The Lessons of Guy Debord

Abstract

OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 31–38. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What would Guy Debord’s intellectual heritage be? Can one speak of a heritage here? The question seems to imply that Debord was a French intellectual like so many others who have become part of academic curricula; or that he has imposed himself as an author, with a work that deserves respectful comment, replete as it is with a stock of sophisticated concepts. But for many reasons, this is not really the case. Debord can hardly be considered a French intellectual—whatever model of the “intellectual” one chooses as a frame of reference—so that the answer might therefore be that, indeed, he left no heritage. At least Debord did not behave as most well-known intellectuals did: he never made any attempt to be part of the “milieu” or to be recognized by his supposed peers; he kept silent about them, despised them with almost no exceptions, and hated Sartre as manifestly as he could, or at least to the point that Situationism would probably not have been called Situationism if Sartre had not written his endless Situations. That would be Debord’s specificity: the refusal to appear on the French intellectual stage, to play a role on this scene (or, to put it in his terms: in this spectacle). This is precisely what makes him interesting, appearing as it does in all the forms of expression he has chosen to test (collage, autobiography, theory, film, political activism, etc.). If there is no heritage, there is still a lesson to be kept in mind stemming from Debord’s will to escape what Bourdieu might have called the economy of the French intellectual field. And the point of this essay would be to show that this lesson is ultimately a lesson of freedom. Let’s start at the beginning, with his childhood and a few psychoanalytical remarks (very few, I promise). In Panegyric, his autobiographical account from 1989, Debord makes the following statement toward the beginning of the book: