20 Détournement is a word used in relatively common parlance in France. Its accepted meaning is ‘reversal’, ‘re-routing’, ‘diverting’, even ‘hijacking’ – as in ‘un détournement d’avion’. The Situationists appropriated the notion in its everyday understanding, yet gave it their own inflection, their own twisted meaning. Situationist détournements were literary as well as practical, urbanistic as well as political, inverting art and daily life simultaneously, pillorying it, devaluing accepted meaning and behaviour. Détournement would invent new values and different meanings, meanings that the Situationists believed to be creative preludes of the future.
21 Les Chants de Maldoror, in Lautréamont, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1946), p. 289.
22 Ibid., p. 292.
23 Ibid., pp. 251, 306, 251.
24 Poésies, in Lautréamont, Oeuvres complètes, p. 365.
25 Hervé Falcou kept all young Guy’s letters. Fifty-five years later, on the tenth anniversary of Debord’s death, they surfaced, beautifully reproduced in large-format colour facsimile. See Guy Debord, Le Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille (Paris, 2004).
26 Arthur Cravan, Oeuvres:poèmes, articles, lettres (Paris, 1987), p. 107. See, too, Andy Merrifield, ‘The Provocations of Arthur Cravan’, Brooklyn Rail (June 2004).
27 Debord, Considérations, p. 35.
28 Breton’s essay is included in Cravan, Oeuvres. This citation appears on p. 105.
29 See Debord to Alex Trocchi, 1 June 1959, in Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. I: Juin 1957–août 1960 (Paris, 1999), p. 233.
30 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, pp. 43–4; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 50.
31 Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London, 1990), p. 78; see Commentaires sur ‘La Société du spectacle’ (Paris, 1992), pp. 104–5.
32 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 23; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 33.
33 The English translation unfortunately loses the wit of Debord’s original phrase ‘entrepreneurs de demolition’.
34 Guy Debord, Mémoires, 1952–1953 (Paris, 1993).
35 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955) in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA, 1989), p. 5.
36 ‘Encore un effort si vous voulez être Situationnistes’, Potlatch, 29 (5 November 1957); reprinted in Guy Debord présente Potlatch, 1954–1957 (Paris, 1996), p. 277. In Potlatch, 30, Debord described the journal as an ‘instrument of propaganda’ and ‘probably in its time the most extreme expression, which is to say, the most advanced search, for a new culture and a new life’ (Potlatch, 30, in ibid., p. 282).
37 ‘Hurlements en faveur de Sade’, in Guy Debord, Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, 1952–78 (Paris, 1994), p. 11.
38 Debord, ‘Le Rôle de Godard’ in Internationale Situationniste (Paris, 1997), p. 470.
39 ‘Hurlements en faveur de Sade’, in Debord, Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, p. 12.
40 Ibid., pp. 12, 17–18.
41 ‘A la porte’, in Guy Debord présente Potlatch, p. 21.
42 ‘L’Architecture et le jeu’, in ibid., pp. 155–8.
43 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, MA, 1955), p. 9.
44 Ibid., p. 89.
45 Debord, ‘Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps’, in Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, p. 21.
46 Ibid., p. 31.
47 Debord defined psychogeography as the ‘study of the precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously developed or not, acting directly on the affective behavior of individuals’ (see ‘Définitions’ in Internationale Situationniste, p. 13).
48 ‘Interview: Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International’, October, 79 (Winter 1997), p. 80.
49 Ibid.
50 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One (London, 1991), p. 202.
51 Now in his seventies, the anarchist rebel Vaneigem keeps going strong in Belgium, where he resembles a latter-day Charles Fourier. His book of 1967, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations, was recently republished in Paris. Vaneigem’s text would be more widely known today if it hadn’t been released the same year as The Society of the Spectacle, which became the radical book of the epoch.
52 Lefebvre, ‘Interview’.
2 The Café of Lost Youth
1 Ralph Rumney, The Consul (San Francisco, 2002), p. 21.
2 Guy Debord, ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’, in Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, 1952–78 (Paris, 1994), p. 223.
3 Ibid., pp. 223–5.
4 Ibid., p. 230
5 Jean-Michel Mension, The Tribe (San Francisco, 2001), pp. 38–3.
6 Ibid., p. 122.
7 Ibid., p. 41.
8 Ibid., p. 47.
9 Ibid., p. 51.
10 ‘Interview: Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International’, October, 79 (Winter 1997), pp. 69–70.
11 Michèle Bernstein, Tous les chevaux du roi (Paris, 2004), p. 19.
12 Ibid., p. 22.
13 Ibid., p. 26.
14 Blaise Cendrars, To the End of the World (London, 2002), pp. 13,73.
15 The Complete Poems of François Villon (New York, 1960), p. 25.
16 Ibid., p. 173.
17 Pierre Mac Orlan, Petit manuel du parfait aventurier (Paris, 1998), p. 15.
18 Guy Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, trans. James Brook (London, 1991), p. 46; Panégyrique, vol. I (Paris, 1993), p. 52–3.
19 Louis Chevalier, The Assassination of Paris (Chicago, 1994), p. 12.
20 Ibid., p. 246.
21 Ibid., p. 84.
22 ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’, pp. 226–7.
23 Chevalier, Assassination of Paris, p. 245.
24 Guy Debord présente Potlatch, 1954–1957 (Paris, 1996), p. 38.
25 Ibid., pp. 37–9.
26 ‘Critique de la séparation’, in Debord, Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, p. 45.
27 Ibid., p. 46.
28 Ibid., pp. 55–6.
29 Ibid., p. 47.
30 Guy Debord, ‘Perspectives de modifications conscientes dans la vie quotidienne’, cited in Internationale Situationniste (Paris, 1997), p. 219.
31 Karl Marx, ‘The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, in Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworth, 1974).
32 See the hanging to Debord’s letter to Constant (25 May 1960) in Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. I: Juin 1957–août 1960 (Paris, 1999), p. 336.
33 Constant’s early sketches of New Babylon, dating between 1956 and 1974, have been collated and presented in Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
34 ‘Programme elementaire du Bureau d’Urbanisme Unitaire’, in Internationale Situationniste, p. 216.
35 ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’, in Oeuvres cinematographiques complètes, pp. 278–9.
36 Ibid., p. 280.
37 Philippe Sollers, ‘L’étrange vie de Guy Debord’, in Eloge de l’infini (Paris, 2002), p. 574.
38 ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’, in Oeuvres cinematographiques complètes, p. 240.
39 Ibid., p. 238.
40 Ibid., p. 247.
41 Ibid., p. 253.
42 Ibid., p. 259.
3 It Never Said Anything Extreme
1 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris, 1992), p. 15.
2 Karl Marx, ‘The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, in Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 377.
3 Guy Debord, ‘Avertissement pour la troisième édition française’, in La Société du Spectacle, p. 11.
4 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, P. 326.
5 Guy Debord, Panégyrique, vol. II (Paris, 1997).
6 Guy Debord, ‘Préface à la quatrième édition italienn
e de La Société du spectacle’, in Commentaires sur ‘La Société du spectacle’ (Paris, 1992), p. 131.
7 Guy Debord, Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (Paris, 1993), pp. 30–31.
8 ‘Préface à la quatrième édition italienne’, p. 129.
9 This latter phrase Debord used to conclude an essay called ‘La Planète malade’ (1971), destined for the unlucky thirteenth Internationale Situationniste before its dissolution. In it, Debord tackles ‘spectacular pollution’, where mass-commodity production and alienated labour has created a ‘sick planet’. The hitherto unpublished text has recently been released, in La Planète malade (Paris, 2004).
10 Guy Debord, The Veritable Split in the International, trans. Lucy Forsyth (London, 1985), pp. 11–12 (emphasis in original).
11 Ibid., p. 11.
12 ‘Lefebvre on the Situationist International’, October, 79 (Winter 1977), p. 81.
13 ‘The Beginning of an Era [1969]’ in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA, 1989), pp. 227–8 (emphasis in original).
14 See the ‘Interview with Michèle Bernstein’ cited in Christophe Bourseiller, Vie et mort de Guy Debord, 1931–94 (Paris, 1999), pp. 258–9.
15 ‘Lefebvre on the Situationist International’.
16 Henri Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste (Geneva, 1973), p. 11; see, too, Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2005).
17 Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Theses on the Paris Commune’, in Situationist International Anthology, p. 314.
18 ‘Lefebvre on the Situationist International’.
19 Debord, ‘La Société du spectacle’, in Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, 1952–78 (Paris, 1994), p. 139.
20 Ibid., pp. 140–41.
21 Guy Debord, Cette mauvaise réputation (Paris, 1993), pp. 94–5.
22 Marx, of course, used the sobriquet in his satire of Napoleon III, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Crapulinski, which he borrowed from a Heine poem, comes from the French word crapule, meaning intemperance, gluttony or drunkenness; it can also stand for a loafer or a scoundrel.
23 Guy Debord (with Gianfranco Sanguinetti), The Veritable Split in the International, p. 77.
24 Debord, Considérations, p. 64.
25 J.H.M. Salmon, Cardinal de Retz: The Anatomy of a Conspirator (London, 1970), p. 62.
4 Aesthete of Subversion
1 Gianfranco Sanguinetti, The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy (Fort Bragg, CA, 1997), p. 52.
2 Ibid., p. 58 (emphasis in original).
3 Ibid., p. 75.
4 For further details of this and other Red Brigade activities, see Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington, IN, 1989).
