Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official, professor.
Friend of Che Guevara as a young man in the 1960s, later wrote a book entitled Revolution in the Revolution?. This book critiqued the tactical and strategic doctrines then prevailing among militant socialist movements in Latin America. When Guevara was captured in Bolivia (1967), Debray (also in Bolivia at the time) was imprisoned, convicted of having been part of Guevara's group, but released (1970) after an international campaign for his release which included Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux.
Became foreign affairs advisor (or minister?) to François Mitterrand after the latter was elected president of France in 1981. In this capacity he developed a policy that sought to increase France's freedom of action in the world, decrease dependence on the United States, and promote closeness with the former colonies (?). He was also involved in the development of the government's official ceremonies and recognition of the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
Founder of the "discipline" of médiologie or "mediology", which attempts to scientifically study mass media and power.
Recently notorious in the news for having come out in favor of the French ban on headscarves for female Muslim students in the public schools.
It is simply that Debray overstates the limits of these fields, as well as the unique quality of the practice that he refers to as "mediology," which he seems to see as the first to ever undertake questions of signification and communication from a materialist (though not Marxist) perspective.
For example, Debray suggests that "it is no longer the homily from the pulpit but the narration of the news on the screen and paper that presently provides for the translation of event into symbol and of peripeteia or mere incident into dramatic art" (25).
For Debray, the task of the mediologist is to identify the mediating, material "pathways" (technological and institutional processes and bodies) which constitute the "how" of symbolic transmission at a particular point in history, and which in turn produce (and are produced by) these other fields or spheres.
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