The Game of War The Life and Death of Guy Debord

Andrew Hussey's The Game of War is the first full-length intellectual biography of the hugely controversial Guy Debord, leader of the SI (Situationist International). Debord has always been seen as a contradictory and extremely inflammatory figure: shady revolutionary behind the May 1968 eruption in Paris; precursor to the postmodernism of Baudrillard et al; and vaunted stylist of French letters. Praised nowadays to the hilt by such important French writers as Philippe Sollers and Michel Houellebecq, Debord is the writer of the continuingly influential Society of the Spectacle, the politics of which are much better delineated in Anselm Jappe's Guy Debord.
Hussey, in his admittedly often pedestrian account, walks through the life of Debord showing how the neo-Dadaist Letterism of Isidore Isou became by 1952 the Letterist International which then mutated, in 1957, into the increasingly anti-art SI, whose influence on everything from architectural to sociological theory continues to grow. Marked by in-fighting and bitter sectarianism, Hussey explains how the Situationists shifted from being a group of revolutionary artists, including among them Asger Jorn, to a group concerned with revolutionising the conditions of life itself. Debord then became involved with dissident marxists like Henri Lefebvre. The work of Asger Jorn, probably the most important artist in the group, is brilliantly accounted for in Peter Shield's book Comparative Vandalism. Hussey's account quotes heavily from Debord's slim, but beautifully written, autobiography Panegyric and he seems somewhat overawed by his subject. But, then, Debord was a complicated and compelling man and Hussey' s biography is as good a starting place as any to understand what caused this erudite, alcoholic film-maker to have such a hold on all those who came under his spell. --George Bowman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description
Since his death in 1994 (when he put a bullet through his heart in his lonely farmhouse) Guy Debord has been hailed as one of the key thinkers of the age. In Britain and the United States, his theories on the ?spectacle? of modern life were simultaneously hailed as deadly truths by underground subversives and accorded the highest academic prestige. In the same way, the Situationist International (SI), a volatile group of artists, revolutionaries and intellectuals which he led through the 1950s and 1960s, is considered to be the most important art movement since Dada and the Surrealists. Debord himself was a welter of contradictions, whose public life was entirely predicated upon the singlemindedness of his revolutionary intentions, but who privately sought oblivion in infamy, exile and alcoholism. Implicated in the events of May 1968, Italian terrorism and the murder of his friends, and under surveillance by the French secret police for over a decade, he mixed in élite art, business and political circles, and has had admirers and devotees of all political colours and ranks.This biography is an appraisal of a lone and defiant figure whose story follows and, at one historic moment in 1968, appears to lead the drift of art and politics in post-war Paris. ?It could almost be believed that I was the only person to have loved Paris,? Debord said. Then, almost with a shrug, ?but no one has twice raised Paris to revolt.?