Guy Debord by anselm jappe

Author:anselm jappe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2018-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Debord Myth

The events of May 1968 bestowed a measure of unanticipated notoriety on Guy Debord. Never having been fond of the limelight, least of all that of a society that he despised, and being of a naturally discreet disposition, he proceeded in the aftermath of 1968 to make himself more inaccessible than ever. He would have nothing to do with the many groupuscules, in several countries, all of whom claimed the mantle of the Situationists and spent most of their time in crude vendettas passed off as revolutionary activity. Nor did he heed the attempts to co-opt the luminaries of 1968 and turn them into literary editors, academics, politicians, or at the very least willing talkshow guests. His position was unwavering: “I would find it just as vulgar to be an authority in the resistance to society as to be an authority within society itself” (OCC, 269–70; In girum, 66). The very act of withdrawing, however, led to Debord’s being described as “the most elusive of men with one of the most significant trajectories of the last twenty-five years,”84 and he was accused by some of disappearing precisely as a way of burnishing the myth that surrounded him.

This alleged disappearance of Debord’s was in actuality quite relative. During this time, he formed a friendship with Gérard Lebovici, a brilliant and unconventional cinema impresario who in 1970 had founded and financed the small publishing house Champ Libre. In 1971 Debord entrusted Lebovici with a new edition of The Society of the Spectacle, and from 1974 on, though in no official capacity, he began to play a decisive role in running Lebovici’s unique company. Unique, because, ignoring considerations of profit entirely, Champ Libre published texts on the theory and practice of revolution that ranged from Hegel to Bakunin and from Saint-Just to the Spanish anarchists; the critique of Maoism and Stalinism rubbed shoulders on Champ Libre’s list with such classics as Omar Khayyám and Baltasar Gracián, George Orwell and Karl Kraus, while forgotten writings of Clausewitz or the German Dadaists, of Georg Groddeck or Malevich, were given a new lease on life.85 Naturally Debord’s own works, and those of other Situationists, also appeared under the Champ Libre imprint. Lebovici’s most provocative act as a publisher, however, occurred in 1984, when he issued L’Instinct de mort [The Death Instinct], the memoirs of Jacques Mesrine, France’s most infamous criminal and “master escape artist,” considered public enemy number one until his barbaric elimination by the French police.

Lebovici and Debord deliberately maintained execrable relations with the press and the so-called intellectual world. Champ Libre acquired a terrible reputation in the eyes of many people, and, to quote Debord himself, “the publishing house was shrouded in a sinister atmosphere of continual conspiracy against the whole world.”86 Ample confirmation of this is supplied by the two volumes of its own Correspondance that Champ Libre published in 1978 and 1981, for the letters reproduced are full of exchanges of insults sometimes occasioned by the most trivial of considerations.

Lebovici had many enemies, made for the most part, no doubt, during his meteoric career in the film industry.

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