Incitement to Self-Defense

By Michel Bounan

Dedicated to Gerard Berreby

"I come to explain to you from whence comes this reputation and these calumnies. Thus, listen. Certain people among you believe that I am joking; nevertheless, be sure that I will only say the tell." -- Plato, Apology of Socrates.

"I will punish you for your ways, while your abominations are in your midst. Then you will know that I am the Lord." -- Ezechiel, VII, 4.

Warning Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII

New revised edition, published by Editions Allia, 2005. First edition published in 1995. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! November 2007.

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According to Editions Alia, Michel Bounan was born in Paris in 1942. Today he is known as a physician and writer. A personal friend of Guy Debord, who strongly influenced his ideas, he has written nine books, all of them published by Allia. None of them has been published in English. It is this last fact or, rather, the circumstances in which The Time of AIDS (1990) was rejected by Verso Books that motivated him to write this Incitement to Self-Defense. Though we ourselves have a few reservations about some of his assertions, which we have indicated by way of footnotes, we believe that his books certainly merit being widely distributed, read and discussed in the English-speaking world. They undeniably enrich and increase the relevance and usefulness of the Marxist-situationist tradition of social critique.

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Incitement to Self-Defense By Michel Bounan Warning

The title of this work, which is unequivocal, has often been badly read and, due to this fact, one can say that its content has been badly understood. It is not principally a question of an individual appeal. Its ambitions are quite different: to propose to the reader a model of selfdefense that efficaciously responds to the habitual offensive that our current world leads against those who recognize neither its categories nor its legitimacy.

The discourses that our social organization conduct about itself for the last 150 years are coherent, not only in their overtly eulogistic content, but also in the species of self-critique that it always adds and that only serves to reinforce it. This pseudo-critique can easily be recognized in that it noisily denounces the ravages of our economic, political, social, industrial or ideological systems, or even those more serious ravages that risk subsequently coming to pass, thus accrediting -- for a large public -- its image as authentic critique, but it does so by leaning upon the conceptual foundations or the moral imperatives that are, themselves, products of our current social organization, that appeared with it, that can only maintain themselves with it, and that will disappear with it. To justify itself, such a pseudo-critique thus requires the support of the system that it claims it wants to bring down.

The philanthropic movement of the 19th century that, in the name of moral imperatives and a progressive ideology, denounced the living conditions of the workers during the Industrial Revolution, in the same way that the Leftist university critique of the 1960s critiqued the new forms of alienation in the name of the same imperatives and the same ideology, have best illustrated the nature and role of this pro domo[1] critique.

Pseudo-critique has a triple function:

1) It occupies the terrain of social critique at the historical moments when an authentic critique begins to make itself known.

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2) It attempts to impose the ideological forms that are the foundations of the system on those who want to have done with that very system.

3) Finally, it denounces all real social critique that aims at the abolition such foundations by at least accusing it of "nihilism," "visionary idealism" or "apocalyptic prophetism." Sometimes the calumnies are more serious, and any person who contests the system will see him/herself denounced -- according to the times -- as an agent of Prussian imperialism, the STASI or cryptorevisionism. More crudely, he or she will see him/herself labeled as a papist, a pornographer or a Guenonian.

The model of self-defense proposed here presents itself under the form of a general plan in seven parts, arranged according to what, in music, one calls a "bridge" structure; and this plan is the real object of the book. It will be necessary to consider its contents as a simple illustration of this method.

The first three chapters concern the particular calumnies directed against authentic social critique that appears in current society. It is above all a question of recognizing the nature of these calumnies and their origin across the apparent diversity of their origins and forms (chapter 1). It is then a matter of showing that the crimes imputed to this critique are not only foreign to it but fundamentally opposed to it, to the extent that they are the very crimes that this critique denounces (chapter II). It is then fitting to indicate that such crimes only continue to exist today because they are forged and encouraged by the system itself; that they permit the isolation of its victims, the setting of them against each other (chapter III). Such a self-defense will always remain prohibited to the police or negationist forgers.

The central chapter (chapter IV), which concerns any current or future self-defense, exposes how -- since the beginning of our modern society -- a deluge of calumnies of the same fabrication and the same intention has always been orchestrated against the real critiques that this society has had to confront.

