Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102532 in Books
• Published on: 1983-11
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 279 pages

Customer Reviews

a revolution indeed
This is a one off. There are wonderful pages describing the "many petty humiliations we a subjected too everyday" which will resonate with people who feel herded, crammed in and degraded by mass transportation. And what is humilation but "being reduced to an object"?

Indeed, it is these "inbetween times" - riding public transport, walking down the street - which Vaneigem seeks to save from oblivion, as just time-in-transit before assuming a work-or-lesuire role. This he calls "signifying the insignifcant" and is an attempt to bring lived meaning to the most unpromising or fleeting of situations.

Much of the book, and indeed the situationist project in general, can be viewsed as a "war against roles". Veneigem says that proportional to your identiification with a role is the sense of time speeding up - getting out of roles, or rather playing/creating an unplayed one, is the way towards authenticity and reunified subjectivity.

In a world where the following phrase is overused to the point of banality let me assure that it rings true here : THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Insight, polemic and revolutionary prose.
Written in a more accessible manner than the, also vital, Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord) and with a more flowing, beautiful and inspiring style, this book is indespensible to any modern left-wing revolutionary.25 chapters of sparkling genius which, although not the easiest read in the world, is probably one of the most satisying and most life-changing books. A swift diatibe against the current world order of politics and economics, possessed with the urge to destroy that set of social relationships which it describes. "Be realistic - demand the impossible"

Down Quantity Strasse
I freely admit to not having read this book anywhere near as closely as it deserves. But is that going to stop me writing a review?? You bet. Instead, I offer the following - which I (despite my abject lack of humility) would not even dare dignify with the comparatively honorific term "review." Vaneigem's style is elegant, engaging and incisive. That much we know. However, there is sometimes the feeling that his thought is tinged with sociology...or at least, that it is not perhaps as startlingly original as it may feel on first encounters. E.g. Down Quantity Street. If I can reduce part of the thought here - the world abraded of its qualities, divided and subdivided, categorised, labeled, sawn up industriously into manageable chunks. And us with it. What's left? Numbers. Nothing to feel or be felt by. Computations, statistics, bean counting. Sure. Except wasn't this part of Weber's beef with bureaucracy? A big part, in fact. And probably bits of Hegel if you look. Not to mention a lot of the Romantics before that. Probably RV would say use what you can. And if so it would seem slightly churlish to argue.