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Bill Brown

Correspondance

Gli opuscoli di
Omar Wisyam

Volume n. 12
Correspondance

"Although I have read a lot, I


have drunk even more. I have
written much less than the
majority of people who write,
but I have drunk more than
the majority of people who
drink." -- Guy Debord,
Panegyric (1989)

"Where's my mail? Who's


fucking with my mail?" -- The
Lone Ranger, in Lenny Bruce's
posthumous film short, Thank
You Mask Man (1968)
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In the 20 years since Panegyric
was published, it has come out
that the renowned French
acrobat Guy Debord wrote
thousands of letters during his
lifetime (1931-1994). On
average, he seems to have
written a letter every day for
more than 40 years! Avoiding
telephones -- not only because
they could be bugged, but also
because he found
conversations on them to be
intolerably impersonal --
Debord used letters (and
postcards and telegrams) to
organize all kinds of
conferences, exhibitions, and
interventions; to receive and

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critique submissions to
Internationale Situationniste; to
write and distribute draft
versions of declarations to be
signed by the Situationist
International; to distribute
clandestine texts in foreign
countries; to review books
written by friends and offer
proofreader's corrections to
existing books or manuscripts
that had been submitted to
Editions Champ Libre; and to
offer sketches of letters,
statements or articles that
would later be completed by
other writers. He also relied
upon letters to make
arrangements to meet friends

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or newcomers for a "casual"
drink or dinner; to gossip
about friends or enemies; to
renew old friendships; and to
tell certain people to fuck off.
In other words, he used the
postal system the way today's
writers and publishers use
email: on a daily basis, and to
do virtually everything.

An extraordinarily meticulous
man, Debord made a carbon
copy of each of his letters,
which were typically hand-
written and had to be typed up
by someone else. Debord typed
very poorly and disliked using
a machine to write. (When

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computers "arrived" in the
1980s, Debord hated them and
certainly wouldn't use one to
write anything.) These carbon
copies were collected and
organized into files, which were
stored and transported en bloc
when necessary. Debord was
quite certain of the "historical"
character of his life, but he
also wanted to be able to recall
what had been said, when, to
whom, despite his drinking. In
sum, Guy Debord -- heretofore
known as a great writer of a
modest number of books,
essays and pamphlets, and a
pioneering cinematographer (a
"writer of films") -- wrote more

Bill Brown Pagina 6


letters than the majority of the
people who write letters. Drink
to it!

Virtually none of these letters


were published in his lifetime;
only a few of them were
reproduced, circulated to and
discussed by people other than
the original addressees.[1]
Today, fifteen years after
Debord's death (a suicide),
most of his letters have been
collected and published in
well-designed, chronologically
ordered volumes. Undertaken
in 1999 by Librairie Artheme
Fayard, the series entitled Guy
Debord Correspondance has

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included seven volumes so far
and claims to have covered the
years 1957 to 1994. It is said
one more volume in this series
is to yet to come. In addition to
providing an index to the
entire series, Volume 8 of Guy
Debord Correspondance will
apparently cover the years
1954 to 1957, which Fayard
partially mined in 2004, when
it published Marquis de Sade a
des yeux de fille. A collection of
facsimiles of some of the letters
Debord wrote between 1949
and 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 letters
from either 1949 or 1954 all
the way to the end, 30
November 1994.

After five years of translating


hundreds of the letters that
Guy Debord wrote between
1957 and 1994, I have come to
visualize a day in his life in the
following manner: drinking,
reading, eating, going for a
stroll, drinking some more,
writing and waiting for the
mailman. No matter where he
was -- in France or living in
another country, in the city or
in the countryside -- Guy
Debord was waiting for the

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day's mail, that is to say, to
read the responses to his
responses to other people's
remarks. The usefulness, the
regularity and even the novelty
of the postal system never
seemed to wear off. In several
of his letters, but mostly
strikingly in those written in
1994, the last year of his life,
we encounter something like
this: "Write to me at this
address, because the mail
follows me wherever I go." The
temptation is irresistible: Hey,
Guy! Are you getting your mail
down there?

