"There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies." -- Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem (born 1934) is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines (Hainaut, Belgium). After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. He currently resides in Belgium and is the father of four children.
Vaneigem and Guy Debord were two of the principal theoreticians of the Situationist movement. Vaneigem's slogans frequently made it onto the walls of Paris during the May 1968 uprisings. His most famous book, and the one that contains the most famous slogans, is The Revolution of Everyday Life (in French the title was more elaborate: Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations).
According to the website nothingness.org, "The voice of Raoul Vaneigem was one of the strongest of the Situationists. Counterpoised to Guy Debord's political and polemic style, Vaneigem offered a more poetic and spirited prose. The Revolution of Everyday Life (Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations), published in the same year as The Society of the Spectacle, helped broaden and balance the presentation of the SI's theories and practices. One of the longest SI members, and frequent editor of the journal Internationale Situationniste, Vaneigem finally left the SI in November 1970, citing their failures as well as his own in his letter of resignation. Soon after, Debord issued a typically scathing response denouncing both Vaneigem and his critique of the Situationist International."
After leaving the Situationist movement Vaneigem wrote a series of polemical books defending the idea of a free and self-regulating social order. He frequently made use of pseudonyms, including "Julienne de Cherisy," "Robert Desessarts," "Jules-François Dupuis," "Tristan Hannaniel," "Anne de Launay," "Ratgeb," and "Michel Thorgal." Recently he has been an advocate of a new type of strike, in which service and transportation workers provide services for free and refuse to collect payment or fares.
In 2009 Vaneigem was interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist for e-flux.
"As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.""Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.""Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.""Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.""In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.""In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.""Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.""Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.""People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.""Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.""The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.""The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.""To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.""We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.""Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?""Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete."