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www.notbored.org/1957-1994.html
"Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written
much less than the majority of people who write, but I have drunk more
than the majority of people who drink."
-- Guy Debord, Panegyric (1989)
"Where's my mail? Who's fucking with my mail?"
-- The Lone Ranger, in Lenny Bruce's posthumous film short, Thank You
Mask Man (1968)
In the 20 years since Panegyric was published, it has come out that
the renowned French acrobat Guy Debord wrote thousands of letters
during his lifetime (1931-1994). On average, he seems to have written
a letter every day for more than 40 years! Avoiding telephones -- not
only because they could be bugged, but also because he found
conversations on them to be intolerably impersonal -- Debord used
letters (and postcards and telegrams) to organize all kinds of
conferences, exhibitions, and interventions; to receive and critique
submissions to Internationale Situationniste; to write and distribute
draft versions of declarations to be signed by the Situationist
International; to distribute clandestine texts in foreign countries;
to review books written by friends and offer proofreader's corrections
to existing books or manuscripts that had been submitted to Editions
Champ Libre; and to offer sketches of letters, statements or articles
that would later be completed by other writers. He also relied upon
letters to make arrangements to meet friends or newcomers for a
"casual" drink or dinner; to gossip about friends or enemies; to renew
old friendships; and to tell certain people to fuck off. In other
words, he used the postal system the way today's writers and
publishers use email: on a daily basis, and to do virtually everything.
An extraordinarily meticulous man, Debord made a carbon copy of each
of his letters, which were typically hand-written and had to be typed
up by someone else. Debord typed very poorly and disliked using a
machine to write. [When computers "arrived" in the 1980s, Debord hated
them and certainly wouldn't use one to write anything.] These carbon
copies were collected and organized into files, which were stored and
transported en bloc when necessary. Debord was quite certain of the
"historical" character of his life, but he also wanted to be able to
recall what had been said, when, to whom, despite his drinking. In
sum, Guy Debord -- heretofore known as a great writer of a modest
number of books, essays and pamphlets, and a pioneering
cinematographer (a "writer of films") -- wrote more letters than the
majority of the people who write letters. Drink to it!
Virtually none of these letters were published in his lifetime; only a
few of them were reproduced, circulated to and discussed by people
other than the original addressees. [1] Today, fifteen years after
Debord's death (a suicide), most of his letters have been collected
and published in well-designed, chronologically ordered volumes.
Undertaken in 1999 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, the series entitled
Guy Debord Correspondance has included seven volumes so far and claims
to have covered the years 1957 to 1994. It is said one more volume in
this series is to yet to come. In addition to providing an index to
the entire series, Volume 8 of Guy Debord Correspondance will
apparently cover the years 1954 to 1957, which Fayard partially mined
in 2004, when it published Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille. A
collection of facsimiles of some of the letters Debord wrote between
1949 and 1954, Marquis de Sade has apparently gone out of print.
Perhaps it will be "reprinted" in Volume 8. If so, we will have
Debord's letters from either 1949 or 1954 all the way to the end, 30
November 1994.
After five years of translating hundreds of the letters that Guy
Debord wrote between 1957 and 1994, I have come to visualize a day in
his life in the following manner: drinking, reading, eating, going for
a stroll, drinking some more, writing and waiting for the mailman. No
matter where he was -- in France or living in another country, in the
city or in the countryside -- Guy Debord was waiting for the day's
mail, that is to say, to read the responses to his responses to other
people's remarks. The usefulness, the regularity and even the novelty
of the postal system never seemed to wear off. In several of his
letters, but mostly strikingly in those written in 1994, the last year
of his life, we encounter something like this: "Write to me at this
address, because the mail follows me wherever I go." The temptation is
irresistible: Hey, Guy! Are you getting your mail down there?
