Guy Debord

Posing the question of the Debord–Agamben relation immediately presents us with a series of problems, particular to Debord as well as Agamben. In terms of Debord, we must decide how to position ourselves towards his work in order to understand its place on Agamben’s philosophical path. Such a decision has to be taken in several senses. As Agamben himself reports in a lecture on Debord’s films, ‘Once, when I was tempted (as I still am) to consider Guy Debord a philosopher,he told me: I’m not a philosopher, I’m a strategist.’1 Bracketing the Holzweg of the disciplinary specificity of philosophy, what this quote opens up is the occasional rather than systematic character of Debord’s interventions, insofar as the stakes for Debord, and with them the marshalling of his own philosophical lineage, are bound up with a certain political and aesthetic practice and not the production of thoughts that will stand the test of time.