from Guy Debord

To Gianfranco Sanguinetti
22 January [19]69
Dear Gianfranco:

We have received a letter of violent and crude denunciation directed against you by your ex-comrades at the "912" publishing house.[1] It was sent express on 5 January (so as to torpedo your position in the dialogue with Paris), but we didn't check our post office box for a dozen days. In any case, the unpleasant weakness of the content and tone of this letter didn't provide more than five minutes of commentary in our communal discussion.

Of course, it is obvious that we haven't responded to the people who have insulted you. We communicate to you this "document" so that you yourself can adopt the form of response that seems appropriate to you.[2] The minimum is obviously breaking all relations, even personal relations, with the signatories and the people who will associate with them subsequently.

This phenomenon of "jealousy" doesn't surprise us. During the Strasbourg scandal,[3] people wrote to us to denounce -- from the side of the SI -- the conduct of the local situationists, which had been perfectly correct. When Rene Riesel (who wasn't yet a member of the SI) led the agitation in Nanterre[4] with a certain radicalism, the results of which everyone has since then certified, we received several idiotic and dishonest, signed or anonymous letters that attacked him. One always acts in the same way: the cretins only denounce themselves through such proceedings.

Claude Gallimard has finally responded to our letter [of 16 January 1969] with half-confessions and vague allusions to possible half-excuses for his behavior or that of Antoine, by affecting to take the matter as a pleasantry. This imbecile declares that he doesn't see any reason for there being any change in our relationship! He proposes that all of us come to his place for a drink, and he already speaks of "truncated" remarks by Antoine* that were reported second hand by anonymous people. This is why we have concluded with the attached letter.[5] This stupid bourgeois naturally still hasn't understood what the SI is.


Cordially to all,
Guy

(Alice Becker-Ho, 169 Saint-Jacques, Paris, 5th.)

*We have since then learned that this miscarriage is a "March 22d" Maoist.

[1] Who published a collection of extracts from the SI in L'Estremismo coerente dei situazionisti [The Coherent Extremism of the Situationists] (Milan, November 1968), credited to Servizio Internazionale di Collegamento-ILS (International Link Service). [Translator: see the statement by the Italian section of the SI called Touched by enemy hands, the gold of the International becomes coal (July 1969).]

[2] The response appeared in issue #1 of Internazionale Situazionista, p. 114-115.

[3] Winter 1966-1967.

[4] With the Enrages of Nanterre.

[5] Cf. "Correspondence with a publisher," I.S., #13, p. 115-116.


(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 4, 1969-1972. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French and, where necessary, from the Italian, by NOT BORED! July 2005.)



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