O espetáculo como negação da vida em Guy Debord

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Inácio José de Araújo da
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)
• Texto Completo: http://www.repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/46410
• topic: Espetáculo; Vida; Teoria crítica; Spectacle; Life; Critical theory

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the concept of spectacle formulated by the French thinker Guy Debord (1931 - 1994), in order to understand it fundamentally as a denial of life. According to the author, who presented one of the most incisive critical theories about the society that emerged within the modern capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century, as the ceaseless development of the capitalist mode of production extended its alienating logic to all sectors of everyday life, more and more people lost the ability to act and organize themselves consciously, becoming passive spectators of a world ruled by the laws of the commodity and losing control over their own lives. The concept of “spectacle” which guided his reflections on modern society, succinctly defined as “the autocratic reign of the market economy and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign” is also described as “concrete inversion of life”, “autonomous movement of non-life”, “visible negation of life”. The persistence in emphasizing the spectacle as the opposite of "life" is not acidental or stylistic, but central to Debord's thought, because it reveals his concern about the fact that economic laws directly interfere with the various aspects of human existence in the world: from the reification of the social and psychic life of human beings, the submission of concrete life to objects of commercial fetish transformed into images, to the critical degeneration of the bodies and minds of individuals in modern society. In order to defend the meaning of the spectacle as a denial of life in Guy Debord's thought, elements were sought within the author's own work that support this claim, as in his best-known books The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), in his texts published in the Internationale Situationniste magazine and in the scripts of his films.