There is not a word to be
changed in this book in which, apart from three or four typographic mistakes, nothing has been corrected in the course of the dozen or so reprints
it has known in France.
Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle
As a matter of fact, I believe that there is nobody in the world
capable of being interested in my book apart from those who are enemies of the existing social order and who act efficaciously, starting from this position.
Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle
There have not been three books of social critique of such importance published in the last hundred years.
Guy Debord, Réfutation de tous les jugements
Such a book does not have to “advance,” like some doctoral dissertation on Machiavelli, toward the approval of a board of examiners and the
attainment of a diploma.
Internationale situationniste #12
The Society of the Spectacle does not hide its
a priori engagement, nor does it attempt to derive its conclusions from academic argumentation. It is written only to show the concrete coherent field of
application of a thesis that already exists at the outset, a thesis deriving from
the investigations that revolutionary criticism has made of modern capitalism. In our opinion, it is basically a book that lacked nothing but one or more revolutions.
Internationale situationniste #12
The room on the rue Saint-Jacques where The Society of the Spectacle got written was at once an
austere cell—with nothing on the shelves, I remember, but a few crucial
texts (Hegel, Pascal, Marx, Lukács, Lautréamont's Poésies) laid open at
the relevant page—and the entryway to Debord's minuscule apartment,
through which friends and comrades continually passed.