Introduction

Ces journalistes … m’ont traité sans jamais relier la qualification à un fait correspondant, de: Maître à penser, nihiliste, pseudo-philosophe, pape, solitaire, mentor, magnetiscur, pantin sanglant, fanatique de lui-même, diable, éminance grise, âme damnée, professeur ès radicalisme, gourou, révolutionnaire des bazars, agent de subversion et de déstabilisation au service de l’imperialisme soviétique, Méphisto de pacotille, nuisible, extravagant, fumeux, énigmatique, mauvais ange, idéologue, mystérieux, sadique fou, cynique total, lieu de la non pensée, envoûteur redoutable, déstabilisateur, enragé, théoricien Guy Debord, Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lébovici.

A special issue on Guy Ernest Debord is not surprising in the current cultural moment, either in Europe or in the United States. The increasing number of publications on the Situationist International (SI) and its leader in recent years¹ clearly indicates a growing interest on the part of academia as well as among the general public. It also demonstrates how publishers (paradoxically and inevitably) are turning Debord and SI into a spectacular commodity.² This volume adds new voices to the work of analysis, reconstruction, and rethinking of a particularly significant period in the cultural and political history of contemporary Europe, by focusing on the figure of the man who, for better or for worse, polarized the theoretical assumptions of the SI, and provided the most refined intellectual instruments for understanding the political and philosophical connotation of the movement itself. We also hope to help define the contours of a personality who consistently misled (with skillful détournements) his biographers and who seems to elude any crystallization.³