Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine

Quel besoin a-t-on de "faire un portrait" de moi? N'ai-je pas fait moi-même, dans mes écrits, le meilleur portrait que l'on pourra jamais en faire, si le portrait en question pouvait avoir la plus petite nécessité?

Guy Debord, "Cette mauvaise réputation..."

The Man Behind the Mask

With the publication of his Memoirs in 1959, Guy Debord began, insistently, to paint his own portrait, which he retouched again and again in the years that followed. Debord gave much of his work an autobiographical dimension, intermingling in this way objectivity and subjectivity, theory and practice. Despite his desire for transparency, however, Debord composed his texts according to a secret code, which must be broken in order to understand what he really means. He cares little whether the common reader understands: "Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential," he writes in Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle, "I obviously cannot speak in complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody"(1). Debord has, in fact, covered his tracks, so that only those who take the trouble to crack the code will understand his work. Despite the familiar faces in his films, his winks and private jokes, Debord gives little of himself away. He proceeds by allusions, while his real life remains hidden, obscure. In In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, he lingers on the great episodes of his life (the Lettrist epic, May '68, etc.), but it is not always possible to reconstitute the chain of events without the key to his particular codes.¹ Unless done by one who knew him personally, any portrait of Debord that goes beyond what he himself made public will be at best speculation, and at worst sleight-of-hand. To understand the multiple self-portraits he left behind, we must turn to those who knew Debord, and recorded their own images of him.

During his lifetime, Debord was the subject of numerous accounts. Gérard Guégan depicted him in his 1975 novel The Irregulars as a character named Antoine Peyrot. Guégan had little love for Debord, and used Peyrot to settle the score between them.² Maurice Rajsfus dedicated the eighth chapter of his memoirs to a description of Saint-Germain-des-Prés between 1950 and 1954, just at the time of the Lettrist International. He met Debord there, and provides invaluable information not only on the revolutionary youth of the era, but on the screening of the first Lettrist films, including the famous showing of Hurlements en faveur de Sade on October 13, 1952 (Rajsfus 1992).

Since Debord's death, tongues have loosened, and accounts of Debord have become more frequent. Gérard Berréby conducted a series of interviews with Jean-Michel Mension, who took part in the Lettrists' escapades around 1953. The interviews give us a better understanding of the importance of the Lettrist movement in the development of Debord's ideas (Mension 1998). No doubt other accounts will appear in the near future.

To these various eyewitnesses must be added Debord's two wives, Michèle Bernstein and, later, Alice Becker-Ho. The latter has, for the moment, published only a short collection of poems, in which she mourns the suicide of her husband (Becker-Ho 1998). Bernstein, on the other hand, published two novels, Tous les chevaux du roi in 1960 and La Nuit in 1961, which are romans à clef of her life with Debord. I would like to study these two texts for the light they shed on Debord's life and intellectual sensibility. Of course, we must proceed cautiously, not only because they present themselves as works of fiction, but also because their author herself tends to minimize their importance. For several reasons, however, they deserve an attentive reading, which they have not yet received. Rather than taking the novels as works purely of the imagination, I consider them as "autofictions." This term, coined by Serge Doubrovsky, refers to a genre...