Recent publications:
Mikkel Bolt
Book publication
The Refusalist International: A Theory of the New Protest Cycle
Available at: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-refusalist-international-a-theory-of-the-new-protest-cycle--9781509568277
ISBN: 9781509568277
This book is an attempt to supplement the destituent analyses of Colectivo situaciones, the Invisible Committee and Marcello Tarì and counter the many negative and nostalgic analyses of the mass protests of the last decade with a less defeatist reading drawing on an underground history of political-aesthetic refusal informed by the Situationists but also Maurice Blanchot, Herbert Marcuse and Black radical thinking.
Tom Bunyard
Recent published articles:
Tragic landscapes: TJ Clark and Gillian Rose on modernity and the future
Thesis Eleven, Volume 186, 2025.
Abstract: This essay places the work of the art historian TJ Clark in relation to the social and political philosophy of Gillian Rose. It develops an interpretation of the ideas that inform his art history, and of the ways in which they inform his advocacy of a ‘tragic’ approach to what he calls ‘Left’ politics. The latter approach is intended to avoid the dangers that Clark takes to be inherent in the Left's classical focus on shaping the social conditions of the future. The essay shows that Rose's philosophy is also sensitive to such concerns, and that it echoes aspects of Clark's position. In her work, however, this does not come at the cost of abandoning an orientation to the future. These points are developed via a discussion of the two writers’ respective conceptions of modernity, and via a consideration of their differing readings of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin.
An Introduction to Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
Historical Materialism, 2026.
Available at: https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/an-introduction-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/
Extract: The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society’. It is somewhat ironic, then, that it has become such an established landmark within the culture that it sought to attack: nearly sixty years after its first publication in 1967, Debord’s book is now often mentioned in newspaper articles, lecture halls and cultural commentary. Its prominence has, however, been facilitated by a rather reductive view of its central claims. It is often assumed that the book’s central concept of ‘spectacle’ denotes the visual imagery of capitalist culture, and thus the great mass of shopfronts, screens and entertainments that mark contemporary social life. Understood in these terms, the book can then serve as a useful reference point in commentary on such phenomena; hence its prominence. Yet such a reading simply cannot accommodate all that Debord says in the book, rendering his theory opaque. Moreover: if spectacle simply means visual imagery, we have little sense of how and why it might be connected to his avowed revolutionary politics. On such a reading, then, the book’s purportedly harmful intentions and meaning can slip from view.
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Eric-John Russel
Book publication:
Warum alles ist, wie es scheint: Spektakuläre Logik bei Hegel und Debord
[Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems]
ISBN: 978-3-89320-328-4
Guy Debord’s revolutionary work The Society of the Spectacle (1967) had a direct influence on the events of May 1968. Eric-John Russell deepens the analysis of Debord and Marx by highlighting the central importance of Hegel’s speculative logic for both. By linking Debord and Hegel, Critical Theory breaks new ground. With the help of Debord, Russell examines a theory of capitalism in relation to its manifestations — here, the world truly is as it appears. This spectacular logic of appearance illustrates Debord’s significance for a theory of 20th-century capitalism and formulates a new perspective for Critical Theory of society.
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Vanessa Theodoropoulou
Book publication
Le Monde en situation – La révolte sensible de l'Internationale Situationniste
[The World in Situation: The Sensible Revolt of the Situationist International]
ISBN: 978-2-37896-393-4
For two decades (1952–1972), the SI and the avant-garde groups from which it emerged (the Lettrist International, MIBI) experimented with expanding the scope of artistic practice so that it could transform everyday life (by creating emotionally charged situations), transcending the division into distinct practical, disciplinary, or epistemological fields. Active in various countries, they criticized, in their numerous publications and events, the institutionalization of art and supported all forms of struggle and resistance against the ideological and sensory hold of the “spectacle” over the lifestyles and imaginaries of postwar capitalist societies, marked by decolonization wars and the rise of consumer society and cybernetics. Their artistic projects and works are cataloged, reconstructed, historicized, and analyzed from the perspective of the “integral construction of the framework of life” referred to by the SI at the time of its founding, always in connection with their famous critical stances toward the art, culture, and politics of their era. Experiences and accounts of urban fieldwork, maps, manifestos, magnetic recordings, radio broadcasts, films, collages, paintings, models, atmospheres, situations, acts of institutional critique, and appropriations are studied as so many ways of situating language, bodies, and human settings with a view to the collective production of “free” forms of life.
