Gianfranco Sanguinetti, Italian, author of Veritable Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy, which Editions Champ Libre published in translation on 8 January [1976], presented himself at the French border on 11 February [1976] but was denied entrance due to a "refusal of visit" order issued on 21 July 1971 by Marcellin, the Minister of the Interior.[1] One knows that these kinds of administrative demonstrations of "reasons of State" don't need any judicial sanctions, are unappealable, and perpetual. That the regimes of Europe want to change little in the continuity [towards a Common Market], naturally doesn't have any effect on the people who contest them all equally.

We are modestly broad-minded about the fact that it isn't appropriate to resort to publicity in order to put a simple particular phenomenon that only interests a few private individuals under the eyes of the reader, who is at every instant occupied by other information, all of it pertinent and burning, of consistently universal interest and touching the lives of all.

In effect, we don't have the insolence to insinuate that the critique of capitalism will concern the totality of our contemporaries, their work and their substance, their ideas and their pleasures. Like the subjects of scholarly discussions limited to small numbers of experts, we certainly do not ignore the appropriateness of the long-controversial concept; and finally capitalism, insofar as the hypothesis goes, is no longer our contemporary: because the Thought of Vincennes [2] has recently lept well beyond it, as when the better recyclers among its professors decided upon "the end of history" and, even more rich in consequences for them, the suspension of the criteria of truth in discourse.

Moreover, we are not really assured that there exists somewhere a geographical and economically feeble entity called Italy. The responsible eminences in the Common Market have good reasons to be in doubt about Italy's existence and the fact that the free circulation of people, as well as the free circulation of commodities, are their affair.

The effective existence of Gianfranco Sanguinetti himself, either as the person eventually revealed to be behind a Western samizdat or as the target of some advanced-liberal Gulag, is, at this moment, debatable. If we allow ourselves to positively reaffirm the reality of his existence, his writings or the diverse but painless police persecutions of him, someone can retort that "Sanguinetti" is a living public rumor, beyond our borders, whom no one here has heard speak; and we feel the full weight of such objections.

We also frankly say that we know a number of estimable persons, either working in the publication of information or the distribution of books, who don't hide the fact that they have come to the conclusion that Editions Champ Libre doesn't exist any longer; and, for our part, we don't have the boldness to settle such an obscure question by going against the honest convictions of so many competent men, and instead stick to our contingent desires and limited interests.

After all this, are we going to allow ourselves to leave open this question of knowing if the world in which we are, and about which you read the latest information every day, really exists? We are in some measure reassured that it does exist, at least for the moment.

(Written by Guy Debord and published anonymously in the 24 February 1976 issue of Le Monde. Reprinted in Editions Champ Libre Correspondance, Volume I October 1978. Translated from the French and footnoted by NOT BORED! July 2004.)

[1] Raymond Marcellin was the French Minister of the Interior from 31 May 1968 to 27 February 1974.

[2] Founded in 1969 as an alternative to traditional universities, the Universite de Vincennes was the home of such well-known "post-structuralist" philosophers as Michel Serris, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Debord's dislike of Vincennes theorists was in part a response to their theories, but also to their means of supporting themselves. Michel Foucault "undertook a number of research projects for the Ministere de l'Equipment in the 1970s [...] Many well known sociologists and philosophers participated in research financed by this Ministry, such as Deleuze and Guattari who also undertook contract research [...] Lefebvre points out that recuperation has taken a specific form in the years after 1968 in that technocrats got the critics themselves to work out what would be applicable out of the radical critique. Many Marxists sociologists at this time accepted contracts from State ministries." Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, translators' introduction to Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Blackwell, 1996). As for "cadrist," it refers to cadres, business executives.