The following text was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
(For the people of Tunisia.)
There is a tension in Guy Debord’s crisis theory, which stems from a particular bifurcation in his own consideration of crisis. On the one hand, Debord sought to completely deconstruct the Marxian logic of crisis, but on the other, his own situationist theory of praxis depended on the relationship between crisis and opportunity. In short, Debord abandons any notion of the grand crises of world-historical significance, and looks instead to minor crises of ideology and critique.
