Raoul Vaneigem was born on March 21, 1934 in Lessines, Belgium. He studied Roman philology (French and Latin) at the Free University of Brussels, graduating in 1956 with a thesis on Lautréamont.

In 1960, while working as a teacher at the École Normale (i.e. a public college specializing in the training of teachers) in the town of Nivelles, he started corresponding with the influential French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre.

Impressed by Lefebvre’s oeuvre Critique de la vie quotidienne, Vaneigem sent him the manuscript of an essay intitled Fragments pour une poétique (suivis de quatre poèmes à parfaire). This essay earned Vaneigem his letters of nobility, allowing him to transition to the politically engaged phase of his life. 

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It was upon Henri Lefebvre’s commendation that Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International, read Vaneigem’s essay draft, and agreed to meet with him in early 1961. Vaneigem joined the SI (Situationist International) shortly afterwards.

He immediately became one of the main editors of the journal Internationale Situationniste, and continued serving on the editorial board until the publication of the very last issue in 1969.

Vaneigem played a major role in the final rupture of the SI with the more artistically and aesthetically oriented legacies of the Lettrist International. His admission to the SI ushered in the definite shift towards the movement's political phase. 

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Vaneigem co-authored some of the most crucial statements of the SI, such as Déclaration sur les procès contre l'Internationale situationniste en Allemagne fédérale (1962), Sur la commune (1962) and Aux poubelles de l’histoire (1963). In collaboration with Attila Kotanyi, he wrote the Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism (1961). An "idea" rather than a "project," unitary urbanism was concerned with the critical deciphering of the (existing) urban landscape in an effort to rebuild its bases. Breaking with the logic of utility,  unitary urbanism was conceived as a "living critique," that is: as an experimentation of the individual, designed to adapt the urban milieu to the needs of its inhabitants.

In 1967, Vaneigem published The Revolution of Everyday Life (Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations). This text – like Debord’s Society of the Spectacle dating back to the same year – was soon to be identified as the theoretical cornerstone of the SI. Today, Vaneigem’s Traité is considered to have played a major role in fomenting the outbreak of the student and workers’ protests in France in May '68. 

The text repertories the different forms of economic and ideological alienation, which have come  to contaminate everyday life, and vowed the human being to a state of mere "survival." Anchored in the belief that radical self-realization leads to general prosperity, the Traité then calls for individual creativity as a form of resistance. Self-creation and self-realization are introduced as the critical means for examining and subverting (détourner) the unconsciously assimilated mechanisms of domination governing the modern "society of the spectacle."

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Vaneigem resigned from the SI in November 1970. As he declared in his resignation statement, both the revolutionary project of the SI and his involvement in it had turned out to be a failure.

In a series of conversations with Gérard Berréby published in 2014, Vaneigem came to specify that, in his view, the events of May 68 had given the decisive impetus to the SI’s demise. For instead of dissolving in the direct aftermath of the general strike, and proving by this very gesture to be absolutely true to its practice of theory, the SI had persisted in its revolutionary quest and, yet, soon fallen prey to an increasing institutionalization – vowing the movement to the paralysis that every becoming-ideology is supposed to imply.

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Since quitting the SI, Vaneigem has been dividing his time between publications echoing the spirit of the revolutionary political activism of the Situationist years, and scholarly publications on medieval Christian mysticism and heresy.

Noteworthy publications in the first category are De la grève sauvage à l'autogestion généralisée, a user’s guide to revolution (1974), and Le livre des plaisirs (1979). Among Vaneigem’s publications as a medievalist are to be mentioned Le Mouvement du libre-esprit (1985) and La Résistance au christianisme. Les hérésies des origines au XVIIIe siècle (1993). In these texts, Vaneigem intends to demonstrate that the striving for freedom and the belief in the vital force of pleasure were already present in medieval thought and culture.

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Raoul Vaneigem currently lives close to Tonnerre, a town in the Province of Yonne, France.