Despite its grand appearance or our fondest hopes, Guy Debord
Correspondance has not been "complete", and will not be "complete",
even after the publication of the Volume 8, which, according to Ken
Knabb, will "also include various letters that were discovered too
late to be included in the above volumes." There have been serious and
systematic omissions, right from the start. None of the untold numbers
of letters addressed to Guy Debord, by untold numbers of people, have
been included. Furthermore, and for one reason or another, none of
Debord's letters to the situationist Jacqueline de Jong, his one-time
girlfriend Michele Mochot-Brehat, and his ex-wives (the situationist
Michele Bernstein and Alice Becker-Ho) have been included. A cynical,
but still unsatisfied buyer might ask: Will there be a separate volume
entitled "Guy Debord, Love Letters"? [2]
While it is true that either "Alice Debord" (Alice Becker-Ho) or
someone at Fayard (Patrick Mosconi?) has consistently provided
summaries of the major events of each year, as well as explanatory
footnotes, both have been kept very brief, and seem to have been added
"only when necessary." In any case, they rarely quote from or even
summarize the letters that have sent to Debord and to which he is
always already responding. As a result, quite unnecessarily, and to
the incalculable detriment of both contemporary understanding and the
research of future historians, some passages in a few fairly crucial
letters are difficult, if not impossible to understand, and some
letters can't be properly or fully contextualized. At the global
level, a complex and rich network of back-and-forth dialogues (true
correspondences) has been turned into a simple set of monologues
(letters primarily addressed to posterity and only secondarily to
particular people at particular moments in time).
Only Jean-Pierre Baudet, Jean-Francois Martos, and Michel Bounan have
publicly denounced the Guy Debord Correspondance series and Alice
Debord's role in it, in particular. [3] Almost everyone else in "the
situ scene" hasn't been outraged; at the very least, they have managed
to stay ignorant or silent about the whole affair. Perhaps they feel
that Alice can do anything she wants to do, [4] and/or that "we" are
lucky to have the letters that we have been given. Most translators --
Ken Knabb, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Stuart Kendall, John McKale, Keith
Sanborn, et al -- have continued to work with Alice, that is to say,
to help her capitalize on her ex-husband's assets: not only his
"correspondence", but his lesser known books, his films, his film
scripts, and his cabinet game, Kriegspiel or The Game of War. But they
should not be condemned too harshly: it is quite true that they do not
get paid, or get paid very little, while Alice keeps the lion's share
of the money for herself, even or especially if its ultimate source is
the French Ministry of Culture in Los Angeles, New York or London. The
sums involved here are probably substantial.
Harsh condemnation is best reserved for Semiotext(e), which recently
published a perfectly good translation of Fayard's already defective
version of Volume I (1957-1960), but did so without even mentioning
the existence of the on-going battle over the integrity of the Guy
Debord Correspondance series as a whole. Of course Semiotext(e) didn't
need to "announce" what position it was taking up on this particular
battlefield. Its position spoke for itself: The prestige of publishing
Debord more than compensates for the inadequacy of the money we are
paid. And so Semiotext(e) must feign ignorance or keep quiet about the
prestige-killing things Alice/Fayard have done to make the project
happen in the first place: the ruthless suppression Jean-Francois
Martos' volume of his personal correspondence to and from Guy Debord,
which allegedly compromised the "completeness" of then-nonexistent
Guy Debord Correspondance series; the aforementioned omissions (the
most important women in Guy Debord's life, no less!); and the
satisfaction of a requirement that "X" replace a certain person's name
wherever it appeared in Volume 6 (1979-1988). Semiotext(e) isn't
simply helping Alice make even more money for herself; they are
helping her to cover her tracks or, rather, to erase the tracks of
others, without even knowing why she is erasing these particular
tracks and not others. [5] See no evil, speak no evil.
* * *
I have been reading Guy Debord's works since 1983. I like them. I
learn a lot from them and enjoy them. I damn well know that he wasn't
perfect, that he had his faults (in addition to the drinking), and
that he was capable of saying stupid things, just like anyone else,
especially in his "private" correspondence. I never met him nor
thought to send him a letter, even though I have long published a
"situationist" fanzine in which Debord is often mentioned. I have
never met or corresponded with Alice Becker-Ho; I do not have anything
"personal" against her. But it has pleased me, especially since the
man's death, to do my best to keep straight and/or complete the
historical record about Guy Debord, to fill in the "missing" pieces,
and to make sure the context is clearly understood.
