Critique de la Séparation (Guy Debord, 1961)

The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

[Blessed by Debord himself.]

Guy Debord’s house at Champot.

Photo: Luc Olivier.

”The erasure of personality is the fatal accompaniment to the conditions of existence that is concretely submissive to spectacular norms, and thus more separated from the possibilities of knowing experiences that are authentic and thus from the discovery of individual preferences. Paradoxically, the individual must permanently repudiate them if he wants to be respected a little in such a society. This existence postulates a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually disappointing commitments to false products. It is a matter of running quickly behind the inflation of devalued signs of life. Drugs help one to conform to this organization of things; madness allows one to flee it.”

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

da "in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" / guy debord. 1978

Come li ha trattati duramente il sistema di produzione moderno! Di progresso in progresso, hanno perduto il poco che avevano, e guadagnato ciò che nessuno voleva. Collezionano le miserie e le umiliazioni di tutti i sistemi di sfruttamento del passato; non ne ignorano che la ribellione. Assomigliano molto agli schiavi, perché sono stipati in massa in brutti fabbricati, malsani e lugubri; mal…

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The most dazzling displays of intelligence mean nothing to us. Political economy, love and urban planning are means that we must master in order to solve a problem that is first and foremost of an ethical kind. Nothing can release life from its obligation to be absolutely passionate. We know how to proceed. The world's hostility and trickery notwithstanding, the participants in an adventure that is altogether daunting are gathering, and making no concessions. We consider generally that there is no other honorable way of living apart from this participation.

potlatch #2

information bulletin of the french section of the lettrist international

29 June 1954

in girum imus nocte et consumirmur igni

“The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.”

― Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Citation c-dessus en introduction de La Société Du Spectacle (Guy Debord).

Et j’ajouterais que le comique c’est l’ « authentique » qui au nom du spectaculaire, dans un idéalisme paradoxal, prétendra s’opposer au « vrai » en guise de justification !

Critique de la Séparation (Guy Debord, 1961)

The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.

The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself.

Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage -- slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. -- are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive.

Guy Debord, "Theory of the Dérive" in Internationale Situationniste #2, (1958)

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but…) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration.

Ivan Chtcheglov, "Letter from Afar" in Internationale Situationniste #9 (1964)