opuscoli 12

8/7/2019 opuscoli 12

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Bill Brown

Correspondance

Gli opuscoli diOmar Wisyam

Volume n. 12


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Correspondance

"Although I have read a lot, Ihave drunk even more. I havewritten much less than themajority of people who write,but I have drunk more thanthe majority of people who

drink." -- Guy Debord,Panegyric (1989)

"Where's my mail? Who'sfucking with my mail?" -- TheLone Ranger, in Lenny Bruce'sposthumous film short, Thank You Mask Man (1968)


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In the 20 years since Panegyric was published, it has come outthat the renowned Frenchacrobat Guy Debord wrotethousands of letters during hislifetime (1931-1994). Onaverage, he seems to havewritten a letter every day formore than 40 years! Avoidingtelephones -- not only because

they could be bugged, but alsobecause he foundconversations on them to beintolerably impersonal --Debord used letters (andpostcards and telegrams) toorganize all kinds of conferences, exhibitions, andinterventions; to receive and
http://notbored.org/debord.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord.html


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critique submissions toInternationale Situationniste ; towrite and distribute draftversions of declarations to besigned by the SituationistInternational; to distributeclandestine texts in foreigncountries; to review bookswritten by friends and offerproofreader's corrections to

existing books or manuscriptsthat had been submitted toEditions Champ Libre; and tooffer sketches of letters,statements or articles thatwould later be completed byother writers. He also reliedupon letters to makearrangements to meet friends


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or newcomers for a "casual"drink or dinner; to gossipabout friends or enemies; torenew old friendships; and totell certain people to fuck off.In other words, he used thepostal system the way today'swriters and publishers useemail: on a daily basis, and todo virtually everything.

An extraordinarily meticulousman, Debord made a carboncopy of each of his letters,which were typically hand-written and had to be typed upby someone else. Debord typedvery poorly and disliked usinga machine to write. (When


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computers "arrived" in the1980s, Debord hated them andcertainly wouldn't use one towrite anything.) These carboncopies were collected andorganized into files, which werestored and transported en blocwhen necessary. Debord wasquite certain of the "historical"character of his life, but he

also wanted to be able to recallwhat had been said, when, towhom, despite his drinking. Insum, Guy Debord -- heretoforeknown as a great writer of amodest number of books,essays and pamphlets, and apioneering cinematographer (a"writer of films") -- wrote more


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included seven volumes so farand claims to have covered theyears 1957 to 1994. It is saidone more volume in this seriesis to yet to come. In addition toproviding an index to theentire series, Volume 8 of Guy Debord Correspondance willapparently cover the years1954 to 1957, which Fayard

partially mined in 2004, whenit published Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille. A collection of facsimiles of some of the lettersDebord wrote between 1949and 1954, Marquis de Sade has apparently gone out of print. Perhaps it will be"reprinted" in Volume 8. If so,


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we will have Debord's lettersfrom either 1949 or 1954 allthe way to the end, 30November 1994.

After five years of translatinghundreds of the letters thatGuy Debord wrote between1957 and 1994, I have come tovisualize a day in his life in the

following manner: drinking,reading, eating, going for astroll, drinking some more,writing and waiting for the mailman. No matter where hewas -- in France or living inanother country, in the city orin the countryside -- GuyDebord was waiting for the


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day's mail, that is to say, toread the responses to his responses to other people'sremarks. The usefulness, theregularity and even the noveltyof the postal system neverseemed to wear off. In severalof his letters, but mostlystrikingly in those written in1994, the last year of his life,

we encounter something likethis: "Write to me at thisaddress, because the mailfollows me wherever I go." Thetemptation is irresistible: Hey,Guy! Are you getting your mail down there?