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Despite its grand appearance
or our fondest hopes, Guy
Debord Correspondance has
not been "complete," and will
not be "complete," even after
the publication of Volume 8,
which, according to Ken
Knabb, will "also include
various letters that were
discovered too late to be
included in the above
volumes." There have been
serious and systematic
omissions, right from the start.
None of the untold numbers of
letters addressed to Guy
Debord, 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 the
situationist Jacqueline de
Jong, his one-time girlfriend
Michele Mochot-Brehat, and
his ex-wives (the situationist
Michele Bernstein and Alice
Becker-Ho) have been
included. A cynical, but still
unsatisfied 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?) has
consistently provided

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summaries of the major events
of each year, as well as
explanatory footnotes, both
have been kept very brief, and
seem to have been added "only
when necessary." In any case,
they rarely quote from or even
summarize the letters that
have sent to Debord and to
which he is always already
responding. As a result, quite
unnecessarily, and to the
incalculable detriment of both
contemporary understanding
and the research of future
historians, some passages in a
few fairly crucial letters are
difficult, if not impossible to
understand, and some letters

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can't be properly or fully
contextualized. At the global
level, a complex and rich
network of back-and-forth
dialogues (true
correspondences) has been
turned into a simple set of
monologues (letters primarily
addressed to posterity and
only secondarily to particular
people at particular moments
in time).

Only Jean-Pierre Baudet,


Jean-Francois Martos, and
Michel Bounan have publicly
denounced the Guy Debord
Correspondance series and
Alice Debord's role in it, in

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particular.[3] Almost everyone
else in "the situ scene" hasn't
been outraged; at the very
least, they have managed to
stay ignorant or silent about
the whole affair. Perhaps they
feel that Alice can do anything
she wants to do,[4] and/or that
"we" are lucky to have the
letters that we have been
given. Most translators -- Ken
Knabb, Donald Nicholson-
Smith, Stuart Kendall, John
McKale, Keith Sanborn, et al --
have continued to work with
Alice, that is to say, to help her
capitalize on her ex-husband's
assets: not only his
"correspondence," but his

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lesser known books, his films,
his film scripts, and his
cabinet game, known as
Kriegspiel or The Game of War.
But they should not be
condemned too harshly: it is
quite true that they do not get
paid, or get paid very little,
while Alice keeps the lion's
share of the money for herself,
even or especially if its
ultimate source is the French
Ministry of Culture in Los
Angeles, New York or London.
The sums involved here are
probably substantial.

Harsh condemnation is best


reserved for Semiotext(e),

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which recently published a
perfectly good translation of
Fayard's already defective
version of Volume I (1957-
1960), but did so without even
mentioning the existence of the
on-going battle over the
integrity of the Guy Debord
Correspondance series as a
whole. Of course Semiotext(e)
didn't need to "announce" what
position it was taking up on
this particular battlefield. Its
position 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 done
to make the project happen in
the first place: the ruthless
suppression of Jean-Francois
Martos' volume of his personal
correspondence to and from
Guy Debord, which allegedly
compromised the
"completeness" of then-
nonexistent Guy Debord
Correspondance series; the
aforementioned omissions (the
most important women in Guy
Debord's life, no less!); and the
satisfaction of a requirement
that "X" replace a certain
person's name wherever it
appeared in Volume 6 (1979-

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1988). Semiotext(e) isn't simply
helping Alice make even more
money for herself; they are
helping her to cover her tracks
or, rather, helping her erase
the tracks of others, without
even being told why she is
erasing these particular tracks
and not others.[5] See no evil,
speak no evil.

