(Not) being on time: the legacy of the Situationist International--a response to Simeon Hunter.

• Date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt
• Published date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt

If right and law stem from vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain--before Nietzsche, before Heidegger, before Benjamin--can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance?

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx

WHAT IS LEFT OF THE SITUATIONIST PROJECT? AS THE COMPLETE FILMS OF GUY Debord were recently released on DVD just in time to be offered as Christmas gifts, we are confronted with a widespread effort--visible in Simeon Hunter's reply too, I think--to turn the Situationist project into an art movement (creating objects to be seen and commodities to be sold), and thereby to minimize its role in the political and social movements of the sixties. In my short text, "Counterrevolution, the Spectacle, and the Situationist Avant-Garde," I attempted to show that the Situationists, at least Guy Debord and the people associated with him, were, already in 1957, heavily involved in "political" questions. The different art-world accounts of the Situationists that focus on the early phase of the group, where art played a role through the presence of artists like Asger Jorn...