Recent published articles:
Interview with 02 magazine:
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Gabriel Zacarias
Recent published articles
Gil J Wolman: Disorienting the Temporality of Images
International Journal of Surrealism (IJS), Volume 3, 2025.
A volume dedicated to Collage and edited by Katharine Conley and Alyce Mahon.
Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/article/973914
Abstract: This article presents the work of Gil J Wolman, a former member of the Lettrist movement, particularly in how it relates to the surrealist practice of collage. Together with Guy Debord, Wolman was the cocreator of the notion of détournement. In the first part of the article, I will analyze the notion of détournement, as presented by Wolman and Debord in the text “A User’s Guide to Détournement” (1956), in relation with Louis Aragon’s understanding of collage, as proposed in his well-known text “Challenge to Painting” (1930). After that, I will present a study of Wolman’s Art Scotch, a very peculiar type of collage that the artist developed in the 1960s with the use of adhesive tapes. The use of tapes resulted in visually distinctive collages and Art Scotch can arguably be considered as Wolman’s hallmark. More importantly, such collages without colleinvite us to reflect upon the very nature of collage and its posterities. I will address that question at the end of this article, with a particular attention to the characteristic materiality of Wolman’s work and how it reinstates and complexifies the temporality of images.
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Cristiano José Steinmetz
Book publication
Morfologias do fetiche e colisões formativas: repensar a formação humana pela Internacional Situacionista e pela Teoria Crítica do Valor
[Morphologies of fetish and formative collisions: rethinking human formation through the Situationist International and the Critique of Value]
ISBN: 978-8572216159
This recent book explores the paths of a radical critique, in the Marxist sense, applied to the processes of human formation in their cultural and institutional dimensions. In order to analyze the expressions of fetishism within formative processes, it establishes a dialogue with the Situationist International (1957–1972) and with Value-Critique, which has been developing since the mid-1980s. Steinmetz’s book thus proposes a debate that seeks to understand how we arrived at this point and how we might rethink the concept of human formation.
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Collective
Book publication
Formas do fim: as humanidades ante o colapso
[Forms of the End: the humanities before collapse]
ISBN: 978-65-5361-501-4
Never has there been so much talk of the end. But is social critique equal to the challenge, at least on the theoretical plane? This book seeks to help fill that gap. Naturally, it can offer only a few samples, provide a few indications, open up a few paths. The approaches are quite varied, and so are the sources. What nonetheless unites these approaches, while at the same time distinguishing them from countless others, is their recognition of the need for “grand theories,” theories that set out to grasp the social totality and to press against the core of contemporary capitalist society. Yet only the unfolding of events in the coming years will be able to answer this question: do even those who detest present society truly desire collapse? Or, faced with the unknown and with the possibility that things may become even worse, will they prefer to hope that the world as they knew it continues, for better or worse?
Edited volume by Rafael Rodrigo Mueller and André Cechinel, with contributions by Alastair Hemmens, Gabriel Zacarias and Cristiano Steinmetez, as well as a foreword by Anselm Jappe:
Prefácio – Bem ou mal [Foreword – For Better or Worse], by Anselm Jappe.
Espetáculo sem sujeito: repensando o espetacular integrado [Subjectless Spectacle: Rethinking the Integrated Spectacular], by Gabriel Ferreira Zacarias.
As crianças de Brobdingnag: sobre o poder, a ilusão de maturidade e a morte do capitalismo [The Children of Brobdingnag: On Power, the Illusion of Maturity, and the Death of Capitalism], by Alastair Hemmens.
La Révolution Surréaliste et la guerre au travail: cem anos da crítica artístico-política do Surrealismo [La Révolution Surréaliste et la guerre au travail: a century of the Surrealist Artistic-Political Critique], by Cristiano J. Steinmetz.
