Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works.

  In the same series

  Michel Foucault

  David Macey

  Jean Genet

  Stephen Barber

  Pablo Picasso

  Mary Ann Caws

  Franz Kafka

  Sander L. Gilman

  Guy Debord

  Andy Merrifield

  REAKTION BOOKS

  Pour Corinna, comme d’hab’

  Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London EC1V ODX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2005

  Copyright © Andy Merrifield 2005

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by CPI/Bath Press, Bath

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Merrifield, Andy

  Guy Debord. – (Critical lives)

  1. Debord, Guy, 1931– 2. Internationale situationniste

  3. Radicals – France – Biography

  I. Title

  303.4’84’092

  ISBN: 1 86189 261 6

  Contents

  1 Eyes for Blowing Up Bridges

  2 The Café of Lost Youth

  3 It Never Said Anything Extreme

  4 Aesthete of Subversion

  5 I Am Not Somebody Who Corrects Himself

  6 Land of Storms

  References

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Acknowledgements

  La nuit, lorsque l’aquilon ébranlait ma chaumière… il me semblait que la vie redoublait au fond de mon cœur, que j’aurais la puissance de créer des mondes.

  Chateaubriand, René

  1

  Eyes for Blowing Up Bridges

  What acceptable paradise can we extract from so many ruins, Hervé, without falling into them?

  Guy Debord, Le Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille

  Bellevue-la-Montagne is a sleepy, almost-deserted village perched on a 1,000-metre hillock in the northern reaches of France’s Haute-Loire. Up here, looking south-east, there is a fine view of mountains, of the Massif Central, whose flat-topped volcanoes dominate this part of the rugged Auvergne. Volcanoes are everywhere and stretch as far as the eye can see. Scattered amid them, around every side of Bellevue, are numerous tiny hamlets, many made up of just two or three houses, replete with a few clucking hens and barking dogs. About a kilometre further north along the D906, motorists reach a sign indicating one of them: CHAMPOT.

  After a sharp right turn, a narrow lane leads you to another signpost, and to another sharp right turn down an even narrower lane. After a minute the track suddenly dips and the vista ahead allows you to glimpse an earlier age, a pre-modern France, more Villon than Flaubert, with battalions of trees and seemingly endless meadows, a patchwork quilt of every shade of green under the sun. In the immediate foreground are a cluster of five modest cottages, Champot Haut; one property, to the far left, is surrounded by a high wall made up of light-tanned boulders, which renders the house within only partly visible, giving it an air of mystery. Only the outside mailbox, still adorned with the name of its late resident and his widow, offers clues to this mystery:

  ‘DEBORD • BECKER-HO’.

  On the road to Champot.

  The former occupant of the house was himself somewhat mysterious. He’d lived inside these walls with his wife Alice Becker-Ho on and off for almost twenty years. He’d spent most of his summers and occasional winters here. But on 30 November 1994, late on a drizzly afternoon, he’d ended it all. The rumour then, since substantiated, was that he’d meticulously used a single bullet to shoot himself through the heart. He was dying anyway, of an alcohol-related illness, peripheral neuritis, which gradually burned away the body’s nerve endings and brought on excruciating pain, apparently too much pain to endure.

  The regional newspaper, La Tribune – Le Progrès, devoted a brief column to the incident on 2 December: ‘Writer and filmmaker Guy Debord, father of Situationism and master of subversion, killed himself on Wednesday evening, at the age of 62, in his domicile of Champot, in the Bellevue-la-Montagne commune.’ In Parisian intellectual circles, however, it was front-page news, the headline of the next day’s Le Monde: Guy Debord, ‘aesthete of subversion’ and ‘theoretician of “the society of the spectacle”’, was dead. Inside, there was an entire page spread, a tributecum-critique of the man who’d fled Paris in 1970 to become ever more reclusive and elusive.

  The Debord/Becker-Ho postbox.

  Guy Debord’s house at Champot.

  Who was this man I’d wandered through a time-warp searching for? Who was this man journalists and critics variously labelled ‘mastermind, nihilist, pseudo-philosopher, pope, loner, mentor, hypnotist, self-obsessed fanatic, devil, éminence grise, damned soul, professor of radicalism, guru, mad sadist, cynic, cheap Mephisto, bewitcher, fearsome destabilizer’?1 Moreover, how could somebody who had become infamous in 1967 for a cult book, The Society of the Spectacle, for his part in the May 1968 insurrections, for drunken binges and late-night wanderings in Paris during the 1950s and ‘60s, for city street-smarts and Marxist pretensions – how could he somehow flee the city, flee modern life itself, and live in isolation in this rural fortress? It had been a strange, Rimbaudesque voyage for Debord; only instead of eloping to Africa never to write again, Debord escaped to an unlikely Haute-Loire, and wrote infrequently. In the Haute-Loire, he said, he’d savoured ‘the pleasures of exile as others suffered the pains of submission’.2 The key to understanding Guy Debord lay not in the grubby backstreets of Paris, nor in the smoky bars where the Situationists’ raw, unfettered radicalism was hatched. The real Debord resides on the other side of that wall, at Champot, where a solitary, aging recluse plotted to overthrow the world in his head.

