Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  All along, though, Censor was really a crypto-Situationist and advocate of exactly the thing he preached against: workers’ self-management. His ostensible right-wing frontal attack, which summoned up Machiavelli and Clausewitz for guidance, was a cunning rearguard left-wing war of position. It was a manifesto utilizing the kind of logic Machiavelli and Clausewitz both invoked: know thy enemy! And Sanguinetti’s mentor and comrade-in-arms was none other than Guy Debord himself, who, in a letter dated 4 April 1978, had said:

  I knew a man who used to spend his time amongst the sfacciate donne fiorentine, and who loved to carouse with the low company of all the drunkards of the bad quarters. He understood all that went on. He showed it once. One knows that he can still do it. He is therefore considered by some as the most dangerous man in Italy.

  The bomb at the Piazza Fontana, Sanguinetti’s Censor insisted, ‘had, in its way, a salutary affect by completely disorienting the workers and the country as a whole.’ After the bombings, amid the disarray, ‘one never saw such reciprocal support from all institutional forces – such solidarity between political parties and the government, between the government and the forces of order, between the forces of order and the union.’1 The Italian state, he added, continually defends itself ‘from phantom enemies – red or black according to the mood of the moment’. But it never wants to ‘confront the problems posed by the real enemy of the society founded on property and work. Our state wastes its time combating the phantoms that it created, waiting to create an alibi that would maintain its innocence for its real desertion.’2 ‘To banish a present danger,’ Sanguinetti’s Censor said, provoking both his Left and Right audience, and citing Machiavelli, ‘irresolute princes most often follow the neutral path, and most often they lose themselves.’3

  Censor’s text appeared three years before the most phantasmal act of terrorism struck: the Red Brigade’s abduction, and subsequent execution, of a well-known Italian politician and ex-Prime Minister, Aldo Moro. Though no longer a government minister, the Christian Democratic Moro was seen as somebody who could build bridges and affect an ‘historic compromise’. In the 1960s he’d been an anti-communist centre-left; in the 1970s he vacillated around pragmatic consensus. Now out of office, though still prominent on TV as a political commentator, he strove to hand an olive branch to the communists.

  On the morning of 16 March 1978, vindicated and celebrating the advent of a new coalition government led by the Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti, with the blessing of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Moro was scheduled to appear in Parliament. His dark blue Fiat 130 had made the three-mile trek through Rome’s streets, from Moro’s home, a thousand times before. Only this time, it was skilfully intercepted, ostensibly by an innocent reversing car. But it was a professional hit. Moro’s chauffeur and two bodyguards were killed instantly by submachine-gun fire. Another got a bullet in the back of the head as he desperately crawled out of the car; a fourth bled to death hours later in hospital. Moro himself was whisked off, unhurt, by a speeding Fiat. For the next few months, his whereabouts and fate dominated Italian media and politics.4

  The day after the abduction, the Red Brigade phoned, admitting responsibility. After a while it mailed other communiqués: Moro, they said, was held in ‘the people’s prison’, awaiting trial as a ‘henchman of the multinationals’. He was, they claimed, ‘closely tied to imperialist circles’; for ‘thirty years’ he had ‘oppressed the Italian people’.5 Red Brigade letters came in thick and fast: a second, a third, a fourth and fifth, then a sixth, seventh and eighth. And then, with the ninth, came the dramatic, and dreaded, verdict: ‘Aldo Moro is guilty and is therefore condemned to death.’ On 9 May 1978 two Red Brigaders, equipped with a Scorpion submachinegun and a Beretta pistol, riddled the Christian Democratic politician’s body with bullets. Moro was later dumped in the back of a red Renault, and parked in a spot almost exactly halfway between the headquarters of his own party and the PCI’S.

