Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem (21 March 1934, Lessines, Belgium) is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life.
His father Paul Vaneigem was a socialist and anticlerical railway worker, his mother was Marguerite Tilte. Between 1951 and 1956, Raoul pursued and obtained a degree in Roman philology at the Free University of Brussels. Between 1956 and 1964, he was a professor at the Ecole Normale de Nivelles. He was forced to resign in 1964 after it was revealed that he'd had an affair with one of his students. In 1960, he sent his work about French poetry to Henri Lefebvre, who then forwarded it to Guy Debord. In 1961, he joined the Situationist International, and remained a member until his resignation in November 1970. Between 1964 and 1972, he was the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Current World. In 1986, he began work on an Encyclopedia Universalis. Especially in the 1990s and 2000s, he published a number of nonfiction books, as well as a novel. The father of four children, he now lives in Belgium.
Publications
- Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, Paris: Gallimard, Dec 1967.
- Tratado del saber vivir para uso de las jovenes generaciones, trans. Javier Urcanibia, 1977; 2008. (Spanish)
- The Revolution Of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1983; London: Rebel Press, 2001, 279 pp. (English)
- Histoire désinvolte du surréalisme, Nonville: Paul Vermont, 1977.
- A Cavalier History of Surrealism, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, AK Press, 1999, 131 pp. (English)
- Le Mouvement du libre-esprit, Ramsay, 1986.
- The Movement of the Free Spirit: General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony Concerning Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time, trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson, Zone Books, 1994, 302 pp. (English)
Literature
- Alastair Hemmens, The Radical Subject: An Intellectual Biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934-Present), Paris: University of London Institute, 2013, 306 pp. PhD dissertation. (English)