The last three chapters correspond to the first three and lead back to the point of departure. The damage, more and more serious -- social, ecological, psychological, and morbid damage -created by the current mode of market production causes defensive reactions and demands that the system oppose the ones to the others, thanks to the categorical determinations that the system distributes to each according to his needs (chapter V). Authentic critique must not Page 5

only tie all the sufferings of the era to the market roots of our social organization, it must also denounce all the individual or collective determinations produced by this organization and only recognize as the subject of its critique the living roots of man, the living subject without qualities (chapter VI). But, to the extent that today it claims to be opposed to market organization, the living subject is simultaneously accused of "paranoia" because it declares itself to be persecuted, of "mysticism" because it believes excessively in itself when confronted with a world that denies it, and "autism" because it claims to found its cause on itself alone (chapter VII).

But authentic social critique does not recognize the validity of such determinations. It still and always recognizes as its own only the living root of man from which it edifies itself and destroys all the circumstantial historical systems, and of which each can have the experience at the moment in which he/she takes exception to all the rest -- this root that one more generally calls liberty, and that pseudo-critique does not know at the point that it sometimes wonders if it is not a question of a mystical, hermetic (or perhaps neo-Platonic?) deus ex machina.[2]

The refusal of all the ideological appearances that our social organization produces and distributes to all according to his/her needs thus brings each to recognize him/herself in absolute despoilment, in scandalous banality and, at the the same time, to recognize the other in his/her identical poverty. In the current social war, one easily distinguishes one's ally in his/her nudity or in the tears in his/her squalid livery; one identifies one's enemy by his/her uniform and the care that each takes to conserve his/her haughty bearing. Thus, the new contesters, by conspicuously showing that they have nothing to defend that is their own, are the poles of attraction of the new identity. And this is the only meeting place of those who want to have done with the current world. September 2004

[1] Latin: "for home." Pro domo et mundo ("For home and for the world") is the name of a work by Karl Krauss (1912).

[2] Bounan is referring to a remark made by Donald Nicholson-Smith, who wrote a reader's report Bounan's The Time of AIDS for Verso Books.

(New revised edition, published by Editions Allia, 2005. First edition published in 1995. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! October 2007. All footnotes by the translator.) Page 6

Chapter I

A book that I published in 1990, entitled Le Temps du sida [The Time of AIDS], exposed how the new epidemic of AIDS, through the factors that favored its diffusion, was the most complete and most terrifying product of the social conditions issued from commodity logic. It also showed that the current scientific explications, with respect to AIDS or anything else, reveal an ideology that is itself tied to commodity logic. Thus, the same commodity reason engendered, here as elsewhere, both the totality of the disaster and the ensemble of the dominant ideas concerning it. The Time of AIDS finally concluded that no individual treatment could impede the march of this immuno-depression epidemic (whatever the name that one will want to give it in the future), which could only be done by suppressing the conditions that produced it and that it in turn precipitated.

The logic of the commodity in its socio-economic and ideological aspects, thus, in its disastrous developments, was critiqued in the last century by Marx, who named it capital in its general form. Subsequently, the situationists described the recent mutations -- required by the surpassing of its initial contradictions -- and they, in their turn, denounced its modern form of spectacle. The Time of AIDS, in sum, only resumed the critique that had been developed for 150 years on the occasion of the completely new collective and private suffering that took the unexpected form of an epidemic.

In its time, situationist critique had as its principal enemies the so-called official inheritors of Marxist critique. Situationist critique exposed their motivations and procedures. Likewise, the most remarkable reactions to The Time of AIDS has come from people who once referred to, or claimed to refer to, situationist critique.

Several days after the publication of this book, the former situationist Michele Bernstein, become a journalist for Libration, published in it a rather confused but incontestably praiseful article (Libration, 4 October 1990). Michel Bounan seeks his references far and wide, in the fall of preceding civilizations (Roman and feudal), in the myopia of the Hegelian system. He speaks of the symbolism of the dreams "that outlive all the psychoanalysts," our family structures, the wine that is a living but frightening god. . . . At the end of his book, he even gives practical and homeopathic advice to those whose defenses only get weaker (...) This author, who puts his supports down upon Lautramont, Dada and the situationists, is obviously my family (when he speaks of the manner in which Reich was buried, he is properly Swiftian!). But no, one is not deceived, it is obvious Page 7

that this work isn't simply seductive, but important as well. Then, another practical piece of advice: Editions Allia not being one of the pachyderms of printed merchandise, The Time of AIDS will not be piled in the shop windows of all the bookstores. If it isn't there, go elsewhere or order it.

This article was all the more remarkable and remarked because it was the only one published about this book by a major French newspaper.

