Guy Debord and the Problem of the Accursed

"…outlaws impelled by that energy springing from bad passions, alone capable of overthrowing the old world and giving back to the forces of life their creative liberty."

—Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel, Histoire de l'Anarchie

"It would have been better for mankind had this man never existed." This is what The Gentlemen's Magazine wrote on the occasion of the death of Godwin, who was an inspiration to Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Blake, and many others, just as Proudhon is the inspiration for Courbet's painting. From this group comes a large part of modern poetry, the "plein air" school in landscape painting, Impressionism, and a whole continuous creative development whose continuation belonged and still belongs to the forces of life, constituting creative freedom itself. But such a development cannot be understood if one separates it from its solidarity with this bad passion that is "alone capable of overthrowing the old world"—the passion carried by creative rule-breakers who are cursed as such.

This state of affairs no longer is at odds with society's general attitude toward modernism. Paradoxically, the general sympathy toward modernism since the turn of the century, and especially since World War II when it was proclaimed that "the accursed artist no longer exists," represses these creative forces even more radically. The reality of social malediction is wrapped in a tranquilizing and antiseptic appearance of emptiness: the problem has disappeared; there never was a problem. At the same time, the journalistic label of "accursed" becomes, on the contrary, an immediate valorization. It is enough to get yourself cursed, to be all the rage. And this is fairly simple, since any kind of aggression provokes curses from its victim. Thus the very principle of the accursed is altered; we rediscover the simple romantic notion of the unrecognized genius. He's the thinker whom one willingly considers as "ahead of his time," and one attempts, further, to leave him unrecognized for as brief a time as possible.

I believe that no other creative person in the world reveals to us the futility of such false explanations as does the enigmatic personality who is Guy Debord. We can already read in certain critical analyses—the most well-informed of our era—that he is considered as one of the greatest innovators in the history of cinema. Thus those who are knowledgeable in this area are able to recognize his true stature. And so we cannot claim that he is unrecognized. The hitch is between this confidential appreciation and his reputation in the world of "gentlemen," where one would like to recycle, as soon as possible, the same obituary for Debord as was used for Godwin. We must conclude from this that valorization and malediction are clearly simultaneous. Debord is of his time; he can not "be better than his time; but, at best, be his time" (Hegel). But this time has become a space where strange things happen, which are not in accordance with the simplistic idea one has of the historic instant. For us, the present is not the instant, but is, as defined by modern physics, the moment of dialogue, the time of communication between question and answer. The problem of the accursed is circumscribed in this measurable space, where for some people, the answer is already given, while others don't yet know the question. The methods of our era's "instantaneous" pseudo-communication obviously do not transmit the questions and the answers of this era, but, rather, a unilateral spectacle, as the Situationists have amply shown.

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