Guy Debord and the Problem of the Accursed

“…outlaws impelled by that energy springing from bad passions, alone capable of overthrowing the old world and giving back to the forces of life their creative liberty.”

—Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel, Histoire de l’Anarchie

“It would have been better for mankind had this man never existed.” This is what The Gentlemen’s Magazine wrote on the occasion of the death of Godwin, who was an inspiration to Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Blake, and many others, just as Proudhon is the inspiration for Courbet’s painting. From this group comes a large part of modern poetry, the “plein air” school in landscape painting, Impressionism, and a whole continuous creative development whose continuation belonged and still belongs to the forces of life, constituting creative freedom itself. But such a development cannot be understood if one separates it from its solidarity with this bad passion that is “alone capable of overthrowing the old world”—the passion carried by creative rule-breakers who are cursed as such.