continued relevance. Ken Knabb's Preface gives a sense of what to expect from SotS, for those who haven't read it, and is an enjoyable essay even for those who have. The remaining three essays are all included at the front of the Treatise on Etiquette for the Younger Generations, previously known as The Revolution of Everyday Life, by Raoul Vaneigem.

Debord, Ressentiment, and Revolutionary Anarchism, by Aragorn!
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/690-debord-ressentiment-revolut...

Preface to the Society of the Spectacle, by Ken Knabb
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/691-preface-to-the-society-of-t...

Raoul Vaneigem, the Other Situationist, by Jason McQuinn
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/692-raoul-vaneigem-the-other-si...
Preface to the Treatise on Etiquette for the Younger Generation, by Raoul Vaneigem
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/693-preface-to-treatise-on-etiq...
Introduction to the Treatise on Etiquette for the Younger Generation, by Raoul Vaneigem
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/694-introduction-to-treatise-on...

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There are 18 Comments

cool but these are all texts from the 1960s and nothing even remotely recent. Are any of them still alive?

Not cognitively he's not -- not from what I saw crashing in the same apartment as Vaneigem and some of his retinue in Poblenou in Barcelona in 2014.

OK, tell us, what did you see when you were crashing in the same apartment as Vaneigem and some of his retinue in Poblenou in Barcelona in 2014?

He was a very nice old chap of 79 or 80, but,

1. He went into high dudgeon claiming that the Spanish anarchists never used the term libertarian communism. He was wrong, of course, and I don't know why he was such a dogmatic fool about it,

2. He seemed to think that communism was that stuff they used to have over there in Russia, and that libertarian is the right-wing US sociopath version of the word -- which is mighty weird, since he had dwelled in a French language culture his entire life and should know better by now,

3. I traipsed along with others as he made a series of presentations about a little pamphlet he'd just had published at various self-managed social centers in Sants, Poble Sec and so on. At the one at Flor de Maig, in Poblenou, he seemed to be saying that violence should only be used "to defend our spaces" and never in any pre-emptive sense by a mass revolutionary movement against its enemies. And this in Barcelona, where the catastrophic failure of the CNT-FAI on these terms doomed the most advanced liberatory social movement of all time to defeat.

Verdict: he seemed like a likeable old feller, but I'd rather have been repeatedly having breakfast with Debord. Unfortunately it was a bit late for that.

Nice troll job, dood. You're so full of shit. Raoul and I traveled throughout Spain together and we only ever stayed in the best private accommodations. Never with the rabble. My friend Raoul knows more about anarchism and communism (historical and modern) than you can ever pretend to know from behind your keyboard. He prefers to play Blanka in Street Fighter but also kicks ass as Chun-Li.

OK fine, but all that as bad as it may or may not be is not the same thing as being cognitively dead, is it? Speaks to what he was like in 2014 but not to what he did before then, I mean between the 1960s and 2014 which was a lot. He didn't write just one book or just one good book, am I right?

His "contribution" to the S.I. was the most self-indulgent and harmless to Capital one, of claiming that hedonism is somehow subversive of bourgeois order. Consumer society moved the goalposts on that one more than a half-century ago.

OK so you've rejected the Vaneigem of 1965 and the Vaneigem of 2014, thus undercutting virtually the entire premise of these podcasts. To what end?

The insights and analysis of the S.I. are crucial for capable real world anti-capitalist political actors, but the Vaneigem stuff is strictly for self-indulgent harmless fools.

Separating Vaneigem ("bad") from the SI ("good") is impossible where the 1962 to 1965 period is concerned, even Debord at his least charitable said so.

It's really from 1964 onward that they produced most of their more formidable and crucial body of work. So, why not do a podcast on that?

That's EXACTLY what the podcast is about, only it doesn't give the years. In 1964 the SI was equally Vaneigem and Debord.

No response to 'ressentiment' claim= no argument to make on that score...

First learn to thread your comments. Then you might be ready to receive wisdom.

In my up close and personal encounters with the venerable Vaneigem, he seemed less like Marx or Blanqui, or even Bakunin, then he did like the elder Verkhovensky in my main man big-D Dostoevsky's 'The Possessed,' the title sometimes translated these days as 'Demons.'

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