  The high wall around Debord’s house in Champot was chosen intentionally. It emphasized a kind of fortress, a refuge inside ramparts, a utility brilliantly delineated by the master philosopher and tactician of war, Karl von Clausewitz, whose On War (1832–7) was much scrutinized by the aging revolutionary. (It was a text that equally impressed Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin, Trotsky and Mao.) ‘A noble who was hard pressed on all sides’, Clausewitz wrote, ‘fled to his castle in order to gain time and wait for a better turn of events. By their fortifications … [they] sought to ward off the storm clouds of war.’3 Debord saw himself as such a noble and considered Champot his defence against assault.

  Debord’s board-game Kriegspiel (from Debord’s film In Gimm Imus Node Et Consumimur Igni).

  For a lifetime, Guy Debord kept his enemy under observation. For a lifetime, revolutionary practice had been akin to warlike strategizing, each the domain of danger and disappointment. In Champot, Debord ruminated on war, on its theory and actual history, spending quiet, lonely summer days studying real battles, reading up on the logic of war, not only by Clausewitz, but also Machiavelli, Sun Tzu and Thucydides. There are books one loves to meditate on in voluntary exile, in the course of a life of intrigue and obscurity. In voluntary exile, Debord even invented his own war board game, Kriegspiel. ‘I succeeded, a long time ago,’ he said,


  in presenting the basics of [war’s] movements on a rather simple board game: the forces in contention and the contradictory necessities imposed on the operations of each of the two parties. I have played this game and in the often difficult conduct of my life, I have utilized information from it – I have also set myself rules of the game for this life, and I have followed them … On the question of whether I have made good use of such lessons, I will leave it to others to decide.4

  This present book will attempt to get over that high Champot wall, peer inside Debord’s house, push back its shutters, drink his wine and listen to him talk. What follows is a tale of a free spirit who was radically at odds with life but who loved a lot of things in life and thought them worth fighting for. It is a story, in Homer’s words, ‘singing of a man and Muse, a man of twists and turns driven time and again off course’, about a man who had lived life to the full, who had loved fine wine, intelligent conversation, attractive company and a few stimulating books, things that seemed so obvious and simple yet are difficult to find. In fact, today, said Debord, ‘the more simple things always seem closer to the critique of society’.5

  In Panégyrique, his slim autobiography of 1989, a masterpiece of sangfroid belles-lettres, Guy Debord is measured, elegant and often self-deprecating. There, he reveals ‘what I had loved’.6 It’s clear he had loved many books, many writers, and had read a lot: Sterne, Clausewitz, Li Po, Dante, Cardinal de Retz, Omar Khayyám, Machiavelli, Cravan, Lautréamont, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Marx, Castiglione, Villon, Tocqueville, Gracián, Orwell, De Quincey, Brenan, Mac Orlan, Saint-Simon, Swift, Borrow, Manrique, Hegel, Feuerbach, Lukacs, etc., etc. He’d also told us of his love for ‘the real Spain’, for Italy, and for a Paris that was no more; he had loved not a few women, too, especially Alice; he had loved his murdered friend Gérard Lebovici; and, perhaps above all, he had loved to drink. ‘Even though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.’7

  The mature Debord increasingly came to resemble Geoffrey Fermin, the doomed Consul, the anti-hero of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), a novel the youthful Debord had greatly admired.8 With a tragic cast, Debord would similarly brood, under Auvergne’s volcanoes. And, like the Consul, he loved the magnificent and terrible peace that alcohol induced. ‘Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle!’ the Consul said. ‘Unless it was an empty glass.’9 ‘How, unless you drink as I do’, he says elsewhere, ‘can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning?’10‘I would have had very few illnesses’, Debord wrote, ‘if alcohol had not in the end brought me some: from insomnia to vertigo, by way of gout… There are mornings that are stirring but difficult.’11Life itself, Debord always insisted, should be a kind of intoxication, a majestic and fertile river that he wanted passionately to consume.

  In Panégyrique, Debord also wrote lovingly about his sojourns in Champot. The ‘charm and harmony’ of his seasons there hadn’t escaped him. It was a ‘grandiose isolation’, a ‘pleasing and impressive solitude’.