***

I have been reading Guy


Debord's works since 1983. I
like them. I learn a lot from
them and enjoy them. I damn
well know that he wasn't
perfect, that he had his faults

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(in addition to the drinking),
and that he was capable of
saying stupid things, just like
anyone else, especially in his
"private" correspondence. I
never met him nor thought to
send him a letter, even though
I have long published a
"situationist" fanzine in which
Debord is often mentioned. I
have never met or
corresponded with Alice
Becker-Ho; I do not have
anything "personal" against
her. But it has pleased me,
especially since the man's
death, to do my best to keep
straight and/or complete the
historical record about Guy

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

Since the "original" volumes of


the seven-volume-long series
Guy Debord Correspondance
are themselves selections, and
not the complete
correspondence, I have not felt
compelled to translate every
single letter in each volume. I
just translated the interesting
ones, the good ones. There
were a lot of them; between 10
and 30 per year. In each case,
I preserved the original
footnotes. When desirable, I
provided new footnotes, all of

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them clearly noted. More
importantly, I did not drop out
or soften the impact of any
passages that might be seen or
construed as unflattering to its
author or that might be
"useful" to Debord's many
detractors (they tend to be the
people who write biographies
of him, for some reason). I
always chose to include these
letters, 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 own
expense, and have made them

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available for free, without
asserting any copyrights or
rights reserved. When I have
received emails pointing out
mistakes, I have made the
proper corrections
immediately. Provided my
translator's notes are included
and attributed to "NOT
BORED," I am always pleased
whenever I discover that
someone somewhere has copy-
and-pasted one or several of
my translations to the internet.
I have never received a cease-
and-desist letter from either
Alice Debord or Fayard, nor do
I expect to. MIT Press? There'd
be no point. Everyone knows

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that you just can't trust what
you read on-line; you can only
trust what's been printed in a
book. Why? Books got a
copyright symbol, an ISBN and
a barcode, and what's on-line
don't.

Bill Not Bored Brown

29 June 2009

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[1] Examples would include
the Situationist International's
orientation debate, which was
largely conducted by mail
between 1970 and 1971 (and
collected and published by
pirates in 1974); Guy Debord's
letters to Afonso Monteiro,
concerning Portugal and dated
March 1975 and 15 November
1975; and Debord's letter to
Gianfranco Sanguinetti,
concerning Aldo Moro and
dated 21 April 1978.

[2] No doubt such a book


would be veritably Sadean.
"Sade was also recuperated to
create the basis of the

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restricted section of the
Bibliotheque nationale de
France. Then why not Debord,
yielded up in a bloc for the
purposes of research?"
Frederique Roussel wrote in
the 17 June 2009 issue of
Liberation.

[3] For Jean-Pierre Baudet, see


Signed X (2007); for Jean-
Francois Martos, see On the
Interdiction of My
Correspondence with Guy
Debord (1999); and for Michel
Bounan, see Editorial Politics
(2000).

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[4] So far, that has included 1)
selling her ex-husband's letters
through Fayard, which is
owned by La Gardiere, one of
the biggest arms-dealers and
media-monopolists in the
world; 2) selling his films
through Gaumont, which one
of the biggest corporate
distributors in France; and 3)
attempting to sell his entire
archives -- which have been
estimated to be worth
approximately $2,340,000 -- to
either Yale University or the
Bibliotheque nationale de
France (see news articles dated
14 June 2009, 17 June 2009
and 17 June 2009).

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[5] For example: Jean-Pierre
Baudet fell out of Debord's
favor in 1988; and Jean-
Francois Martos fell out of
Debord's favor shortly
thereafter because he
questioned what happened to
Baudet. They were thrown out
of Debord's social circle. But
this can't be taken as good
reason to remove either of
these men from the historical
record of Debord's life. These
were people who had known
each other for years; while still
close friends, they collaborated
on texts together, properly
"Debordian" texts -- Baudet's
book about Chernobyl and his

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translation of Clausewitz into
French; Martos's pamphlet on
Poland and his History of the
Situationist International; and
especially their collective work,
as a trio, on the critique of the
Encyclopedia of Nuisances --
that, today, simply cannot be
cut from the corpus without
irreparably disfiguring it.

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