Stolen Origins Society Spectacle

I spotted a 'borrowing' by Debord / Society of Spectacle from Marx. Checking up, I have just found this, which is an extensive list of such borrowings. But then Marx borrowed from Thomas Carlyle (and no doubt others)and Carlyle borrowed from ...

http://www.notbored.org/SOTS-detournements.html


Detournements in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle

Following extracted from Releve des citations ou detournements de "La Societe du Spectacle," published by Editions Farandola, Paris, 2002. Corrected and translated from the French by NOT BORED! March 2007. The translator has made no attempt to conform our renderings with those of Debord's other translators

Thesis 1
"All of life in the societies in which modern conditions of production reign presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles."

Marx, Capital: "The richness of the societies in which the mode of capitalist production reigns presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities."

Thesis 2
"in which the liar has lied to himself."

Hegel, The Science of Logic: "Truth verifies itself."

"the autonomous movement of the non-living."

Hegel, The First Philosophy of Spirit (Iena, 1803-1804): "Money is the material, existing concept, the form of unity or even the possibility of all the things needed. Need and work elevated to this universality thus form for themselves in a great number of people an immense system of community and reciprocal dependence, a life that dies in itself autonomously from a dead reality, a life that, in its movement acts in a blind and elementary manner and which, like a wild animal, has need of being continuously trained and mastered with severity."

Thesis 4
"The spectacle is not an ensemble of images, but a social connection between people, mediated by images."

Marx, Capital: "Thus one discovers that instead of being a thing, capital is a social connection established by the intermediary of things."

Thesis 6
"is at once the result and the project"

A. Kojeve, Introduction to Reading Hegel: "As a result that is a project and as a project that is a result -- a result born from the project and a project engendered by a result; in a word, the real is revealed in its dialectical truth as a synthesis.

"It is not a supplement to the real world, its added-on decoration."

Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right: "Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium (...) its solemn complement."


: dot dot dot all the way to :

Thesis 205
"In its very style, the exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination according to the rules of the dominant language, and for the tastes that they have produced, because in the positive use of existing concepts it includes, at the same time, the intelligence of their recovered fluidity and their necessary destruction."

Marx, Preface to Capital: "In its rational aspect, [the dialectic] is a scandal and an abomination for the ruling classes and their doctrinaire ideologues, because in the positive conception of existing things, it includes, at the same time, the intelligence of their fatal negation, and their necessary destruction."

Thesis 208
"Detournement has not founded its cause on anything exterior to its own truth"

Stirner, The Unique and its Property: "I have founded my cause on nothing."

Thesis 217
"separation has built its world."

Proverbs, 9, 1: "Wisdom has built her house."

Thesis 221
"To emancipate itself from the material bases of the inverted truth, this is what the self-emancipation of our epoch consists. This 'historical mission to instaurate truth in the world' . . . ."

Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right: "It is thus the task of history, before the beyond of the truth has disappeared, to establish the truth in the here-and-now."

"the class that is capable of being the dissolution of all the classes"
Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right.


(Extracted from Releve des citations ou detournements de "La Societe du Spectacle," published by Editions Farandola, Paris, 2002. Corrected and translated from the French by NOT BORED! March 2007. The translator has made no attempt to conform our renderings with those of Debord's other translators.)