After the publication of her article, Michele Bernstein was alerted by a colleague at her newspaper and vigorously reprimanded for having made an apology for a "homophobic" and "charlatanesque" work. This judgment was immediately co-signed by another former situationist, Donald Nicholson-Smith, then employed by the English publishing house Verso Books.[1]

The director of Verso Books, Malcolm Imrie, had previously translated and published Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle[2] and, upon the advice of the author, had envisioned a translation of The Time of AIDS. Nicholson-Smith was tasked with writing a reader's report. His objections were important and his critique was severe:[3] The book certainly has the merit of placing the question of AIDS in the broadest possible critical context -- precisely the context from which it is systematically removed (...) But he denies science any neutrality at all, where it might have made more sense to ask just how science is distorted, and by which specific social forces, away from a real comprehension of issues like AIDS. For all his Marxo-situationist baggage, Bounan evacuates class struggle as the "motor of history," and replaces it with a quasi-mystical deus ex machina called the "living subject" (and deus indeed -- because this entity is also known as "the living God") (...) At another level, that of individual remedies in the present circumstances, Dr. Bounan's promotion of silica administered to AIDS patients in a homeopathic manner fails to convince: at best, one feels, this is a worthwhile avenue, but very minor; at worst, we are listening to the patter of a snake-oil merchant. It must be added that a barely concealed homophobia does little to strengthen Bounan's case.

Malcolm Imrie then made known to Editions Allia what he called his "own opinion," which exactly confirmed that of Nicholson-Smith:[4] Bounan places the question of Aids [sic] in the broadest possible critical context (precisely the context from which it is systematically removed by dominant ideologies). His arguments for the Page 8

existence of pathological factors in our 'civilization' which -- rather than a 'virus' -- are responsible for Aids [sic] and many other diseases, are eloquent, erudite and persuasive. His general critique of 'marionettism' is impressive. But we found his notion of the 'living subject' as the only motor of history somewhat mystical. His accounts of the homeopathic uses of silica were rather unconvincing. And there is sometimes a barely-concealed homophobia in the book which we found distasteful.

Thus, a work of which Debord had wanted the diffusion and which was, beyond several generalities, sometimes interesting but often banal, was especially remarkable for these three points:

1) Substitution for the "class struggle" by a species of mystical ideology.

2) Promotion of a charlatan's remedy for AIDS.

3) Obvious homophobia.

None of this had appeared to the former situationist Michele Bernstein. One imagines she was perplexed and perhaps concerned about it.

Several weeks after the English discovery, the French journal Mordicus in its turn published its own opinion under the signature of Serge Quadruppani,[5] editor of this journal and described -mendaciously -- as a "former situationist" (and even "irreducible situationist author") in the advertising pages of the Nouvel Observateur (1 July 1993).

After a rather cretinous blast of kepi ("a brilliant synthesis of life and illness . . . it is very good"!), but nevertheless venomous ("one feels the presence of Vaneigem on each page"), this professional warned the readers of Mordicus at great length about what "jammed" in this "rather suspicious" book. No allusions this time to the Motor of History, the class struggle, the living subject or other nonsense. All this was apparently of no concern to the readers of Mordicus, who would be uselessly troubled by the idea that there could exist some kind of relation between this nonsense and AIDS. Nevertheless, this journalist picked up upon, and even several times, a "condemnation of sexual perversions," the moralizing character of which was Page 9

attested to by the concomitant "praise" of the bourgeois family. And he especially found it "truly unsupportable" that the author claimed to recommend to AIDS patients "an old wives' remedy" instead of A.Z.T.

This exemplary report on The Time of AIDS, centered upon the homophobia of the author and the charlatanesque character of his wild imaginings, served as a model for other, more confidential treatises, distributed within certain inner circles. A typed-up and anonymous text, for example, circulated in a group that was part of the Stop-Nogent Committee.[6] One learned in it what was suitable to know about The Time of AIDS. The author, a certain Bounan, indulges in an exercise of pro-situ style in which, with great scholarly erudition and illuminist references, he presents his vision of the world, a kind of undigested mystical situationism. This moral father [pre-la-pudeur] sings the praises of the traditional family in a style that would not be disavowed by the Church Fathers, condemns homosexuality as a form of slavery, and proposes to take care of the illnesses of AIDS with homeopathic dilutions of silica (sand) in water. The work, which is of rare pretense and full of scorn for the sick (puppets), was nevertheless greeted seriously in the pro-situ milieu as a "disturbing book." Furthermore, this imbecile, making very just but quite banal critiques of medicine, obviously denounces a conspiracy. . . . One lies about the nature of AIDS! Which is not caused by a virus, but by the "degradation of the modern conditions of existence," nothing less. . . . Of course, this lie was hidden from the good people by the physicians of "official science" and the coalition of all the powers. . . . Our good apostle offers to take care of the sick on the conditions of submitting to ideological edicts and renouncing the horrible "official medicine."[7]

