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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.lcguom

>

Where these data come from
Experience and representation of the subject

Abstract

Guy Debord (1931-1994), always on the margins of cultural and intellectual institutions, authored a heterodox style of thought and art. Through extensive archival research in the “Fonds Guy Debord”, a collection of unpublished notes and manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this thesis seeks to retrace Debord’s intellectual experience. These documents allow for the creation of a genealogy of the author’s key concepts and enable us to situate him in the intellectual context of his times. Contemporary French thought was dominated by existentialism and structuralism. Discussion of the empowerment and disappearance of the “subject” was therefore central. Although Debord took no direct part in these disputes, expressing disinterest in the authors then in vogue, his works did respond to this debate: First of all, in his experimental art, which places the subject in a “situation” and thereby seeks to discover the objective determinations that affect subjectivity; secondly, in his theoretical work – in particular, the theory of the spectacle –, in which capitalist modernity is characterized as a growing separation between experience and representation; and thirdly, in his literary and cinematic works, in which the practice of détournement appears as a method for a subjective re-appropriation of representation.

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