Since the "original" volumes of the seven-volume-long series Guy
Debord Correspondance are themselves selections, and not the complete
correspondence, I have not felt compelled to translate every single
letter in each volume. I just translated the interesting ones, the
good ones. There were a lot of them; between 10 and 30 per year. In
each case, I preserved the original footnotes. When desirable, I
provided new footnotes, all of them clearly noted. More importantly, I
did not drop out or soften the impact of any passages that might be
seen or construed as unflattering to its author or that might be
"useful" to Debord's many detractors (they tend to be the people who
write biographies of him, for some reason). I always chose to include
these letters, completely unabridged. This is my Guy Debord, yes; but
it is Guy Debord, warts and all.
I have placed these "unofficial" translations on-line, at my own
expense, and have made them available for free, without asserting any
copyrights or rights reserved. When I have received emails pointing
out mistakes, I have made the proper corrections immediately. Provided
my translator's notes are included and attributed to "NOT BORED", I am
always pleased whenever I discover that someone somewhere has copy-and-
pasted one or several of my translations to the internet. I have never
received a cease-and-desist letter from either Alice Debord or Fayard,
nor do I expect to. MIT Press? There'd be no point. Everyone knows
that you just can't trust what you read on-line; you can only trust
what's been printed in a book. Why? Books got a copyright symbol, an
ISBN and a barcode, and what's on-line don't.
Bill Not Bored
29 June 2009
Footnotes
[1] Examples would include the Situationist International's
orientation debate, which was largely conducted by mail between 1970
and 1971 (and collected and published by pirates in 1974); Guy
Debord's letters to Afonso Monteiro, concerning Portugal and dated
March 1975 and 15 November 1975; and Debord's letter to Gianfranco
Sanguinetti, concerning Aldo Moro and dated 21 April 1978.
[2] No doubt such a book would be veritably Sadean. "Sade was also
recuperated to create the basis of the restricted section of the
Bibliotheque nationale de France. Then why not Debord, yielded up in a
bloc for the purposes of research?" Frederique Roussel wrote in the 17
June 2009 issue of Liberation.
[3] For Jean-Pierre Baudet, see Signed X (2007); for Jean-Francois
Martos, see On the Interdiction of My Correspondence with Guy Debord
(1999); and for Michel Bounan, see Editorial Politics (2000).
[4] So far, that has included 1) selling her ex-husband's letters
through Fayard, which is owned by La Gardiere, one of the biggest arms-
dealers and media-monopolists in the world; 2) selling his films
through Gaumont, which one of the biggest corporate distributors in
France; and 3) attempting to sell his entire archives -- which have
been estimated to be worth approximately $2,340,000 -- to either Yale
University or the Bibliotheque nationale de France (see news articles
dated 14 June 2009, 17 June 2009 and 17 June 2009).
[5] For example: Jean-Pierre Baudet fell out of Debord's favor in
1988; and Jean-Francois Martos fell out of Debord's favor shortly
thereafter because he questioned what happened to Baudet. They were
thrown out of Debord's social circle. But this can't be taken as good
reason to remove either of these men from the historical record of
Debord's life. These were people who had known each other for years;
while still close friends, they collaborated on texts together,
properly "Debordian" texts -- Baudet's book about Chernobyl and his
translation of Clausewitz into French; Martos's pamphlet on Poland and
his History of the Situationist International; and especially their
collective work, as a trio, on the critique of the Encyclopedia of
Nuisances -- that, today, simply cannot be cut from the corpus without
making the body bleed, or at least rot some more.----
Message sent by the Situationist list.