  Debord followed these events and their repercussions closely. He drafted a new Preface to the fourth Italian edition of The Society of the Spectacle, barely six months after Moro’s deadly ‘historic compromise’. He expressed considerable interest in the Italian situation: first, with respect to the Italian reception of his book; second, to the antics of the Red Brigade, whom he deemed ‘the Stalinist trade union police’. Meanwhile, he got to know Italy well and was always fascinated by its dramas and shenanigans. He slowly learnt the language, became absorbed by its wine, literature and culture, and even bragged about his roots – his half-sister, remember, had an Italian father. ‘Italy’, he’d said,

  is the most modern laboratory for international counter-revolution. Other governments descended from the old pre-spectacular bourgeois democracy, look with admiration at the Italian government, for the impassiveness it knows how to maintain at the centre of all tumultuous degradations, and for the tranquil dignity with which it wallows in the mud.6

  But, in the factories of this very same country, his book also found its best readers. ‘For their absenteeism, for their wildcat strikes that aren’t appeased by no particular concession, for their lucid refusal to work, and for their contempt for the law and for all statist parties’, Italian workers, he noted, ‘are an example to their comrades of all other countries’. They ‘know the subject well enough by practice to have been able to benefit from the theses of La Société du Spectacle, even when they read only mediocre translations of them.’7 Still, Debord reviled the Red Brigade itself, yet understood them ironically: he knew that if the Situationist International had lived beyond 1972, it too would have been branded a ‘terrorist’ group and tarred with the same brush.

  He also thought the Moro affair ‘a mythological opera with great machinations’. ‘Terrorist heroes’, he said, turned ‘into foxes to ensnare their prey, into lions to fear nobody for as long as they can, and into sheep so as not to derive from this coup d’état anything harmful to the regime they feign to defy.’8 The Red Brigade, Debord added, were blessed by good luck: they dealt with the world’s most incompetent police force, some of whom had actually infiltrated the Red Brigade, without apparent hindrance. The Red Brigade’s ‘illogical and blind terrorism’, served only to embarrass itself; gladly, the mass media seized upon it and the Italian state used it – indeed, nourished it – to bolster its repressive power. In this sense, Red Brigade politics was a ‘spectacular politics of terrorism’, playing straight into the hands of the right-wing media and Stalinists, whom, Debord said, the Red Brigade always refused to denounce. Ultimately, the Red Brigade’s sole function was to disconcert and discredit those workers who really did want to smash the state. And, from his underground Italian lair, smashing the state was still top of Debord’s agenda.

  Debord gives us a few hints of what he got up to in Italy, where he wasn’t well received by everyone. Assuredly, he drank a lot of Italian wine and grappa, while trying hard not to avoid dangerous encounters. Now, however, his Situationist rebel-rousing days were done; he subverted freelance instead, without affiliation. He tells us he lived principally in Florence, in the old artisan Oltrarno district, in an apartment in a fourteenth-century building along the Via delle Caldaie. In Florence, too, he ‘had the good fortune to know the sfacciate donne fiorentine’. ‘There was this little Florentine’, he said in Panégyrique,

  who was so graceful. At night, she would cross the river to come to San Frediano. I fell in love very unexpectedly, perhaps because of her beautiful, bitter smile. And I told her, in brief: ‘Do not stay silent, for I come before you as a stranger and a traveler. Grant me some refreshment before I go away and am here no more.’9

  At the time, Italy ‘was once again losing its way: it was necessary to regain sufficient distance from its prisons, where those who stayed too long at the revels of Florence ended up’.10 So our stranger and traveller hid himself away for a while in the verdant hills of Chianti, in another old house, behind another high stone wall. He and Alice had a penchant for t
hings ancient, for places grand yet shabby, aristocratic yet proletarian. It was an odd mix; somehow they managed to pull it off and to assume all the regal airs of the dangerous classes. Was Guy a pilgrim descending into hell, or someone ascending up the mountain of purgatory, reaching upwards toward paradise? The Dantesque inflection seems apt. He’d read the Florentine maestro, who’d similarly been banished from his native city. ‘What force or fatality’, Debord asked in Panégyrique, citing Dante’s Purgatory (Canto v), ‘took you so far from Campaldino/ that one had never known your burial place.’ ‘He goes in search of freedom’, Dante had written elsewhere (Canto I), ‘and how dear that is,/ the man who gives up life for it well knows.’

