THEOSCOPYimplicitly evoking an anthropological line from Le ́vy-Bruehl through Mauss up to Ba-
taille.^73 Not only is the spectacle to be understood as ‘‘a specious form of the sacred,’’^74
but Debord goes so far as to ignore the regressive and repressive tendencies in medieval
millenarian cults and to argue for an analogy between modern revolutionary hopes and
‘‘the religious passion of millenarianism’’:
Millenarianism, the expression of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the language
of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, lacking
only the consciousness ofbeing historical and nothing more. The millenarians were
doomed to defeat because they could not recognize revolution as their own handi-
work. The fact that they made their action conditional upon an external sign of God’s
will was a translation onto the level of thought of the tendency of insurgent peasants
to follow outside leaders.^75Debord goes on to argue that the recoding of religious themes, institutions, and theolo-
gemes forms a fundamental part of modern society, even where ‘‘the most advanced
forms of commodity consumption have seemingly broadened the panoply of roles and
objects available to choose from.’’^76 Family and religion, ‘‘still the chief mechanism for
the passing on of class power,’’ not only survive, but their ‘‘vestiges... and thus too the
vestiges of the moral repression that these institutions ensure, can now be seamlessly
combined with the rhetorical advocacy of pleasurein this life. The life in question is after
all produced solely as a form of pseudo-gratification which still embodies repression.’’^77
In other words, religion is significant both because it serves class (and spectacular) domi-
nation and because it forms an irreducible historical subtext to contemporary banaliza-
tion and repression.^78 Such repression merely moves pseudogratification from the
paradise it imagines to life in the present.^79
Debord’s most significant reference to religion comes at the opening of the book in
a citation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s preface to the second edition ofThe Essence of Christian-
ity: ‘‘And undoubtedly our present era... favors an image over the thing it denotes, the
copy over the original, representation over reality, appearance over existence.... That
which is sacred for [the present era] is the illusion, while truth is profane. Worse, the
sacred swells as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion
comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.’’^80 It is understandable that Debord uses for
his exergue a quotation about truth and illusion—what surprises is the formulation of
sacredness and profanity. Are we to understand that the spectacle, besides being the social,
political, and economic ground of the contemporary world, a totality at once falsely
united and infinitely divided,^81 is grounded in theological formulations at the same time
that it forms the world’s most profane moment? Why does Debord use this rhetoric of
sacredness, apocalypse, and illusion in a theory propounding the spectacularization of
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