THE GAME OF WAR: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GUY DEBORD By Andrew Hussey, HarperCollins, £11 Guy-Ernest Debord (1931-1994) is one of those avant-garde thinkers of the 20th century for whom the demarcation between life and art did not exist. He looked upon life and art as interchangeable terms, both conceived as revolutionary games consisting of 'constructing situations' to thwart the evil nexus of state, capital and bourgeoisie consumerism, which left an individual with no alternative but to participate in it. His book, The Society of the Spectacle, took the world by storm with its poignant commentary on the sinister designs of state-sponsored capitalism, and the hollowness of individual existence which conspire to reduce a person to the status of a passive spectator to his own life. He was a prime mover of the move- ment called Situationist International which had a tremendous impact on life in Paris in the Sixties. Debord was also a major contributor to pamphlets such as Potlatch, and periodicals like L'internationale Situationniste. He believed that in this 'spectacular society' a renegade artist is posed only with a choice between two extremes - revolution and suicide. Suicide was for him a supreme act of negation, and it was no accident that he shot a bullet through his heart in 1994. Debord's genius, his stubbornness, egotism, drunkenness and anarchism were all a consequence of his childhood, which had been spent mostly in the care of his grandmother, Manon. The sense of neglect that Debord felt as a child found expression in his world-view. This was further nurtured by his reading of Isidore Ducasse, Arthur Rimbaud and surrealist writers such as André Breton and Arthur Cravan. In The Game of War,Andrew Hussey charts out Debord's nihilistic life. Hussey chronicles different phases of Debord's career as an author and a filmmaker. He emphasizes Debord's role as a key figure behind the 1968 Student's Insurrection, known as the Strasbourg scandal, which with the involvement of Trotskyist and Maoist Left factions took the shape of a civil war. Hussey describes in detail how in the early Fifties, Debord, Gabriel Pomerand, Gil Wolman and Maurice Lemaître joined the Letterist Movement under the influence of the Romanian poet, Isidore Ison, whose objective was to strip every form of art down to its barest constituents. Debord's film, Howling in Favour of Sade, which emphasized the disintegration of sounds and images was inspired by this Letterist philosophy. After breaking away from the Letterist group, Debord first formed Letterist International with Gil Wolman, and then founded Situationist International in 1957. The theoretical base of the Situationist programme was the interplay of derive and detournment - the twin principles of artistic subversion of time and space inextricably linked to what was called situational 'psycho-geography', which is the 'study of the precise effects of the geographical milieu, and its direct influences on the affective behaviour of individuals'. Hussey also shows how Johan Huizinga's theory of the ludic principles of medieval war in his book, Game and War, influenced Debord, who as a situationist strategist set out to explore secret niches of power in order to wreck the 'spectacular' institutions of civilization.