Reading as an event: the legend of the last Debord, conversation between Amador Fernández-Savater, political and cultural essayist and activist, and Hugo Savino, essayist and poet.
Guy Debord wrote Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988, but who was he? A Debord without Situationist International: alone but not isolated. A Debord without revolution in sight: the years when capitalism seemed to reign unchallenged. How does a revolutionary without organisation, a revolutionary without any revolutions in sight, cause ‘ideas to become dangerous’, as SI put it? What ties does he invent when collective ideas are no longer collective and revolution no longer threatens the status quo? We’ll see Debord take an interest in strategy, film, and above all reading. He ultimately takes an interest in himself, paradoxical though this seems from a classical revolutionary perspective.
In these texts, Guy Debord contrasts the reader with the spectator. The body of the reader with the body of the spectator. In view of the idea that ‘everything can be juxtaposed’ and that ‘leaves no time for reflection’, demanding ‘pure adhesion to what exists’, reading is approached as an exercise ‘demanding a real opinion at every line’, since ‘only that can allow us access to the vast pre-spectacular experience’. Reading and writing are therefore exercises with the ability to transform, which Debord uses to create his own legend as a form of political resistance.
A conversation between Amador Fernández-Savater, political and cultural essayist and activist, and Hugo Savino, essayist and poet.