To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe situationist" in the body of a message
to requests-AT-lists.nothingness.org
(please forward if necessary)
www.notbored.org/1957-1994.html
"Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written
much less than the majority of people who write, but I have drunk more
than the majority of people who drink."
-- Guy Debord, Panegyric (1989)
"Where's my mail? Who's fucking with my mail?"
-- The Lone Ranger, in Lenny Bruce's posthumous film short, Thank You
Mask Man (1968)
In the 20 years since Panegyric was published, it has come out that
the renowned French acrobat Guy Debord wrote thousands of letters
during his lifetime (1931-1994). On average, he seems to have written
a letter every day for more than 40 years! Avoiding telephones -- not
only because they could be bugged, but also because he found
conversations on them to be intolerably impersonal -- Debord used
letters (and postcards and telegrams) to organize all kinds of
conferences, exhibitions, and interventions; to receive and critique
submissions to Internationale Situationniste; to write and distribute
draft versions of declarations to be signed by the Situationist
International; to distribute clandestine texts in foreign countries;
to review books written by friends and offer proofreader's corrections
to existing books or manuscripts that had been submitted to Editions
Champ Libre; and to offer sketches of letters, statements or articles
that would later be completed by other writers. He also relied upon
letters to make arrangements to meet friends or newcomers for a
"casual" drink or dinner; to gossip about friends or enemies; to renew
old friendships; and to tell certain people to fuck off. In other
words, he used the postal system the way today's writers and
publishers use email: on a daily basis, and to do virtually everything.
An extraordinarily meticulous man, Debord made a carbon copy of each
of his letters, which were typically hand-written and had to be typed
up by someone else. Debord typed very poorly and disliked using a
machine to write. [When computers "arrived" in the 1980s, Debord hated
them and certainly wouldn't use one to write anything.] These carbon
copies were collected and organized into files, which were stored and
transported en bloc when necessary. Debord was quite certain of the
"historical" character of his life, but he also wanted to be able to
recall what had been said, when, to whom, despite his drinking. In
sum, Guy Debord -- heretofore known as a great writer of a modest
number of books, essays and pamphlets, and a pioneering
cinematographer (a "writer of films") -- wrote more letters than the
majority of the people who write letters. Drink to it!
Virtually none of these letters were published in his lifetime; only a
few of them were reproduced, circulated to and discussed by people
other than the original addressees. [1] Today, fifteen years after
Debord's death (a suicide), most of his letters have been collected
and published in well-designed, chronologically ordered volumes.
Undertaken in 1999 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, the series entitled
Guy Debord Correspondance has included seven volumes so far and claims
to have covered the years 1957 to 1994. It is said one more volume in
this series is to yet to come. In addition to providing an index to
the entire series, Volume 8 of Guy Debord Correspondance will
apparently cover the years 1954 to 1957, which Fayard partially mined
in 2004, when it published Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille. A
collection of facsimiles of some of the letters Debord wrote between
1949 and 1954, Marquis de Sade has apparently gone out of print.
Perhaps it will be "reprinted" in Volume 8. If so, we will have
Debord's letters from either 1949 or 1954 all the way to the end, 30
November 1994.
After five years of translating hundreds of the letters that Guy
Debord wrote between 1957 and 1994, I have come to visualize a day in
his life in the following manner: drinking, reading, eating, going for
a stroll, drinking some more, writing and waiting for the mailman. No
matter where he was -- in France or living in another country, in the
city or in the countryside -- Guy Debord was waiting for the day's
mail, that is to say, to read the responses to his responses to other
people's remarks. The usefulness, the regularity and even the novelty
of the postal system never seemed to wear off. In several of his
letters, but mostly strikingly in those written in 1994, the last year
of his life, we encounter something like this: "Write to me at this
address, because the mail follows me wherever I go." The temptation is
irresistible: Hey, Guy! Are you getting your mail down there?
