Introduction

Ces journalistes ... m'ont traité sans jamais relier la qualification à un fait correspondant, de: Maître à penser, nihiliste, pseudo-philosophe, pape, solitaire, mentor, magnetiscur, pantin sanglant, fanatique de lui-même, diable, éminance grise, âme damnée, professeur ès radicalisme, gourou, révolutionnaire des bazars, agent de subversion et de déstabilisation au service de l'imperialisme soviétique, Méphisto de pacotille, nuisible, extravagant, fumeux, énigmatique, mauvais ange, idéologue, mystérieux, sadique fou, cynique total, lieu de la non pensée, envoûteur redoutable, déstabilisateur, enragé, théoricien Guy Debord, Considérations sur l'assassinat de Gérard Lébovici.

A special issue on Guy Ernest Debord is not surprising in the current cultural moment, either in Europe or in the United States. The increasing number of publications on the Situationist International (SI) and its leader in recent years¹ clearly indicates a growing interest on the part of academia as well as among the general public. It also demonstrates how publishers (paradoxically and inevitably) are turning Debord and SI into a spectacular commodity.² This volume adds new voices to the work of analysis, reconstruction, and rethinking of a particularly significant period in the cultural and political history of contemporary Europe, by focusing on the figure of the man who, for better or for worse, polarized the theoretical assumptions of the SI, and provided the most refined intellectual instruments for understanding the political and philosophical connotation of the movement itself. We also hope to help define the contours of a personality who consistently misled (with skillful détournements) his biographers and who seems to elude any crystallization.³

Isolating Debord as the main focus of our inquiry does not imply diminishing the importance of the Situationist movement and its artistic and revolutionary practice, which has to be constantly assumed as the stage on which Debord's life and activity took place. If the contribution Debord gave to the historical and theoretical construction of SI is unquestionable, it is also true that a careful analysis of his thought and political activity will provide a deeper understanding of SI's novelty within the cluster of European avant-gardes, and its particular historical evolution. Moreover, it is nearly impossible to obtain a full understanding of SI experience and Debord's writings if we try to isolate a specific element of their totalizing discourse, which was in turn radically subversive because it moved against any form of separation.

Further, to isolate Debord in this debate could be problematic since, more than any other members of SI, he has been the constant target of severe judgments. The criticisms raised against Debord range from the consistency of his political strategy, the monopolization or even betrayal of SI's destiny,⁴ the tenability of his theoretical assumptions and his megalomania, to the dramatis persona he tried to shape, especially in the last period of his life, and seem sometimes to aim at liberating the SI experience from its too encumbering father-figure. Moreover, in regard to The Society of the Spectacle, there is a consistent attempt at normalizing its assumptions ("nothing new under the sun").⁵ At the same time, several critics display animosity to Debord as a person, which seems unusual and excessive in intellectual criticism, while Debord and his historical dimension seem to overshadow his own writings. In saying this, it must be clear that our goal is not to defend Debord or the consistency in his political action and his life. Rather, we aim at rethinking the experience of SI and Debord's thought as crucial for understanding the system of art and theories of its disappearance, and the spectacle-like construction of present discourses.

Our goal is not to conceive Debord more as "a stylist of pessimism," as a "master-thinker," as a "moralist" than as a figure "engaged in the cultural politics of [his] time." Nor do we want to confine Debord to one of his "continentally polarized" readings—a European versus an American one, as Thomas F. McDonough seems to suggest in his introduction to the issue of October devoted to the SI.⁶ Our concern is to...