Customer Reviews

The Revolution of Everyday Life

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Building on the genius of Marx, Nietzsche and others, Vaneigem takes apart the complex spectacle of consumer society with the goal in mind of nothing short of every human being's self-realization. He's far more realistic than other thinkers, and has a firm grasp on how our everyday lives reflect and affect our social surroundings. His writing style is poetic and elegant, dense but never technical and dry. Roughly speaking, his hope lies in the subjectivity and uniqueness of every individual, living everyday life spontaneously and artistically, with the end in mind that we can all eventually liberate our individual selves and each other from social constraints and social objectification/commoditization. It's a revolution of love, not of violence -- of protest for the innocence and beauty of the human spirit. Although written in the late 1960's, his description only seems more accurate today, when the nihilism of money and consumer society are worse than ever. A must-read for any student of personal, emotional REAL LIFE ITSELF, this book has deeply strengthened my faith in philosophy and in the possibility for making society work in a healthier, saner and happier way.

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/

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My personal copy of this book is dog-eared, underlined, highlighted and, by now, largely taped together. It captures the spirit of the global counter culture movement of the late 60's but is oddly, more relevant now than 30 years ago. The poststructuralists tell us that criticism is impossible, subversion futile, and revolution a childish and reactionary dream. But these are the defeatest rationalizations of yuppie academics with middle class asperations of a slow comfortable death. If they had the nerve to write graffiti it would read 'If you can't beat them join them'. My favorite quote from the book: 'Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve - passionately enough to offer our love the magnificent bed of a revolution.' This book should be read in tandem with Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle', published the same year. It will help clarify many of Debord's theses as well as provide an overview of Situationist thought.

"the revolution of everyday life" is absolutely beyond words, and for that very reason absolutely immune to all assimilation. it captures the main problem with life that we are all (perhaps even the most stupid of us) aware of but cannot quite put our finger on: a lingering emptiness, a 'nothing' where a 'something' should be. this is the magic of vaneigem's prose. he knows the real cause of it, and rightfully accuses us of ignoring and dawdling for so long: the social order and the alienation it causes. he advocates fierce rebellion, joyful suicide, above all collective revolution as an end to all isolation an ennui. vaneigem is not only a political revolutionary: he is a socioliogist, a great poet, a man of words and action. (although i'm sure he would hate me for calling him any of those things.) ultimately, he is himself, and this should be enough for us to change our lives completely. vaneigem wants no following, no idolatry; he wants what everyone really wants, change. vache, cravan, all the great dada and surrealist rebels are quoted at length in this impassioned tome which will only grow more and more important with age-actually, it really doesn't age. it is the NOW sitting in front of our eyes at every moment of every day embodied in a book. everyone in the world should read this book.

My personal copy of this book is dog-eared, underlined, highlighted and, by now, largely taped together. It captures the spirit of the global counter culture movement of the late 60's but is oddly, more relevant now than 30 years ago. The poststructuralists tell us that criticism is impossible, subversion futile, and revolution a childish and reactionary dream. But these are the defeatest rationalizations of yuppie academics with middle class asperations of a slow comfortable death. If they had the nerve to write graffiti it would read 'If you can't beat them join them'. My favorite quote from the book: 'Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve - passionately enough to offer our love the magnificent bed of a revolution.' This book should be read in tandem with Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle', published the same year. It will help clarify many of Debord's theses as well as provide an overview of Situationist thought.

A visionary wrenching of the self away from the alienation of consumerism and boredom.... but don't buy this book here! If you are interested in this book and others like it, support independent booksellers.... (AK Press is a great one)

I got this book thinking it would be some grand radical indictment of our culture and offer some ways around it. After all, that's its reputation. I wanted to like it. I expected to like it. Turns out, it's a bunch of ideological mumbo-jumbo in the typical boring style of your average French intellectual (albeit van Eigem's a little angrier than most). Maybe what van Eigem and Debord had to say about the society of the spectacle was insightful and accurate. I don't know, because van Eigem's style killed any point he tried to make.If there's a cliff's notes version somewhere, I recommend checking that out instead.

This book, along with Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", forms the core of the theoretical output of the Situationist Movement which emphasized the necessity of spontaneous, joyous creative activity to overcome the alienation and oppression of mass consumer culture, giving inspiration to the youthful insurrectionists of Paris '68.

The book is peppered with witty, canny, and memorable aphorisms on revolutionary struggle, and its emphasis on spontaneous activity motivated by felt needs for freedom and self-expression was at the time an important corrective to the Stalinist model of the revolutionary as selfless, altruistic drone. Vaneigem and the situationists go overboard at times in emphasizing the revolutionary value of selfishness, pleasure and spontaneity-- the shortcomings of 1968 are the proof. These shortcomings have been stretched to the point of parody in Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone" and the writings of the Crimethinc collective, but there are important elements of truth in them.

The presentation of the ideas is hobbled by Vaneigem's writing style-- you have to slog through 5 pages of bloated abstractions before coming across one of the keen one-liners that make the book worthwhile-- I think the ideas come across much more powerfully as street graffiti than in a 200 page manifesto. For a more palatable presentation of situationist ideas, check out American situationist Ken Knabb's wonderful piece "The Joy Of Revolution", available online or in his book Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.

This is one of the most viscerally exciting political / philosophical books in history. You can't help but be swept up by the force of Vaneigem's appeals... and though one may not assent to all of his positions or specific interpretations, all in all you will have to say that he had managed to tap into something very true.

read it, ponder it... and get out and live. you have nothing to lose but your boredom.

No Amazon review can really do this masterpiece justice. This is simply one of those classics that will sweep you away, leaving you stunned that someone was able to so precisely articulate the mechanical alienation from self and palpable inner decay that you feel daily as you sit in your cubicle (wash, rinse, repeat) and mimic the farcical motions assigned to humans in modern industrial civilization--a hierarchical vaccum in which "survival" is contingent upon our economic value, obedience to Power and our ability to force others to either consume or produce. The dominance of the lie of economic value has poisoned every area of our lives and left us defunct as human beings, most notably stealing from us the innate urge to spontaneously create and give.

Vaneigem attacks the dead, vacuous nature of modern life with all of the venomous intensity conceivable. He does not misuse or mince words. Each sentence is filled to the brim with harsh truth, the sheer brute force of which will take your breath away.

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I recommend at least printing it out to fully revel and enjoy the intensity, though!