In a departure, author Regis Debray redefines communication as the inescapable conditioning of civilization's meanings and messages by their technologies of transmission and lays the groundwork for a science of the transmission of cultural forms."

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; a debate on the transition, from quill to print, to video and the effects of these changes on society; and an examination of the work of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, C.S. Peirce and Marshall McLuhan.

Regis 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,...

The election in Chile of the Marxist leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, to the presidency in October 1970 inaugurated a political situation unique in Latin America and of world-wide significance. Allende's Popular Unity coalition embraced Socialists and Communists and campaigned on an election programme of unprecedented radicalism - nothing less than the abolition of monopoly capitalism and imperialism in Chile. In this book Regis Debray, recently released from his Bolivian gaol, questions President Allende about his strategy for socialism. These discussions range widely over...

Revolution in the Revolution? is a brilliant, pragmatic assessment of the situation in Latin America in the 1960s. First published in 1967, it became a controversial handbook for guerrilla warfare and revolution, read alongside Che's own pamphlets, and remains fully as important as the writings of Guevara. Lucid and compelling, it spares no personage, no institution, and no concept, taking on not only Russian and Chinese strategies but Trotskyism as well.

The year it was published, Debray was convicted of having been part of Guevara's guerrilla group and sentenced to thirty years...