Creativity over survival

Situationist slogan "Never work" etched into a wall in the Latin Quarter of Paris, 1968.

We are inhabited by abyssal forces that poetry alone has the power to fathom. Raoul Vaneigem

I don't go in for heroes, but I have throughout my life and career been drawn to a clutch of thinkers and their writings to which I turn again and again. Prominent amongst them has been the unorthodox French theorist who never set foot in a university and who was the leading light of the Situationist movement, Guy Debord (1931-1994). For some time the Situationists were shunned by the global academic community in favour of the more respectable pantheon of French theorists Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, the perpetuators of Heideggerism in France. Where the Situationists were the first radical thinkers to perceptively critique Maoist China* for what it was – a concentrated, totalitarian spectacle, the Left-Bank fashionable theorists continued well into the 1980s to construct the Maoist revolution as the Orientalist utopian paradise they wished it to be. It is perhaps no coincidence that those French intellectuals who remain apologists for Mao and Pol Pot similarly continue to carry the flame for Heidegger.†

Alongside Debord stands the Belgian writer, activist and theorist Raoul Vaneigem (1834-2026), whose  1967 Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations is credited with having underpinned the 1968 movement in France. The work is translated into English as The Revolution of Everyday Life, an appropriate title given the Situationists were  – along with Henri Lefebvre with whom Debord had a brief but meaningful intellectual honeymoon –  advanced theorists of the notion of daily life. Vaneigem throughout his long life would actively engage in thinking about ecology and the environment and continually critiqued the société marchande, or society of consumption, the veritable target of Debord's Society of the spectacle, or  "show" society.

In my previous blogpost I wrote about André Gorz's position on work. Since I did so Raoul Vaneigem has died. Together with Guy Debord, Vaneigem was an acerbic critic of the ideology of work, and continued to be so throughout his life. The praise of work and its redemptive, character-building qualities – what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger – form part of the ideological discourse of work, a discourse firmly challenged by Vaneigem. “The celebration of work, which according to Marx, transforms the world while exploiting Nature, and the Nietzschean propension to exalt the superior mind have each served as the Te Deum and De profundis for fascist and bolshevik states and corrupt democracies alike,” wrote Vaneigem (De la destinée, p. 11). However, Vaneigem pushes this back further than the era of industrial capitalism and its discontents, further back even than Christianity, in a reflection that would project the Anthropocene back several thousand years before the “modern” era: “ten thousand years of beliefs and thoughts…have founded, on the dogma of life reduced to survival, truths reputed to be eternal. Whereas, as contradictory as they may be, what they all have in common is the celebration of having over being” (De la destinée, p. 23).

Concern with the environment in Vaneigem’s thinking obliges us to think back beyond the conventional critiques of capitalism and colonialism to a stage in humanity’s domination of the non-human extending back eight to ten thousand years, to the “emergence of an economic and social system which giving free rein to the pillage of vital resources, distorted humankind” (De la destinée,p. 27). Work was and remains central to such domination:

“The appropriation and exploitation of the earth imposes work as a dominant activity. The ability to create, the true specificity of humankind, is left devalued and marginalized. Creativity is incompatible with work, since, implying self-enjoyment and the enjoyment of the world, it invalidates appropriation…. Creativity is to humankind what work is to the alienated human being” (De la destinée, p. 31).

Work, does indeed transform the world, but it reduces humankind to the status of a miserable beast obliged to yield to circumstances it itself fabricates while turning the world into a commodity (De la Destinée, pp. 31-32). And, it is the emergence of commodity-centred society that has provoked a veritable regression of human kind. If we look at the current climatic crisis and its effects, if we look at the millions of migrants seeking just mere survival, it can all be put down to an economic system which century after century has led us against our own interests to the current impasse and assigned us to a “programmed death”.

Much of what Vaneigem has written over the past six decades has proven to be uncannily prescient. For instance, a passage that Vaneigem wrote in 1986, before the declaration of the now already jaded New World Order, reads like a gloss on current far right populist ideology and its grip on so much of humanity. Addressing people's fear in the face of the crumbling economic order, rather than the joy that might be expected at the prospect of beneficial change, Vaneigem writes of “consumers reduced to a basic state of frailty and decrepitude” begging for “strong-armed protection as they rush through the well-lit, clearly displayed aisles of consumable hedonism.” “To what can one attribute this terror,” asks Vaneigem. To which he replies, to “the panic of having to create their own lives” (Movement of the Free Spirit, pp 2021). As I have written before, this reflection always reminds me of the bluesman B. B. King’s inimitable refrain “I've got a good mind to give up living, and go shopping instead.”

Ultimately, it is the old Situationist, libertarian distinction between life (vie) and mere survival (survie) – “surviving thus far has prevented us from living” (Traité) – in which we may discern a horizon of hope, for it is “the passion to live that joyfully reiterates itself. Death is just a tedious repetition" (De la destinée p. 235).

Modified 2.08.2026
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For free access to a comprehensive library of Debord's, Vaneigem's and other Situationist texts go to Situationist International Archive https://situationist.org/ 

† Witness the ever fashionable Alain Badiou,"Mao thinks in an almost infinite way"; Badiou's fidelity to Heidegger is amply documented.

* Guy Debord, “Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine”, Internationale Situationniste, no 11, octobre 1967, pp. 499-508. https://classiques.uqam.ca/contemporains/debord_guy/point_explosion_ideologie_chine/explosion_ideologie_chine_texte.html

Raoul Vaneigem,Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations, 1967.
Raoul Vaneigem, Mouvement du Libre-Esprit, Paris, Ramsay, 1986; Movement of the Free Spirit, New York, NY, Zone Books, 1994.
Raoul Vaneigem, De la destinée, Paris, Le Cherche midi, 2015.

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