“A New Language of Critical Theory”: Debord’s Style of Negation

This article examines how a negative critique operates in the work of French philosopher and avant-gardist, Guy Debord. This article also assesses the aesthetic and political effects of Debord’s negative critique. I discuss how Debord handles the difficult, if not impossible, task of formulating a mode of expression that does not fall victim to recuperation by spectacular society, and how his strategy of negation bears the weight of a stylistic tradition (with roots in the works of Hegel and Marx) which Debord works with and against. I pay particular attention to Debord’s pointed but easily overlooked critique of Roland Barthes, whose theorization of a “writing degree zero” signifies for Debord an idealized negation of style, and not the proper language of critical theory, which must be a more subversive “style of negation.” Finally, I suggest that the ultimate historical failure of Debord’s political program does not undermine its value as a critical apparatus, and that the unfinished and uncertain character of Debord’s theory is a necessary and useful aspect of his praxis, rather than an ideological defect.