Gianfranco Sanguinetti (born 16 July 1948, Pully, Switzerland) is a writer and a member of the Situationist International (SI), a political art movement. He is Teresa Mattei's son.
Sanguinetti was deported from France in 1971 and settled in Italy.
By 1972, Sanguinetti and Guy Debord were the only two remaining members of the SI. Together they wrote "The Veritable Split In The International" a book detailing the rise and fall of the SI. [1]
Again working with Debord, in August 1975, Sanguinetti wrote a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultima opportunita di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (Eng: The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy), which (inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli and Bruno Bauer) purported to be the cynical writing of "Censor", a powerful industrialist. The pamphlet was to show how the ruling class of Italy supported the Piazza Fontana bombing and other covert, false flag mass slaughter, for the higher goal of defending the capitalist status quo from the communist claims. The pamphlet was mailed to 520 of Italy's most powerful individuals. It was received as genuine, and powerful politicians, industrialists and journalist praised its content and guessed on the identity of its high-profile author. After reprinting the tract into a small book, Sanguinetti revealed himself to be the true author. Scandal raised after the revelation, [2] and under pressure from Italian authorities, Sanguinetti left Italy in February 1976, and was denied entry to France.[ citation needed ]
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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 in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.
Ralph Rumney was an English artist, born in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Guy-Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
A détournement, meaning "rerouting, hijacking" in French, is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and later adapted by the Situationist International (SI), that was defined in the SI's inaugural 1958 journal as "[t]he integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres."
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International. He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark, and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen.
Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life.
The dérive is a revolutionary strategy originally put forward in the "Theory of the Dérive" (1956) by Guy Debord, a member at the time of the Letterist International. Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there". Though solo dérives are possible, Debord indicates
that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups' impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions.
The Society of the 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 seminal text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.
Gruppe SPUR was an artistic collaboration formed by the German painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm and Hans-Peter Zimmer and the sculptor Lothar Fischer in 1957. They published a journal of the same name Spur.
Gilles Dauvé is a French political theorist, school teacher, and translator associated with left communism and the contemporary tendency of communization.
Alice Becker-Ho, also known as Alice Debord, is a Chinese-born French intellectual closely associated with the Situationist International. Among other works, she has written poetry, a scholarly study of slang, and a travel memoir. The widow of Guy Debord, she is best known for being the editor of his complete letters, which have been published in eight volumes.
Gérard Lebovici was a French film producer, editor and impresario.
The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." It also exists in a more limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation." Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s.
Ken Knabb is an American writer, translator, and radical theorist, known for his translations of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. His own English-language writings, many of which were anthologized in Public Secrets (1997), have been translated into over a dozen additional languages. He is also a respected authority on the political significance of Kenneth Rexroth.
Donald Nicholson-Smith is a translator and freelance editor, interested in literature, art, psychoanalysis, social criticism, theory, history, crime fiction, and cinema. Born in Manchester, England, he was an early translator of Situationist material into English. He joined the English section of the Situationist International in 1965 and was expelled in December 1967. He lives in New York City.
Situationist prank is a term used in the mass media to label a distinctive tactic by the Situationist International, consisting of setting up a subversive political prank, hoax or stunt; In the terminology of the Situationist International, stunts and media pranks are very similar to situations. The détournement technique, that is "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself," was the essential element of a situationist prank. The Situationist tactic of using détournement for subversive pranks is such a distinctive and influential aspect of the Situationist International, that they are sometimes labeled as a group of political pranksters.
Report on the Construction of Situations is the founding Manifesto of the Situationist International revolutionary organization. The pamphlet was published by Guy Debord in June 1957, and the following month the organization was founded, at Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy.
One of the first times in which Jean-Paul Sartre discussed the concept of situation was in his 1943 Being and Nothingness, where he famously said that
there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom... There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom, of determination, of necessity lose all meaning
Socialisme ou Barbarie was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period whose name comes from a phrase which was misattributed to Friedrich Engels by Rosa Luxemburg in The Junius Pamphlet, but which probably was most likely first used by Karl Kautsky. It existed from 1948 until 1967. The animating personality was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan. Socialisme ou Barbarie is also the name of the group's journal.
The Situationist International's interpretation of the Paris Commune of 1871 was influenced by their collaboration with Henri Lefebvre with whom they had been in contact since the late 1950s. Lefebvre’s writings on revolutionary romanticism and everyday life were important influences on the early SI. In the early 1960s Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem agreed to assist Lefebvre in his preparations for a book on the Commune. The results of their brainstorming sessions were written down in 1962 by the SI in their “Theses on the Paris Commune.” After Lefebvre published his respective notes on their collaboration, in a 1962 piece entitled “La Signification de la Commune,” the two parties had a falling out as the SI ostensibly disagreed with the journal in which he published. Both the SI and Lefebvre published extensively on the feud in the following decade.
