Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the "society of the spectacle" from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord's masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem's book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with "formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies."

"I realise," writes Vaneigem in his introduction, "that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day."

Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, "Reversal of Perspective," he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation.

For "To desire a different life is already that life in the making." And "fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural."

The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem's classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Translator's Acknowledgements (p. vii)
• Author's Preface to the Present Edition (p. ix)
• The Revolution of Everyday Life
• Introduction (p. 3)
• Part 1 Power's Perspective
• I The Insignificant Signified (p. 6)
• The Impossibility of Participation: Power as Sum of Constraints
• II Humiliation (p. 14)
• III Isolation (p. 23)
• IV Suffering (p. 29)
• V The Decline of Work (p. 37)
• VI Decompression and the Third Force (p. 41)
• The Impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation
• VII The Age of Happiness (p. 50)
• VIII Exchange and Gift (p. 58)
• IX Technology and Its Mediated Use (p. 66)
• X The Reign of Quantity (p. 71)
• XI Mediated Abstraction and Abstracted Mediation (p. 77)
• The Impossibility of Fulfilment: Power as Sum of Seductions
• XII Sacrifice (p. 90)
• XIII Separation (p. 100)
• XIV The Organization of Appearances (p. 106)
• XV Roles (p. 114)
• XVI The Fascination of Time (p. 133)
• Survival and Its Pseudo-Negation
• XVII Survival Sickness (p. 138)
• XVIII Unbuttressed Refusal (p. 143)
• Part 2 Reversal of Perspective
• XIX Reversal of Perspective (p. 162)
• XX Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry (p. 166)
• XXI Masters Without Slaves (p. 179)
• XXII The Space-Time of Lived Experience and the Rectification of the Past (p. 194)
• XXIII The Unitary Triad: Fulfilment, Communication, Participation (p. 210)
• XXIV The Interworld and the New Innocence (p. 240)
• XXV You Won't Fuck with Us Much Longer! (p. 244)
• Postscript (1972): A Toast to Revolutionary Workers (p. 247)
• Appendix 1 Author's Preface to the First French Mass-Market Edition (1992) (p. 253)
• Appendix 2 Concerning the Translation (p. 260)
• Index (p. 263)

Author notes provided by Syndetics