Bøger af Regis Debray

An explosive classic, published to mark the 50th anniversary of Che Guevara's death, and of its first publication

An examination of the difference between communication and transmission that stresses technologies and institutions long overlooked in the study of symbols and signs throughout the history of civilizations.

Régis Debray’s major new work is an exploration of the foundations and limits of political discourse and action. Focusing, with his familiar verve and fluency, on the mechanism through which ideologies mobilize historical subjects, Debray argues that there is a common pattern in all great political or religious movements. Each possesses an apparatus that releases affective charges of belonging and closure; each is tended by bodies of functionaries who maintain its continuity and transmit its doctrines. The great mobilizing ideologies—Christianity, Islam, Marxism—deploy corps of priests, teachers, cadres. The real foundation of ¿political reason¿, for Debray, lies in the human need to participate in closed groups, denying or mitigating the harshness of the external world and the fact of death.

This volume launches a new sub-discipline of the human science, "mediology". It includes a new way in which to analyze and think about the media from the city state to the Internet. It is also an examination of the work of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, C.S. Peirce and Marshall McLuhan.