  The other Florentine to beseech Debord was, of course, Machiavelli, the crafty Renaissance theorist. It was a common defect of men in fair weather, Machiavelli warned, to take no thought of storms.11 Debord thought a lot about storms, especially those that broke out in fair weather. Machiavelli helped him ride a few, and revealed the lessons of shrewdness, not simply force, in political manoeuvring. Debord’s Machiavelli didn’t so much preach about power as lecture about survival through waiting and strategizing, trickery and daring. Machiavelli taught Debord about deception and discretion. Indeed, he appropriated Machiavelli’s sixteenth-century Discourses and The Prince as handbooks toward liberty not autocracy. Machiavelli suggested a prince had ‘to know well how to employ the nature of the beasts’. Princes should

  be able to assume the nature of the fox and the lion; for while the latter cannot escape the traps laid for him, the former cannot defend himself against wolves. A prince should be a fox, to know the traps and snares; and a lion, to be able to frighten the wolves; for those who simply hold to the nature of the lion do not understand their business.12

  In 1971, just as Richard Nixon devalued the dollar, Debord discovered a real-life prince among men: the left-leaning media mogul, impresario and movie producer Gérard Lebovici. Soon, a budding friendship took hold. The French daily France-Soir once described Lebovici as ‘a genius in business, the most important agent-producer in French cinema’. Lebovici – or ‘le roi Lebo’ (King Lebo), as he was called, at once fondly and pejoratively – headed the Artmedia casting agency, whose list included towering figures of French film: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau, Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. He was suave and sophisticated, and rich and cultured as only Parisians can be. He was a handsome playboy with Left sensibilities, who lived a glamorous life yet avoided the limelight. He also controlled a small publishing house, Champ Libre (Free Field), launched after May 1968, which dealt with off-beat radical texts, often obscure books that gave the finger to the same establishment that had made Lebovici wealthy.

  He and Debord were almost identical ages, both brilliantly intelligent, bon vivants with under-class tendencies. Lebovici was passionately interested in the Situationists, and he and the ex-Situ chef genuinely hit it off. Champ Libre wasted no time in republishing The Society of the Spectacle; Lebovici bankrolled Debord’s film version a year later, and picked up the tab for In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni a few years after that. In fact, Lebovici financed the costs of airing all Debord’s other movies, even buying a little cinema, Studio Cujas, in the Latin Quarter dedicated to Guy’s cinematic works. Plainly, our aesthete of subversion had found both a prince and a fairy godmother.

  Before long, the word got out about their friendship. In intellectual circles, they became the talk of the town. Then the tabloids and the glossies weighed in, ever eager for mindless gossip. Inevitably, fact blurred into fiction. Wasn’t Lebovici a man now under the influence, besotted with Debord, who was steering the millionaire producer towards extremist organizations, like the Red Brigade, like the Baader-Meinhof? Didn’t Lebovici finance them because of his taste for scandal and provocation? Wasn’t he the ‘great prostitute of spectacular terrorism’, funding ultra-leftist cliques, as one right-wing newspaper put it, under the watchful eye of police and Mafia alike? Wasn’t Debord the éminence grise who really controlled Champ Libre’s editorial department? In 1974, its four publishing staff, fronted by Gérard Guégan, were all ousted; Debord was accused of masterminding the coup d’état at Champ Libre. Yet, ‘why was it necessary’, he asked, ‘to believe in my influence to explain an event so trifling, which I was totally estranged from, and that I only learned about months later in Italy, where I was then living?’13

