The Game of War

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.