With its three major themes (mysticism, charlatanism, homophobia), the excellent work of Nicholson-Smith thus found itself here, this time well-seasoned:

1) Mysticism, illuminism, Church Fathers;

2) Offering to take care of the sick, whom the author scorns, with sand;

3) Homophobia, the moral father, apostle of the traditional family.

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Moreover, to those who had already heard that The Time of AIDS treated something completely different, one made assurances that it was a question of super well-known and quite banal critiques. Finally, one wanted to inspire laughter by evoking something that is hidden from the public, a kind of conspiracy against it.

Quadruppani's text was also quite simply translated and reproduced in the foreign press without indication of its origin. Thus, after the distribution in Italy of a translation of The Time of AIDS by Paola Balzola, the journal Anarchismo published a translation of the Quadruppani in extenso as if it had emanated from the editorial board of this journal and expressed "its own opinion."

Michele Bernstein thus had more and more reasons to regret her apologetic remarks. She could nevertheless console herself about her initial wandering by observing that Guy Debord, a habitually attentive reader and sensitive to what was denounced here, was also not struck by the "mysticism" of the book, nor by "the evacuation of the class struggle," nor apparently by the "homophobia" or "charlatanism" that others had discovered in it, since he encouraged his English publisher to translate and distribute it. Moreover, he had written to its author: "I can assure you that I find myself in very great sympathy with the bases of your thought and, obviously, your socio-historical critique."

And he commented upon the refusal of Editions Gerard Lebovici[8] to publish the book six months previously: "To refuse your manuscript is not a good sign for a publishing house. Or for the century?"

Several months later, the volte-face of the publisher Malcolm Imrie, founded on NicholsonSmith's reader's report, inspired Debord to make several remarks: The extraordinary tone ("passionate-insincere") of this pseudo-pederast is quite instructive; since he wants precisely to reproduce the cynical appearance of the reasoning of spectacular power, as well as its worthless psychology. This person is no doubt paid by the network of disinformation that specializes in the treatment of advanced critique. I will take note of it. It is certainly elsewhere that one will hear "the song of the sailors."

And, later on: All of what you cite proves the conspiracy, quite foreseeable in the existing situation, against The Time of AIDS; and that Nicholson-Smith participates in it. The machine that today codes the Page 11

degree of democratic permission for access to a book, if one presumes the interest of it to be too strong, disguises its true reasons behind the supposedly individual caprices of the members of the ad hoc network; and it will prefer to justify such pseudo-caprices by the hypocritical appearance of an indignant neo-moralism that simulates the current sheep of the intelligentsia; they only know three inadmissible crimes, at the exclusion of all the rest: racism, antimodernism and homophobia. You must remember that it was already this extraordinary accusation of homophobia against this very book that brought me my first suspicion concerning Imrie's honesty. I have not met with him since then, but I have found enough other good reasons in our correspondence to become angry. I have refused him Le Spectacle after he increased the pressure to take from me in great haste the worldwide English-language rights (and with what intention?)[9]

Thus, in this affair as in others, Guy Debord -- about whom many still wondered what his trade was -- maintained an unsupportable position, faced with an ensemble that was nevertheless composed of real or fantastical former situationists. It is true that to his status as founder of the Situationist International he excessively added that of gravedigger for this moment that was both real and fantastical, for some of its members, too. *

The preceding reactions to The Time of AIDS, their content, their resemblances and especially their origins incited me to publish a short text, The Crafty State, intended as a preface to the work by Maurice Joly, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

Joly's pamphlet, which was banned and seized by the French police in 1865, exposed -- among other things -- how a modern state had the means to falsify the social critique of an era so as to place it at its service. Subsequently, this work was falsified by the Russian police at the beginning of the [20th] century and transformed into an anti-Semitic pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so as to divert the dangerous social agitation of the time towards racist riots.

The preface thus showed how Maurice Joly was the victim of the procedure that it had denounced for the first time; and more precisely what mediatico-police maneuvers were thenceforth used by the modern States in the current social war so as to divert, isolate, manipulate and falsify all new critique that today emerges in less and less avoidable conditions.