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Despite its grand appearanceor our fondest hopes, Guy Debord Correspondance hasnot been "complete," and will not be "complete," even afterthe publication of Volume 8,which, according to KenKnabb, will "also includevarious letters that werediscovered too late to be

included in the abovevolumes." There have beenserious and systematicomissions, right from the start.None of the untold numbers of letters addressed to GuyDebord, by untold numbers of people, have been included.Furthermore, and for one


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reason or another, none of Debord's letters to thesituationist Jacqueline deJong, his one-time girlfriendMichele Mochot-Brehat, andhis ex-wives (the situationistMichele Bernstein and AliceBecker-Ho) have beenincluded. A cynical, but stillunsatisfied 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?) hasconsistently provided


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summaries of the major eventsof each year, as well asexplanatory footnotes, bothhave been kept very brief, andseem to have been added "onlywhen necessary." In any case,they rarely quote from or evensummarize the letters thathave sent to Debord and towhich he is always already

responding. As a result, quiteunnecessarily, and to theincalculable detriment of bothcontemporary understandingand the research of futurehistorians, some passages in afew fairly crucial letters aredifficult, if not impossible tounderstand, and some letters


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can't be properly or fullycontextualized. At the globallevel, a complex and richnetwork of back-and-forthdialogues (truecorrespondences) has beenturned into a simple set of monologues (letters primarilyaddressed to posterity andonly secondarily to particular

people at particular momentsin time).

Only Jean-Pierre Baudet,Jean-Francois Martos, andMichel Bounan have publiclydenounced the Guy Debord Correspondance series andAlice Debord's role in it, in


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particular.[3] Almost everyoneelse in "the situ scene" hasn't been outraged; at the veryleast, they have managed tostay ignorant or silent aboutthe whole affair. Perhaps theyfeel that Alice can do anythingshe wants to do,[4] and/or that"we" are lucky to have theletters that we have been

given. Most translators -- KenKnabb, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Stuart Kendall, JohnMcKale, Keith Sanborn, et al --have continued to work withAlice, that is to say, to help hercapitalize on her ex-husband'sassets: not only his"correspondence," but his


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lesser known books, his films,his film scripts, and hiscabinet game, known asKriegspiel or The Game of War. But they should not becondemned too harshly: it isquite true that they do not getpaid, or get paid very little,while Alice keeps the lion'sshare of the money for herself,

even or especially if itsultimate source is the FrenchMinistry of Culture in LosAngeles, New York or London.The sums involved here areprobably substantial.

Harsh condemnation is bestreserved for Semiotext(e),


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which recently published aperfectly good translation of Fayard's already defective version of Volume I (1957-1960), but did so without evenmentioning the existence of theon-going battle over theintegrity of the Guy Debord Correspondance series as awhole. Of course Semiotext(e)

didn't need to "announce" whatposition it was taking up onthis particular battlefield. Itsposition 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


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quiet about the prestige-killing things Alice/Fayard have doneto make the project happen inthe first place: the ruthlesssuppression of Jean-FrancoisMartos' volume of his personalcorrespondence to and fromGuy Debord, which allegedlycompromised the"completeness" of then-

nonexistent Guy Debord Correspondance series; theaforementioned omissions (themost important women in GuyDebord's life, no less!); and thesatisfaction of a requirementthat "X" replace a certainperson's name wherever itappeared in Volume 6 (1979-


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1988). Semiotext(e) isn't simplyhelping Alice make even moremoney for herself; they arehelping her to cover her tracksor, rather, helping her erasethe tracks of others, withouteven being told why she iserasing these particular tracksand not others.[5] See no evil,speak no evil.

* * *

I have been reading GuyDebord's works since 1983. Ilike them. I learn a lot fromthem and enjoy them. I damnwell know that he wasn'tperfect, that he had his faults


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(in addition to the drinking),and that he was capable of saying stupid things, just likeanyone else, especially in his"private" correspondence. Inever met him nor thought tosend him a letter, even thoughI have long published a"situationist" fanzine in whichDebord is often mentioned. I

have never met orcorresponded with AliceBecker-Ho; I do not haveanything "personal" againsther. But it has pleased me,especially since the man'sdeath, to do my best to keepstraight and/or complete thehistorical record about Guy


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Debord, to fill in the "missing"pieces, and to make sure thecontext is clearly understood.