Despite its grand appearance or our fondest hopes, Guy Debord
Correspondance has not been "complete", and will not be "complete",
even after the publication of the Volume 8, which, according to Ken
Knabb, will "also include various letters that were discovered too
late to be included in the above volumes." There have been serious and
systematic omissions, right from the start. None of the untold numbers
of letters addressed to Guy Debord, by untold numbers of people, have
been included. Furthermore, and for one reason or another, none of
Debord's letters to the situationist Jacqueline de Jong, his one-time
girlfriend Michele Mochot-Brehat, and his ex-wives (the situationist
Michele Bernstein and Alice Becker-Ho) have been included. A cynical,
but still unsatisfied buyer might ask: Will there be a separate volume
entitled "Guy Debord, Love Letters"? [2]
While it is true that either "Alice Debord" (Alice Becker-Ho) or
someone at Fayard (Patrick Mosconi?) has consistently provided
summaries of the major events of each year, as well as explanatory
footnotes, both have been kept very brief, and seem to have been added
"only when necessary." In any case, they rarely quote from or even
summarize the letters that have sent to Debord and to which he is
always already responding. As a result, quite unnecessarily, and to
the incalculable detriment of both contemporary understanding and the
research of future historians, some passages in a few fairly crucial
letters are difficult, if not impossible to understand, and some
letters can't be properly or fully contextualized. At the global
level, a complex and rich network of back-and-forth dialogues (true
correspondences) has been turned into a simple set of monologues
(letters primarily addressed to posterity and only secondarily to
particular people at particular moments in time).
Only Jean-Pierre Baudet, Jean-Francois Martos, and Michel Bounan have
publicly denounced the Guy Debord Correspondance series and Alice
Debord's role in it, in particular. [3] Almost everyone else in "the
situ scene" hasn't been outraged; at the very least, they have managed
to stay ignorant or silent about the whole affair. Perhaps they feel
that Alice can do anything she wants to do, [4] and/or that "we" are
lucky to have the letters that we have been given. Most translators --
Ken Knabb, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Stuart Kendall, John McKale, Keith
Sanborn, et al -- have continued to work with Alice, that is to say,
to help her capitalize on her ex-husband's assets: not only his
"correspondence", but his lesser known books, his films, his film
scripts, and his cabinet game, Kriegspiel or The Game of War. But they
should not be condemned too harshly: it is quite true that they do not
get paid, or get paid very little, while Alice keeps the lion's share
of the money for herself, even or especially if its ultimate source is
the French Ministry of Culture in Los Angeles, New York or London. The
sums involved here are probably substantial.
Harsh condemnation is best reserved for Semiotext(e), which recently
published a perfectly good translation of Fayard's already defective
version of Volume I (1957-1960), but did so without even mentioning
the existence of the on-going battle over the integrity of the Guy
Debord Correspondance series as a whole. Of course Semiotext(e) didn't
need to "announce" what position it was taking up on this particular
battlefield. Its position spoke for itself: The prestige of publishing
Debord more than compensates for the inadequacy of the money we are
paid. And so Semiotext(e) must feign ignorance or keep quiet about the
prestige-killing things Alice/Fayard have done to make the project
happen in the first place: the ruthless suppression Jean-Francois
Martos' volume of his personal correspondence to and from Guy Debord,
which allegedly compromised the "completeness" of then-nonexistent
Guy Debord Correspondance series; the aforementioned omissions (the
most important women in Guy Debord's life, no less!); and the
satisfaction of a requirement that "X" replace a certain person's name
wherever it appeared in Volume 6 (1979-1988). Semiotext(e) isn't
simply helping Alice make even more money for herself; they are
helping her to cover her tracks or, rather, to erase the tracks of
others, without even knowing why she is erasing these particular
tracks and not others. [5] See no evil, speak no evil.
* * *
I have been reading Guy Debord's works since 1983. I like them. I
learn a lot from them and enjoy them. I damn well know that he wasn't
perfect, that he had his faults (in addition to the drinking), and
that he was capable of saying stupid things, just like anyone else,
especially in his "private" correspondence. I never met him nor
thought to send him a letter, even though I have long published a
"situationist" fanzine in which Debord is often mentioned. I have
never met or corresponded with Alice Becker-Ho; I do not have anything
"personal" against her. But it has pleased me, especially since the
man's death, to do my best to keep straight and/or complete the
historical record about Guy Debord, to fill in the "missing" pieces,
and to make sure the context is clearly understood.