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This time the journalist Michele Bernstein let the publisher at Editions Allia know that this text appeared to her to be frankly uninteresting and inopportune. [According to her] particularly weak and improper was the argument according to which "the Dialogue in Hell was not recently retrieved from oblivion so as to show the falsity of the Protocols, but, on the contrary, it was the mediatico-police operation of the Protocols that proved the truth of Maurice Joly."

To this severe judgment, Guy Debord brought several nuances: You have written the preface that Joly merits, and exactly as the experience of this century has demonstrated (...) The strongest and precisely the most modern argument that you have advanced is this one: "The Dialogue in Hell has not been recently retrieved from oblivion to demonstrate the falsity of the Protocols . . . on the contrary, it is the mediatico-police operation of the Protocols that proved the truth of Maurice Joly."

Some time after the publication of The Time of AIDS, I tried to enlarge the subject in a new book that was announced by a text in the form of a test: Are you a man of your times?

The form of this text caricatured the modern journalistic procedure intended to authoritarianly pass on mendacious news in an illusorily democratic form. In addition, it provided grave information, the references for which would be found in Unnameable Life,[10] on the coming disaster and the factors -- ecological, economic and social -- that contribute to it, thus on what one could reasonably expect.

Serge Quadruppani deplored it in this remark: With his handbill in situ-language intended to sell his magic powder against AIDS, Bounan harms the sick much more than official medicine. But this is a reality that will not impassion the public that, with a a sure sense of marketing,[11] he knew how to reach.

For his part, Guy Debord remarked: The test is magnificent! As revolting in the tone as in the informational content; this culminates in the surprising manner in which one encounters the "satisfaction" of seeing oneself recognized as a "modern man." This text can, in addition, function as a memory-aid (I am unfamiliar with several figures, but they are instantaneously brought to your memory when one is not unfamiliar with the general tendency). One cannot congratulate you too much for its Page 13

educational value, nor desire a wide enough distribution. . . . I would like, of course, to receive at least a dozen more tests. (...) I have begun to communicate them to the people who merit it. That is to say, I will put some time into depleting the stock that I have.

Unnameable Life, the title of which -- at two levels of reading -- exactly announced the contents, had been published shortly afterwards, in March 1993. Its subject took up again -- and generalized -- that of The Time of AIDS: the current disaster (ecological, epidemiological, social) and the "dominant ideas" concerning it are identically produced by the "logic of the commodity" and fundamental accomplices. But, in addition, the book showed that such "dominant ideas" can only be received and internalized at the price of psychic disturbance -- which the psychiatrists call alexithymia -- and the physiological and behavioral effects of which are precisely those that led to the current disaster. Alexithymia is thus the terrain on which the dominant ideas seed themselves so as to produce the evils that they claim to name. In such a movement, the function of the media obviously appears under a somewhat new light.

This time, the silence of the media -- as one must expect -- was even more impressive than with respect to The Time of AIDS.

The "irreducible" Quadruppani abandoned the popular columns of Mordicus to confide his impressions in a much more confidential publication, at which the person who fingers the writing machines is not known -- but which has an evocative title (Hotel Ouistiti) -- addressed to several people who are apparently chosen for their potential role as "resonators." His critique concerned the author himself, in whom he recognized a kind of "genius" (for marketing[12]): able to "align, in imitation-Debord style, solid evidence mixed with silliness concerning medicine," that is to say, the discourse of "any pro-situ" and that of "any guru in search of suckers." So much for the content. As for those who claim to have noticed something else in this book, one must know and make it known that it is a question of so-called "radicals among whom the arrogant certitude of piercing the appearances of the spectacle in general precedes the belief in the most dumbfounding nonsense," and of whom he provides the description: these are the "people who believed that Italian 'terrorism' was entirely manipulated by the generals of the carabiniers, that an anti-capitalist revolution was in progress in Portugal, that the Russians provoked an earthquake in Armenia and that Jean-Patrick Manchette was [in fact] Jean-Pierre Georges."[13]

At the time this report was made, the Spanish authorities had not yet been forced to pursue the chief of State for "association with malefactors and terrorism." But considerable ecological Page 14

disasters had indeed already been strategically unleashed -- and confessed -- in the regions where one could fear the worst: an anti-capitalist revolution; and those who read journalistic reports have no need to be "experts" in philology to recognize a police report behind a signature.