5 Ibid., p. 71.
6 ‘Préface à la quatrième édition italienne de La Société du spectacle’, in Commentaires sur ‘La Société du Spectacle’ (Paris, 1992), pp. 142–3.
7 Ibid., p. 127.
8 Ibid., p. 134
9 Guy Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, trans. James Brook (London, 1991), p. 47; Panégyrique, vol. I (Paris, 1993), p. 55.
10 Panegyric, vol. I, pp. 47–8; Panégyrique, vol. I, pp. 54–5.
11 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (New York, 1963), p. 109.
12 Ibid., p. 76
13 Guy Debord, Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (Paris, 1993), p. 33.
14 Gérard Guégan, Guy Debord est mort, le Che aussi. Et alors? (Paris, 2001).
15 Debord, Considérations, p. 29.
16 Baldasar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (New York, 1959), p. 98.
17 Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende (New York, 1955), p. 55.
18 Guy Debord, Stances sur la mort de son père (Cognac, 1996), pp. 74–5.
19 Ibid., p. 75.
20 Ibid., p. 71.
21 Ibid., p. 73.
22 Author’s interview with Alice Debord, Champot, 23 July 2003. It was in fact Alice who introduced Debord to the writings of George Borrow.
23 George Borrow, Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (London, 1925), pp. 102–3.
24 Alice Becker-Ho, Les Princes du Jargon (Paris, 1994), p. 16.
25 Ibid., p. 40.
26 L’Essence du Jargon, p. 41.
27 Debord, Considérations, pp. 79–80.
28 Guy Debord, Des contrats (Cognac, 1995), p. 54. Emphasis in original.
29 Ibid., p. 54.
5 I Am Not Somebody Who Corrects Himself
1 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, MA, 1956), p. 155.
2 Gérard Lebovici, Tout sur le personnage (Paris, 1984), p. 46.
3 Guy Debord, Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (Paris, 1985), p. 10.
4 Ibid., p. 11. This citation is actually Debord’s détournement of a line from Pascal’s Pensées.
5 Ibid., pp. 74.
6 Ibid., p. 42.
7 Ibid., p. 92.
8 Lebovici’s murder was, in fact, the second death that really shook Debord. The first was Asger Jorn’s, who had died of lung cancer a decade earlier. In the spring of 1973, Jorn, from a Jutland hospital, had written to the Debords at their rue Saint-Jacques address, advising them of his terminal illness. But they were already sojourning in Florence, and without a telephone. Debord learnt of his friend’s death on 1 May 1973 from an obituary in Le Monde. When they returned to Paris several weeks later, Jorn’s last unanswered letter was discovered amid the pile of awaiting mail.
9 Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Paris, 1966), p. 232.
10 Guy Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, trans. James Brook (London, 1991), p. 46; Panégyrique, vol. I (Paris, 1993), p. 53.
11 Pierre Mac Orlan, Domaine de l’ombre (Paris, 2000), p. 161.
12 Pierre Mac Orlan, Petit manuel du parfait aventurier (Paris, 1998), p. 22.
13 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
14 Ibid., p. 57.
15 Pierre Mac Orlan, La Vénus internationale (Paris, 1923), pp. 236–7.
16 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London, 1990), p. 5. The emphasis is in Debord’s original French text, Commentaires sur ‘La Société du Spectacle’ (Paris, 1992), p. 17.
17 Debord, ‘Avertissement pour la troisème édition Française’, in La Société du Spectacle (Paris, 1992), p. 7. Debord’s original words are: ‘Je ne suis pas quelqu’un qui se corrige.’
18 Ibid., p. 10 (emphasis in the original).
19 Ibid.
20 Debord, Comments, p. 9.
21 Ibid., p. 10.
22 Ibid., pp. 12–23.
23 Ibid., p. 16 (emphasis in original).
24 Ibid., p. 24.
25 Ibid., p. 67 (emphasis in original).
26 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 66; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 73.
27 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, pp. 67–68; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 75.
28 Guy Debord, Cette mauvaise réputation (Paris, 1993), p. 14.
29 Ibid., p. 50.
30 Guy Debord, Des contrats (Cognac, 1995), p. 65.
31 These passages have been assembled in an interesting little collection called Eloge de l’ivresse (‘In Praise of Drunkenness’), ed. Sébastien Lapaque and Jérôme Leroy (Paris, 2000), in which Debord shares space with the likes of Rabelais, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe and Omar Khayyám.
32 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 36; Panégyrique, vol. I, pp. 44–5. Debord’s confession that he had never found time to write is poetic licence, needless to say. Over recent years, something that has become apparent is his prolific letter writing. Four volumes of his correspondance, dating from June 1957, are now available through Librairie Arthème Fayard, a veritable feast for Debordian fans. Two more volumes in the series, stretching to the very end of his life, are forthcoming.
Guy Debord (Critical Lives) Page 16
