In the depths of the Society of the spectacle: Guy Debord's value criticism

This work aims to carry out a reading of the magnum opus of the French situationist Guy Debord The society of the spectacle basically in the light of three Marxist concepts: alienation, commodity fetichism and reification, this one put forward by Georg Lukacs. Our purpose is to present Debord as one of the interpreters of Marxism that, along with the Hungarian philosopher, is an important precursor of the theoretic results later formulated by the contemporary Marxist strand known as Value criticism (Wertkritik). Firstly, we set forth his reflections about theory and art, the latter considered inside the situationist avant-garde program. Then, we rescue in the fragments of the book his actualization of the above-mentioned Marxian concepts in order to decipher the deep meaning of de idea of spectacle. In the fourth and final section, we investigate the influence of the concept of reification in the notion of image that is recurrent in Debord's theory.