Guy Debord

The French government has stepped in to prevent Yale University from buying the papers of the late Guy Debord. In fact, it bought “almost everything he ever produced from the 1950s onwards: films, notes, drafts, unpublished works and corrected proofs, as well as his entire library, typewriter and spectacles,” and even “the small wooden table where he wrote” his masterpiece, The Society of the Spectacle, as if to make all the more emphatic its explanatory statement that Debord was a “national treasure.”

All of which leads Andrew Gallix to observe in this blog entry for the Guardian, “It’s difficult to convey how bizarre it is to hear Christine Albanel — Sarkozy‘s minister of culture — describing the revolutionary Debord as ‘one of the last great French intellectuals’ of the second half of the 20th century. A love-in between a resurrected Andreas Baader and Angela Merkel would be only marginally more surprising.”

After all, Debord was the founder two radical movements, the Lettrist Internatioanale, and the more famous Situationist Internationale, which propounded concepts such as “détournement” — of mainstream society being a “hijacking,” or that one must “hijack” oneself back — and who’s “hour of glory” was the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, and has influenced everyone from the Sex Pistols to Will Self to Factory Records. Perhaps more tellingly, as Gallix notes, Debord’s first book “was bound in sandpaper so that it would attack any book placed next to it. For years, this lethal dust jacket served as a perfect symbol of Debord’s abrasiveness: he was the ultimate outsider whose ideas could never be assimilated by the mainstream.”

So, asks Gallix, “What went wrong?