Why Everything is at it Seems. Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
Gespräch in der Reihe »Philosophische Gespräche« im Helle Panke e.V. mit Eric-John Russell, Moderation: Falko Schmieder
Guy Debord has been called many things: pseudo-philosopher, nihilist, filmmaker, megalomaniac, third-rate Mephistopheles. His 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle has fallen into a similarly varied reception, frequently caught within the discourses of postmodernism, media and cultural studies or avant-garde art history. At the same time, it has further become an almost ubiquitous observation to say that we live in a society of “spectacles,” whether with reference to television, advertising or social media. Here, Debord most strongly appears as little more than a theorist of media distraction or consumerism.
In his book Why everything is at is Seems (German: Warum alles ist, wie es scheint, Tiamat 2026), however, Eric-John Russel abandons such narratives and offers a sustained examination of the concept of the society of the spectacle—a diagnosis on the way capitalist society has developed a form of social life dominated by appearances—through the two pillars upon which Debord understood his own work as a critical theory of society: Marx’s critique of political economy and Hegel’s speculative philosophy. His presentation will explore how Debord engages with these resources and thus pull him away from the discourses in which he is normally situated, instead examining his work within the lineage of German Idealism, Left Hegelianism, Hegelian Marxism, Marxist Hegelianism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Tracing Debord’s diagnosis out of this lineage makes explicit the merit of theorizing capitalism in terms of its forms of appearance, by emphasizing the difficulty in seeing the world not as it really is.
Admission: 2 Euro
Eric-John Russell is a researcher and translator specializing in the areas of German Idealism, Hegelian Marxism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Potsdam and previously held the position of Enseignant in the Département de Philosophie at Université Paris 8. His book Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything Is as It Seems, with a foreword by Étienne Balibar, has recently been translated into German (Tiamat).
Falko Schmieder is a cultural theorist and research team leader of the project The 20th Century in Basic Concepts. A Dictionary of Historical Semantics in Germany.