Portrait of Guy Debord as a Young Libertine

The Man Behind the Mask

With the publication of his Memoirs in 1959, Guy Debord began, insistently, to paint his own portrait, which he retouched again and again in the years that followed. Debord gave much of his work an autobiographical dimension, intermingling in this way objectivity and subjectivity, theory and practice. Despite his desire for transparency, however, Debord composed his texts according to a secret code, which must be broken in order to understand what he really means. He cares little whether the common reader understands: “Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential,” he writes in Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle, “I obviously cannot speak in complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody”(1). Debord has, in fact, covered his tracks, so that only those who take the trouble to crack the code will understand his work. Despite the familiar faces in his films, his winks and private jokes, Debord gives little of himself away. He proceeds by allusions, while his real life remains hidden, obscure. In In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, he lingers on the great episodes of his life (the Lettrist epic, May ’68, etc.), but it is not always possible to reconstitute the chain of events without the key to his particular codes.¹ Unless done by one who knew him personally, any portrait of Debord that goes beyond what he himself made public will be at best speculation, and at worst sleight-of-hand. [End Page 71] To understand the multiple self-portraits he left behind, we must turn to those who knew Debord, and recorded their own images of him.