  Years afterwards, Guégan still apparently bore a grudge. After Debord’s death, he penned a thin, rather scurrilous text, whipped off almost overnight, entitled Guy Debord est mort, le Che aussi. Et alors? (‘Debord is dead and Che too. So what?’).14 In it, Guégan recalls getting an afternoon phone call advising: ‘Debord is dead.’ Guégan shrugs his shoulders indifferently, and remembers receiving a similar call, from the same person, a few months earlier about the death of another hard-core drinker, Charles Bukowski. First-time tragedy, he muses, second-time farce. Guégan, though, must have had a late night himself, because he was a full month out on the actual date of Debord’s suicide. Debord, for his own part, once claimed not to have known or met Guégan. Still, he’d read Guégan’s Les Irréguliers. ‘It’s a sorry thing’, commiserated Debord, ‘like everything Guégan writes.’15

  Lebo, like his pal Guy, was a man both ahead of and behind the times; he was an entrepreneur as well as a knight, who seemed to epitomize all the grace and elegance of Tuscan virtue outlined in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Together, Lebovici and Debord became prince and courtier; often it was difficult to tell who was who, and who influenced the other. Both, as Castiglione wrote in 1528, were necessarily cautious and wise. ‘Thus, gentleness is most striking in a man who is valiant and impetuous; and his boldness seems greater when accompanied with modesty, so his modesty is enhanced and made more evident by his boldness.’ Hence, ‘to talk little’, said Castiglione, ‘and to do much, and not to praise oneself with deeds that are praiseworthy, but tactfully to dissimulate them, serves to enhance both the one virtue and the other in anyone who knows how to employ this method discreetly.’16

  Whether as prince or courtier, Debord now had a trusty patron for his enterprises and wanderings. From Florence to the hills of Tuscany, onwards into Spain, Guy and Alice took flight, journeying to Barcelona, to Madrid, to Cadiz, and to Seville. Debord adored Spain as he adored Italy. From Italian political intrigue, he now enveloped himself in warm Spanish air. He went in search of sunshine and duende, for a dash of the demonic, for Gypsies and flamenco, for music and dance, for sensuality and folklore, for what the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca dubbed ‘deep song’. Paris had had its deep song taken away; Debord wanted it back, in spite of the spectacle. In Barcelona, he followed Orwell and Genet into shady bars near the Ramblas, where he’d sometimes rendezvous with Lebovici, in the freer post-Franco period, after 1975. In these caves, the lost found themselves and the found lost themselves. Soon, too, Debord would discover duende in Andalusia, in Seville, in its darkest bramble patches, amongst its wildest songs and most decadent life.

  No map will help anyone find duende, Lorca warned. It burns in the blood, like a poultice of broken glass; it exhausts, rejects geometry, leans on human pain and smashes styles. Great artists of the south of Spain, especially of Andalusia, whether they sing or dance or bullfight, know nothing comes unless the duende comes. The commodified world of modern capitalism, Debord knew, killed duende, neutered it, doused it, took away its feeling. A life of wealth and abundance perversely materializes into nothingness, into an air-conditioned nightmare, anodyne and unadventurous, a world devoid of real sensuality. ‘The duende’s arrival’, Lorca wrote, ‘always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle.’ Spain is moved by duende, he said, ‘for it is a country of ancient music and dance where the duende squeezes the lemons of death – a country of death, open to death. Everywhere else, death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curta
ins. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them.’17

  Death is the subject of Spain’s best-known and most popular poem, Verses on the Death of his Father, written in the 1470s by Jorge Manrique. Manrique, like most Spanish writers of that century, belonged to one of the elite Castilian families. His father, Don Rodrigo, whose death is lamented in the stanzas, was a famous military officer; Jorge’s uncle, Gomez Manrique, was a poet of distinction. Jorge himself, who died at the tender age of 39 defending Queen Isabella’s crown, was really a minor scribe, penning mostly trite lines. But, somehow, through his elegy on his dead father, he ‘was able to write a poem that sums up the accumulated feelings of an entire age’. These words are those of the English writer Gerald Brenan, another lover of Spain and one-time Andalusian resident, from The Literature of the Spanish People (1951). It appeared in French under Champ Libre’s imprint, doubtless at Debord’s behest, alongside Brenan’s other great book, his Spanish Civil War history The Spanish Labyrinth (1943).