Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1967–) [FR, ES, EN]

“The book was, along with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, one of the most significant works written by members of the Situationist International (1957–1972).

The book takes the field of ‘everyday life’ as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. The author considers that direct, unmediated communication between ‘qualitative subjects’ is the ‘end’ to which human history tends – a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be “called forward” through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile ‘objects’ and without the ‘qualititive richness’ which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality – it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be ‘built’. So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a ‘thing’ for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life – isolation, humiliation, mis-communication – and toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped convention that freedom comes.” (Wikipedia)

French edition
Publisher Gallimard, 1967.
Vaneigem’s preface to the first French paperback edition was published by Gallimard in 1992.

English translation was first published in 1983 jointly by Left Bank Books and Rebel Press.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Publisher Rebel Press, 2001
No copyright claims will be made against publishers of non-profit editions.
ISBN 0946061017, 9780946061013
279 pages

Review: Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996).

Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (French, 1967, unpaginated), HTML
Tratado del saber vivir para uso de las jovenes generaciones (Spanish, trans. Javier Urcanibia, 1977/2008)
The Revolution Of Everyday Life (English, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1983/2001)