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NOTES TO PAGES 645–49

material production, without autonomy or substance of its own’’ (Minima Moralia[London: Verso,
1978], 15) to Debord’s opening ‘‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of
production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once
directly lived has become mere representation’’ (Society of the Spectacle, §1). Both of these, of course,
rest on the opening of Marx’sCapital.

93. It is interesting that, once theBilderverbottrope is introduced, resonances multiply be-
    tween Debord and Adorno’s essay ‘‘The Culture Industry’’ (in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
    Adorno,Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans.
    Edmund Jephcott [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002], 94–136). For the latter, see Anson
    Rabinbach, ‘‘The Cunning of Unreason,‘‘ inIn the Shadow of Catastrophe(Berkeley: University of
    California Press, 1997), chap. 5, and Gertrud Koch, ‘‘Mimesis and the Ban on Images,’’ inReligion
    and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001),
    151–62.


94. Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §1.


95. Ibid. §4–5.


96. See Levin, ‘‘Dismantling the Spectacle,’’ inOn the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather
    Brief Moment in Time, ed. Sussmann, 73–78, 321–28.


97. Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §18.


98. Ibid., §20.


99. Ibid., §§16, 22–23.


100. Ibid., §25.


101. Ibid., §12.


102. This is precisely why Debord endorses the demonstration of the spectacle’s contradictions
     as a tactic for undermining its pretense to being a unified whole.


103. Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §13, my emphasis.


104. Ibid., §125.


105. Ibid., §136.


106. Ibid., §§135–38.


107. Ibid., §138, italics in original.


108. The argument regarding Debord’s theory of history is not directed toward the identifica-
     tion of Marxism with messianism; nonetheless, several indications could be made. Most striking,
     here, is how explicitly Debord accepts the analogy.


109. Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §§148, 142.


110. Ibid., §150. Debord’s irreversible time also carries with it echoes of Bataille’s analysis of
     time, intimacy, and religion inThe Accursed Share, esp. 131–32, 140.


111. Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §149.


112. Ibid., §153.


113. Ibid., §§155, 158.


114. Ibid., §105.


115. Ibid., §29.


116. ‘‘The revolutionary project of a classless society, of a generalized historical life, is also the
     project of a withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of an individual and collec-
     tive irreversible time which is playful in character and which encompasses simultaneously present
     within it a variety of autonomous yet effectively federated times—the complete realization, in short,
     within the medium of time, of that communism which ‘abolishes everything that exists indepen-
     dently of individuals’ ’’ (ibid., §163).

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