Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-August 1960) (review)

With the exception of McKenzie Wark's introduction, the English translation of Guy Debord's first volume of Correspondence is the exact duplicate of its French counterpart. Consequently, it presents all the good aspects and all the flaws of the French original. Sylvère Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti of Semiotext(e), the American publisher, should be commended for such an ambitious enterprise. They have decided to provide English-speaking readers with a complete translation of Debord's eight volumes of correspondence. It will take great time, skill, and money to complete such an enormous task, which will very likely reap no financial benefit.

If we rely on the first volume published in 2008 to evaluate the quality of the work, the American translation done by Stuart Kendall and John McHale is, from a linguistic perspective, not only accurate, but elegant and clear. Debord's style in French is rather classical, since he used Pascal and Bossuet as his models. His letters, however, have a different, almost improvisational tone than his "official" volumes. This spontaneity, however, should fool no one. From the beginning of his career in 1951 to his death in 1994, Debord had posterity in mind whenever he lifted a pen. His main concern was the judgment future generations would cast on his work. He was above all eager to control this judgment, in the same way he tried to control the two avantgarde groups he founded, Lettrist International in 1953, and Situationist International in 1957. Many of Debord's letters were carefully crafted, and carbon copies of most were kept and classified in his own archives. Even during the early Lettrist period, the future leader of SI took the time to classify any document passing through his hands. To give only one example, Ivan Chtcheglov's two versions of the legendary text, Formulary for a New Urbanism, were given the call numbers 103 and 108 by Guy Debord in the Situationist archives.

Debord's widow entrusted Patrick Mosconi with the control of the French edition of Correspondence, published by Librairie Arthème Fayard between 1999 and 2010. Although Mosconi's editorial work has been preserved in the English edition (including his notes and chronology of significant events during each year catalogued), his name has vanished since having fallen out of favor with Debord's widow, Alice Becker-Ho. However, her own foreword has been translated, which will permit readers to discover the transformation of her publishing perspective from one volume to the next. While she initially does not dissimulate her contempt for any enterprise trying to understand Debord from an historical perspective, she eventually ends this series (in Correspondance: Volume "0" Septembre 1951-Juillet 1957, 2010) with a view close to that of the academic milieu. While the first volumes had been published with polemical prefaces presenting Debord as a revolutionary, in the last one Debord is considered as an author deserving of objective study, with notes and references that can be verified. The last volume, for example, includes an index providing some guidelines for more serious research on Debord. That said, the eight volumes of Correspondance are far from the level of a professional edition. Many letters have been withheld, either by Alice Becker-Ho herself or by others who did not grant her access to them. Biographical notes on Debord's correspondents are meager and do not permit the reader to understand who they were, or the role they played in his life. In general terms, there is no attempt to place the letters in their historical context.

This is also the perspective adopted by McKenzie Wark in his preface. The period taken into consideration in the first volume (June 1957 to August 1960) is extremely important for Debord's intellectual development, when he was still considering achieving public recognition in the avantgarde circles. The first three years of the...