Since the "original" volumes of the seven-volume-long seriesGuy Debord Correspondance are themselves selections, andnot the completecorrespondence, I have not felt

compelled to translate everysingle letter in each volume. Ijust translated the interestingones, the good ones. Therewere a lot of them; between 10and 30 per year. In each case,I preserved the originalfootnotes. When desirable, Iprovided new footnotes, all of


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them clearly noted. Moreimportantly, I did not drop outor soften the impact of anypassages that might be seen orconstrued as unflattering to itsauthor or that might be"useful" to Debord's manydetractors (they tend to be thepeople who write biographiesof him, for some reason). I

always chose to include theseletters, 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 ownexpense, and have made them
http://notbored.org/debord.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord.html


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available for free, withoutasserting any copyrights orrights reserved. When I havereceived emails pointing outmistakes, I have made theproper correctionsimmediately. Provided mytranslator's notes are includedand attributed to "NOT BORED," I am always pleased

whenever I discover thatsomeone somewhere has copy-and-pasted one or several of my translations to the internet.I have never received a cease-and-desist letter from eitherAlice Debord or Fayard, nor doI expect to. MIT Press? There'dbe no point. Everyone knows


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that you just can't trust whatyou read on-line; you can onlytrust what's been printed in a book. Why? Books got acopyright symbol, an ISBN anda barcode, and what's on-linedon't.

Bill Not Bored Brown

29 June 2009


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[1] Examples would includethe Situationist International'sorientation debate, which waslargely conducted by mailbetween 1970 and 1971 (andcollected and published bypirates in 1974); Guy Debord'sletters to Afonso Monteiro,concerning Portugal and datedMarch 1975 and 15 November

1975; and Debord's letter toGianfranco Sanguinetti,concerning Aldo Moro anddated 21 April 1978.

[2] No doubt such a bookwould be veritably Sadean. "Sade was also recuperated tocreate the basis of the
http://notbored.org/orientation-debate.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord-March1975.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord-15November1975.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord-15November1975.htmlhttp://notbored.org/calvacanti.htmlhttp://notbored.org/calvacanti.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord-15November1975.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord-15November1975.htmlhttp://notbored.org/debord-March1975.htmlhttp://notbored.org/orientation-debate.html


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restricted section of theBibliotheque nationale deFrance. Then why not Debord,yielded up in a bloc for thepurposes of research?"Frederique Roussel wrote inthe 17 June 2009 issue of Liberation.

[3] For Jean-Pierre Baudet, see

Signed X (2007); for Jean-Francois Martos, see On theInterdiction of MyCorrespondence with GuyDebord (1999); and for MichelBounan, see Editorial Politics(2000).
http://notbored.org/BNFb.htmlhttp://notbored.org/signedX.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/editorial-politics.htmlhttp://notbored.org/editorial-politics.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/interdiction.htmlhttp://notbored.org/signedX.htmlhttp://notbored.org/BNFb.html


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[4] So far, that has included 1)selling her ex-husband's lettersthrough Fayard, which isowned by La Gardiere, one of the biggest arms-dealers andmedia-monopolists in theworld; 2) selling his filmsthrough Gaumont, which oneof the biggest corporatedistributors in France; and 3)

attempting to sell his entire archives -- which have beenestimated to be worthapproximately $2,340,000 -- toeither Yale University or theBibliotheque nationale deFrance (see news articles dated14 June 2009, 17 June 2009and 17 June 2009) .
http://notbored.org/BNF.htmlhttp://notbored.org/BNFa.htmlhttp://notbored.org/BNFb.htmlhttp://notbored.org/BNFb.htmlhttp://notbored.org/BNFa.htmlhttp://notbored.org/BNF.html


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[5] For example: Jean-PierreBaudet fell out of Debord'sfavor in 1988; and Jean-Francois Martos fell out of Debord's favor shortlythereafter because hequestioned what happened toBaudet. They were thrown outof Debord's social circle. Butthis can't be taken as good

reason to remove either of these men from the historical record of Debord's life. Thesewere people who had knowneach other for years; while stillclose friends, they collaborated on texts together, properly"Debordian" texts -- Baudet'sbook about Chernobyl and his


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translation of Clausewitz intoFrench; Martos's pamphlet onPoland and his History of the Situationist International ; andespecially their collective work,as a trio, on the critique of theEncyclopedia of Nuisances --that, today, simply cannot becut from the corpus withoutirreparably disfiguring it.


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