Revolution of Everyday Life

by Raoul Vaneigem, Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator)

Overview

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.”

Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation.

For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.”

The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604866780
Publisher:	PM Press
Publication date:	10/05/2012
Edition description:	Second Edition, Second edition
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	611,242
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Born in 1934, Raoul Vaneigem is a writer and a former member of the Situationist International. His works include The Book of Pleasures, A Cavalier History of Surrealism, Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle, and the globally influential text The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Born in Manchester, England, Donald Nicholson-Smith is a longtime resident of New York City. Among his many translations are Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (revised ed., PM Press, 2012), Vaneigem’s A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings (2nd ed., PM Press, 2019), Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Zone, 2012), and Guy Debord by Anselm Jappe (PM Press, 2018)

Table of Contents

Translator's Acknowledgements vii

Author's Preface to the Present Edition ix

The Revolution of Everyday Life

Introduction 3

Part 1 Power's Perspective

I The Insignificant Signified 6

The Impossibility of Participation: Power as Sum of Constraints

II Humiliation 14

III Isolation 23

IV Suffering 29

V The Decline of Work 37

VI Decompression and the Third Force 41

The Impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation

VII The Age of Happiness 50

VIII Exchange and Gift 58

IX Technology and Its Mediated Use 66

X The Reign of Quantity 71

XI Mediated Abstraction and Abstracted Mediation 77

The Impossibility of Fulfilment: Power as Sum of Seductions

XII Sacrifice 90

XIII Separation 100

XIV The Organization of Appearances 106

XV Roles 114

XVI The Fascination of Time 133

Survival and Its Pseudo-Negation

XVII Survival Sickness 138

XVIII Unbuttressed Refusal 143

Part 2 Reversal of Perspective

XIX Reversal of Perspective 162

XX Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry 166

XXI Masters Without Slaves 179

XXII The Space-Time of Lived Experience and the Rectification of the Past 194

XXIII The Unitary Triad: Fulfilment, Communication, Participation 210

XXIV The Interworld and the New Innocence 240

XXV You Won't Fuck with Us Much Longer! 244

Postscript (1972): A Toast to Revolutionary Workers 247

Appendix 1 Author's Preface to the First French Mass-Market Edition (1992) 253

Appendix 2 Concerning the Translation 260

Index 263

Editorial Reviews

"The most striking aspect of Vaneigem's compendium of Free Spirit Lore is his ability to release the material into the present . . . you can almost feel the whole great edifice of social order—their Church, our capitalist democracy—gather itself up, take a deep breath, and run."  —Greil Marcus, author, Lipstick Traces on The Movement of the Free Spirit

From the Publisher