NOTES TO PAGES 635–36(‘‘beautiful’’!) totality of the individual, stage, etc. Also note Foucault’s revision in his attention to
bodies, the formation of individuals, the training of forces, the play of signs, etc.
- Despite their differences, Foucault and Debord share an important debt to Jean Hyppol-
ite—whom Foucault respected immensely, and whose 1967 lectures Debord followed. See Didier
Eribon,Michel Foucault et ses contemporains(Paris: Fayard, 1994), and Jappe,Guy Debord, 128n. - It is unfair to speak of Debord and ‘‘power.’’ Fairly standard readings of Debord see his
understanding of power as bound by the limits of classical Marxism. Nonetheless, Debord did speak
of poweras such, and he set it at once in and at the root of the spectacle (Debord,Society of the
Spectacle, §§22–23). It is also worth wondering whether Debord and Foucault’s respective concep-
tions of spectacle/power and power differ completely (see Debord’s usage ofpoweraspracticalor
specialized; ibid.), especially in their nonempirical, transcendental aspects. While I do not wish to
reduce spectacle to power, I will occasionally use the latter for purposes of simplicity. - ‘‘I’d like to mention only two ‘pathological forms’—those two ‘diseases of power’—fascism
and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are so puzzling for us is that, in spite of their
historical uniqueness, they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already
present in most other societies... they used, to a large extent, the ideas and devices of our political
rationality’’ (Foucault, ‘‘The Subject and Power,’’ inPower: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984,
vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion [New York: The New Press, 2000], 328). The ‘‘evil’’ remark is in
Foucault, ‘‘The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,’’ inEthics, Subjectivity,
and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New
Press, 1997), 298. See also Foucault, ‘‘Body/Power’’ and ‘‘Truth and Power,’’ inPower/Knowledge,
59 and 124–25. - The connection to Socialisme ou barbarie was first made in Richard Gombin,Les Origines
du gauchisme(Paris: Seuil, 1971). Gombin’s history is too linear and teleological, by contrast to the
somewhat better Jappe,Guy Debord, 90–93. Jappe notes Debord’s relative respect forLes Origines
du gauchisme(175). - ‘‘The ruling class of Europe is all but... forgotten.... Television won’t talk about it, and
the left only talks about what television talks about’’ (Internationale Situationniste, 10:32). Debord’s
Situationist International celebrated the failure of the New Left journalArgumentsand loudly re-
jected Lefebvre. - Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §§24–28, 54, 63, 69, 72.
- Jay, inDowncast Eyes(chap. 7), provides clear and cogent analyses of Debord and Fou-
cault, and indicates the difference in the traditions from which the two emerged. Jay does not
elaborate on the specific topic I am considering here, and it is somewhat peculiar that he is hesitant
to draw a closer connection between the two. Ultimately, he limits his conclusion to: ‘‘Foucault’s
critique of surveillance and Debord’s of the spectacle provided a generation of critics with ammuni-
tion in their struggle against the hegemony of the eye’’ (434). - Foucault,Birth of the Clinic, 107; also 54.
- Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §§4, 1.
- Curiously, the spectacle is absent from Debord’s writings betweenPotlatchand the last
issues of theSituationist International. Among Debord’s nine signed articles in the latter, only one
centers on the ‘‘spectacular character of modern industrial society.’’ This is his presentation of the
opening ofSociety of the Spectaclein ‘‘La Se ́paration acheve ́e,’’ 11:43–48. Unsigned editorials also
shy away from the issue. Foucault did not use the termspectacleextensively; on the most significant
occasion, he uses it to determine the apprehensible stage of the scaffold as a political operation
(Discipline and Punish, chap. 2, esp. 53). - See Thomas Y. Levin, ‘‘Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,’’ inOn the
Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, ed. Elizabeth Sussmann (Cam-
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