  I spent several winters there. Snow fell for days on end. The wind piled it up in drifts … Despite the exterior walls, snow accumulated in the courtyard. Logs burned in the fireplace. The house seemed to open directly onto the Milky Way. At night, the nearby stars would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next be extinguished by the passing mist. And so too our conversations and our celebrations, our meetings and our tenacious passions. It was a land of storms. They approached noiselessly at first, announced by a brief passage of a wind that slithered through the grass or by a series of sudden flashes on the horizon; then thunder and lightening unleashed, and we were bombarded for a long time, and from every direction, as if in a fortress under siege. One time, at night, I saw lightning strike near me, outside: you could not even see where it had struck; the whole landscape was equally illuminated for a startling instant. Nothing in art seemed to give me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose that Lautréamont employed in the programmatic exposition that he called Poésies.12

  Debord himself was something of a prophet of storms and violent winds: he’d lived through a lot of them, and conjured up a few more in his own imagination. ‘All my life’, he began Panégyrique, ‘I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles.’ He had lived through ‘an era when so many things have changed at the astounding speed of catastrophes, in which almost every point of reference and measure suddenly got swept away, along with the ground on which it was built.’ Little wonder

  I saw around me a great number of individuals who died young, and not always by suicide, frequent as that was. On the matter of violent death, I remark, without being able to advance a fully rational explanation of the phenomenon, that the number of my friends who have been killed by bullets constitutes an unusually high percentage.13

  Yet for locals of Champot and Bellevue, Monsieur Debord was a rather reserved, distant character, seldom going out, and taciturn when he did. On odd occasions, dressed in black, donned in his seaman’s cap – his casquette de marine – arm-in-arm with Alice, he walked with his cane into Bellevue. Madame Soulier, in Bellevue’s boucherie, recalls Debord in the 1980s lunching at the now-extinct restaurant, Le Midi, next door to her store. He was fairly short and fat, she said, with a big stomach and glasses. He’d often buy meat from her for their evening meal. He’d come in with his wife, ‘Madame Becker’, ‘a Eurasian’, who was always polite and still returns to Champot every summer, in July and August.

  Alice Becker-Ho was Debord’s second wife, whom he married in 1972 after divorcing Michèle Bernstein, an earlier flame and a fellow founder of the Situationist International. Alice’s mother, a Shanghai native, had married a German, Wolf Becker, who’d been a deserter from the Reich army. The Becker-Ho family settled in Paris, in rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, close to the Cluny Museum, where mother Becker-Ho ran a Chinese restaurant. Alice’s brother, Eugene Becker-Ho, a Paris antiques dealer, who also has a big country manor in Saint-Pierre-du-Mont, Normandy, and a stable of horses, owns Debord’s Champot Haut house.

  Sometimes Guy and Alice had guests down from Paris. Sports cars would park in front of the wall, and action inside the house heated up at night when the Debords entertained, cooking sumptuous meals and drinking fine wine. In those days, there were other, less-welcome visitors to Champot: journalists and paparazzi – eager for an off-guard shot of Debord, something they could sell to a glossy hebdomadaire – and La Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the French secret police, who had kept tabs on the legendary subversive since 1968, believing him connected to the Italian militant Red Brigade and the German Baader-Meinhof Gang.14 Champot was his base, his stronghold, from where he’d plot to overthrow European governments, plant bombs and kidnap prominent politicians – or so it was thought. Debord scoffed at their bungling incompetence. He viewed journalists and police as he viewed bothersome flies in summer.15 He’d close the property’s shutters to ward both off.

  The DST also kept close watch on the Chinese restaurant of Alice’s mother, suspecting that Chinese Communist Party agents ate there, and that it was the hatching-place of all sorts of Fu Manchu plots. Debord put the record straight: he was, he said, never involved with any Communist organizations, nor with Left political figures or even the intellectuals of his day. In fact, he said, ‘I have firmly kept myself apart from all semblance of participation in the circles that then passed for intellectual or artistic.’16

  I have lived comfortably among the lowest levels of society, among the Kabyles in Paris, surrounded by Gypsies, always in good company. In brief, I have lived everywhere except amongst the intellectuals of this era. This is naturally because I despise them; and who, knowing their complete works, will be surprised?17

  Debord’s defiance was like
that of Dostoevsky’s underground man: he carried to an extreme what others did not dare to carry halfway. ‘I have tasted pleasures’, he said, ‘little known to people who have obeyed the unfortunate laws of this era.’18

  A self-proclaimed ‘doctor of nothing’, Guy Louis Marie Vincent Ernest Debord was born in 1931 in a peripheral quarter of Paris, the rundown La Mouzaïa in the 20th arrondissement. His bourgeois family’s fortune, he claimed, was wiped out in the 1930s as economic crisis swept eastwards from America. Thereafter, in the course of adolescence, ‘I had simply not attached any sort of importance to those rather abstract questions about the future.’ ‘I went slowly but inevitably’, he said, ‘toward a life of adventure, with my eyes open. I could not even think of studying for one of the learned professions that lead to holding down a job, for all of them seemed completely alien to my tastes or contrary to my opinions.’19