''The Revolution of Everyday Life'' (french: Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations) is a 1967 book by

Raoul Vaneigem Raoul Vaneigem (; born 21 March 1934) is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book ''The Revolution of Everyday Life''. He was born in Lessines ( Hainaut, Belgium) and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1 ...

, Belgian author and onetime member of the

Situationist International The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution ...

(1961–1970). The original title literally translates as, ''Treatise on Good Manners for the Younger Generations''. John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking chose the title under which the work appears in English.

Summary

Vaneigem takes the field of " everyday life" as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. He considers that direct, unmediated communication between "qualitative subjects" is the 'end' to which human history tends – a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be "called forward" through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile "objects" and without the "qualitative richness" which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality – it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be "built". So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a "thing" for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life – isolation, humiliation, miscommunication – and to reach freedom, individuals have to tend toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped conventions.

Influence

''The Revolution of Everyday Life'' was, along with Guy Debord’s ''

The Society of the Spectacle ''The Society of the Spectacle'' (french: La société du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered a semin ...

'' (1967), one of the most significant works written by members of the

(1957–1972).

External links

The Revolution of Everyday Life
online a
www.nothingness.org

Summary

Influence

External links

See also