L’Internationale Situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary

The Situationniste Internationale was a small transnational group of artist-revolutionaries that came out of the neo-Dadaist Lettriste movement.¹ In Paris, Guy Debord and a small, changing cast of friends and supporting characters² tracked through the Parisian cultural and political underground along the path laid earlier by the Surrealists.³ Skilled as provocateurs, anxious to abandon the constraints of artistic production and to acquire legitimacy as revolutionaries, Debord and his friends almost immediately began to look to the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, edited by the group of the same name led by Cornelius Castoriadis.⁴