from Guy Debord

To Uwe Lausen
14 November 1963
Dear Uwe

I don't know the Vienese psychoanalyst of whom you speak. I think that he was tied to a Marxist psychoanayst of the 1920s, currently little known, who will certainly be of interest to you: Wilhelm Reich.

Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral: zur Geschicte der sexuellen Oekonomie[1] (Berlin-Viena, 1932) and Die Sexualitat im Kultur-Kampf[2] (Copenhagen, 1936).

We haven't published anything since the catalogue of the Odense exposition -- which made a sufficiently beautiful scandal, intensified by the expulsion of Rudi Renson at the Danish border. We prepare our next publications (including two books that Raoul [Vaneigem] and I -- alas! -- have written).

Our best public activity of the last few months has been an excellent liasion with Japanese revolutionaries (those who lead the famous Zengakuren student movement). Two of them have visited me several times; situationist texts have been translated into Japanese, and these people [the Zengakuren] are very numerous and active in a country where the atmosphere is quite explosive (we have also come to know some Englishmen after the RSG-6 exposition, but they are much less interesting and less in agreement with us -- they are more or less anarchists of the old style).

The next conference will be held in Vienna, as was previously decided. But we will fix the date so that it coincides with the end of a period of activity, which allows us to discuss the results of this activity as well as the next perspectives (we no longer have the spectacular discourse of the Spurists to combat; all of them are together at the Malraux Biennale, where they have made a quite nice model of a monument).

There has recently been a theoretical -- but also a very practical -- debate in the S[ituationist] I[nternational], about which I here communicate to you all the relevant documents (except for a letter, from the end of October, that Attila [Kotanyi] refuses to discuss in any "detail," because, since "he is a situationist," we must understand that he has said but has not thought any stupidities, and because he has no need to demonstrate that there isn't anything for which we can reproach him).

Unanimously, Attila and also the Dane Peter Laugeson, who has a neighboring tendency, have been exluded.

I don't know what your opinion will be. I think that there have certainly been problems in your relations with us over the last eight months -- problems of "individualism" or "nihilism" -- which perhaps are explicable and founded in the theoretical opposition that Attila has revealed? Perhaps now is the occasion for you to take stock of the divergences between us, if they exist on any fundamental points. But, in case you are in agreement with us, I would be interested in receiving your opinion (also your opinion on the finally published issue of D[eutsche] G[edanke]).


Cordially yours,
Guy

[1] The Collapse of Sexual Morals[: Towards a History of the Sexual Economy].

[2] The Sexual Revolution.


(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 2, 1960-1964. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! May 2005.)



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