Guy Debord's Time-Image: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)

Abstract

In his Rhapsody for the Theatre (1990), Alain Badiou compliments Guy Debord’s final film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)—the film’s title is a Latin palindrome that can be translated as “we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire”—for revealing a “pure temporal moment [that] speaks to the glory of cinema, [and] which may very well survive us humans.” 1 One can easily imagine that Debord would have been dismissive of Badiou’s claim. In a letter to Jacques Le Glou sent on November 15, 1982, Debord expresses particular ire at Badiou’s judg ments on In girum , describing Badiou as “Maoist carrion.” 2 Badiou’s invo cation of a “pure temporality” at the service of cinema would seem to ignore and minimize Debord’s political project, placing Debord as merely another cinematic auteur. This may have been Badiou’s purpose. In his Theory of the Subject (1982), Badiou suggests that Debord and the situa tionists could only offer a Promethean politics of “active nihilism.” This politics was limited to a transitional stage and could not reach true polit ical virtue. 3 Therefore, Badiou’s reclamation of Debord for the “glory of cinema” might be an attempt to further marginalize this politics by limit ing the virtues of Debord’s project to the aesthetic. This marginalization of Debord as “aesthetic” figure, as exemplar of the “last avant-garde,” is remarkably common. To insist on the necessity of a political reading of Debord’s cinema, and especially In girum , in order to counter this kind of claim might seem like a relatively simple matter. And yet, in a text cowritten with Gianfranco Sanguinetti at the time of the dissolution of the Situationist International (SI) in 1972, Debord states that “the SI had been, from the beginning, a much vaster and more profound project than a simply polit ical revolutionary movement.” 4 The reason for this was the SI’s conception of time as “made of qualitative leaps, of irreversible choices, of occasions that will never return.” 5 So, although Debord constructs his “time-image” as a political act, he also hints that it serves a more profound project. In this case, the various politicizing readings of the situationists, which aim simply to revise and continue their political project, often fail to attend