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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Quimbys Bookstore (@quimbysbookstore) Zines Used Records and Tapes #4 by Chris Auman, Mike Dixon & friends $7 Comp Book Companion (various issues) by …
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Published by PM Press
272p, b&w, softcover, 6"x9"
$20.00
"Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life
offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the "society of the
spectacle" from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas
Debord's masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that
triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the
time with theory, Vaneigem's book described their feelings of
desperation directly, and armed them with "formulations capable of
firing point-blank on our enemies."
"I realise," writes Vaneigem in his introduction, "that I have given
subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me
for this without first considering the extent to which the objective
conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity
day after day."
Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in
consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the
cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity,
subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the
Economy. And in the second part of his book, "Reversal of Perspective,"
he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical
fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity,
spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and
participation."