Guy Debord, or The Revolutionary Without a Halo

Abstract

OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 39–45. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Long taken for a nonentity, in other words passed over in silence, then taken for a brilliant if rowdy character of chilly arrogance, the chances are good that Guy Debord will purposely spare himself the third stage of embalming: that of being taken for a remarkable writer.”1 So wrote journalist and author Claude Roy in 1974 at the time of the release of Debord’s first feature-length film, The Society of the Spectacle, and at the time this appeared to be a rather reliable prediction. Debord was still thought of primarily as one of the founders and associates of the (recently defunct) collective enterprise known as the Situationist International, and as the author of the concise but dauntingly dense text upon which his film was based. His colleague Raoul Vaneigem tended to be considered the better writer, even if both were criticized for muffling their arguments “under [a] dense Hegelian wrapping.”2 The intervening thirty years, however, have provided ample evidence to contradict Roy’s confident forecast: it has, perhaps ironically, become a commonplace that Debord’s legacy is precisely that of a great author-essayist, a memoirist and moralist in a long line of classical French writers. If we were to date the arrival of this unanticipated reception of his work, we could do worse than to point to the year 1989 and the publication of his Panegyric, a slim volume of memoirs that was quickly and unexpectedly hailed by Philippe Sollers in the pages of Le Monde.3 Since that date Sollers has written a series of important articles on Debord for the French literary press, has aided in the publication of his works by the prestigious firm of Gallimard, and has even produced a television documentary on him; perhaps no single figure has played a greater role in defining Debord’s legacy for the reading public, at least in France. Sollers has been instrumental in consolidating Debord’s reputation as the author of a distinct and exemplary oeuvre: “Guy Debord’s style