Since the "original" volumes of the seven-volume-long series Guy
Debord Correspondance are themselves selections, and not the complete
correspondence, I have not felt compelled to translate every single
letter in each volume. I just translated the interesting ones, the
good ones. There were a lot of them; between 10 and 30 per year. In
each case, I preserved the original footnotes. When desirable, I
provided new footnotes, all of them clearly noted. More importantly, I
did not drop out or soften the impact of any passages that might be
seen or construed as unflattering to its author or that might be
"useful" to Debord's many detractors (they tend to be the people who
write biographies of him, for some reason). I always chose to include
these letters, completely unabridged. This is my Guy Debord, yes; but
it is Guy Debord, warts and all.
I have placed these "unofficial" translations on-line, at my own
expense, and have made them available for free, without asserting any
copyrights or rights reserved. When I have received emails pointing
out mistakes, I have made the proper corrections immediately. Provided
my translator's notes are included and attributed to "NOT BORED", I am
always pleased whenever I discover that someone somewhere has copy-and-
pasted one or several of my translations to the internet. I have never
received a cease-and-desist letter from either Alice Debord or Fayard,
nor do I expect to. MIT Press? There'd be no point. Everyone knows
that you just can't trust what you read on-line; you can only trust
what's been printed in a book. Why? Books got a copyright symbol, an
ISBN and a barcode, and what's on-line don't.
Bill Not Bored
29 June 2009
Footnotes
[1] Examples would include the Situationist International's
orientation debate, which was largely conducted by mail between 1970
and 1971 (and collected and published by pirates in 1974); Guy
Debord's letters to Afonso Monteiro, concerning Portugal and dated
March 1975 and 15 November 1975; and Debord's letter to Gianfranco
Sanguinetti, concerning Aldo Moro and dated 21 April 1978.
[2] No doubt such a book would be veritably Sadean. "Sade was also
recuperated to create the basis of the restricted section of the
Bibliotheque nationale de France. Then why not Debord, yielded up in a
bloc for the purposes of research?" Frederique Roussel wrote in the 17
June 2009 issue of Liberation.
[3] For Jean-Pierre Baudet, see Signed X (2007); for Jean-Francois
Martos, see On the Interdiction of My Correspondence with Guy Debord
(1999); and for Michel Bounan, see Editorial Politics (2000).
[4] So far, that has included 1) selling her ex-husband's letters
through Fayard, which is owned by La Gardiere, one of the biggest arms-
dealers and media-monopolists in the world; 2) selling his films
through Gaumont, which one of the biggest corporate distributors in
France; and 3) attempting to sell his entire archives -- which have
been estimated to be worth approximately $2,340,000 -- to either Yale
University or the Bibliotheque nationale de France (see news articles
dated 14 June 2009, 17 June 2009 and 17 June 2009).
[5] For example: Jean-Pierre Baudet fell out of Debord's favor in
1988; and Jean-Francois Martos fell out of Debord's favor shortly
thereafter because he questioned what happened to Baudet. They were
thrown out of Debord's social circle. But this can't be taken as good
reason to remove either of these men from the historical record of
Debord's life. These were people who had known each other for years;
while still close friends, they collaborated on texts together,
properly "Debordian" texts -- Baudet's book about Chernobyl and his
translation of Clausewitz into French; Martos's pamphlet on Poland and
his History of the Situationist International; and especially their
collective work, as a trio, on the critique of the Encyclopedia of
Nuisances -- that, today, simply cannot be cut from the corpus without
making the body bleed, or at least rot some more.----
Message sent by the Situationist list.
To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe situationist" in the body of a message
to requests-AT-lists.nothingness.org
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