In the same piece, the "irreducible" one reproached me bitterly for having called him a journalist. He nevertheless did not complain about having been mendaciously described as an ex-situationist by his colleagues at the Nouvel Observateur. But one knows that a contemporary journalist can indeed have another task than that of informing the public and it is thus through a slightly out-of-date usage that one continues to call them "journalists" only.

For her part, Michele Bernstein did not reiterate her blunder. She told anyone who was happy to listen about all the bad things that she thought, not only about Unnameable Life, but its author, his previous writings, and particularly The Time of AIDS, about which she finally recognized what was suitable to recognize about it: no, one cannot be deceived, it is obvious that this work is not only homophobic, but charlatanesque as well. Apparently the former situationist was not offended by having been treated like a journalist, but she contested having been vigorously scolded, following her first article, by a "member of her professional entourage," when it was in fact a question of a "friend who found himself a colleague." It was Moliere who amused Paris with his bourgeois [protagonist], about whom the stupid people claimed that he was a "fabric merchant," when in reality he "gave it to his friends in exchange for money." But one must formally acknowledge Michele Bernstein, for whom a certain social activity favored the choice of friends and a particular disposition to find them very good.

As for Guy Debord, always excessive in his indulgence according to the apologies that he had not ceased to make for this virtue, he said: I find that your second offense with Unnameable Life is even more successful. The censors, who expect the worst, will not be disappointed. Thus, you have left the framework, already quite immense, but apparently still a little circumscribed by an (?) illness, to become the central connoisseur of the total disaster that is henceforth certifiable in the entire sphere of health. I was completely amazed by the discovery of alexithymia, which -- in the light of the knowledge that you have highlighted -- appears as the link that had until now been missing from the contemporary expose of the end of everything.

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[1] Nicholson-Smith would later translate Debord's The Society of the Spectacle into English (Zone Books, 1994). For some odd reason, his translation reads more like a text by Raoul Vaneigem than by Guy Debord.

[2] We believe that this translation was so bad that it amounted to a falsification. And so we have translated it into English ourselves.

[3] It was written in English, so rather than translate Bounan's French translation back into English, we have quoted directly from the original.

[4] It was written in English, so rather than translate Bounan's French translation back into English, we have quoted directly from the original.

[5] In a letter to Jean-Francois Martos dated 24 February 1990, Guy Debord wrote: I had read the Quadruppani. He is obviously a disinformer and perhaps of "type b." At least on the borderline? That is to say, manipulated by his dangerous associations (police-related or repenters) and also by the person who wrote the preface. Henceforth, he will be "the most Leftist" expert on questions of terrorism. And you know what an expert must always be today. He obeys (consciously or due to being maneuvered? I believe rather consciously) the same orders that Fargette has obeyed. It is a marvel, because he [Quadruppani] says that it is necessary to take me (a ridiculous bullshitter) "at my word," whom he claims to have inspired. And this also serves for a very reassuring interpretation of many (actually worrisome but modern) points in the Comments. He makes it seem that he understands, and as an unquestionable banality, that an "impenetrable building" is inevitably (as in 1860) an embassy covered by its diplomatic [legal] extraterritoriality. "Remove your mustache, we have recognized you. . . ." Ass!

In a footnote to this passage, Martos added the following:

One now knows more clearly that Serge Quadruppani was, as a defender of [Robert] Faurisson, in the first rank of the revisionist operation that begun at the end of the 1970s. A "Supplement to #3 of La Guerre Sociale" affirmed in June 1979: "The legend of the 'gas chambers' was made official by the Nuremburg Tribunal, in which the Nazis were judged by their vanquishers (...) Page 16

Faurisson is attacked for having sought the truth and made it advance (...) We who are revolutionaries intend to support him in any case." It was not merely a question of a trap to compromise naive people as much as possible. The goal of the maneuver, which aimed at scrambling and leading astray any true critique of the existing world, was explicitly unveiled in the final "repentance," made by Quadruppani himself. In Libertarians and "Ultra-Leftists" Against Negationism (Editions Reflex, Paris 1996), one actually learned that it was necessary to finish off the surpassed reflexes that are "conspiracism, the conception of ideology as lie, with its illuminist cult of the truth, [and] the taste for scandal"; because these lead straight to revisionism, in which "the delirious residuum of May 68 inextricably mixed with neo-fascist phantasmagorias." The guilty party is the "innate belief in conspiracies that (...) make one see behind every event the Machiavellian maneuvers of the State or the 'Masters of the World,' a world in which everything is only spectacle and lies (a cutting remark (...) about Debord's Comments)." Because this attack was too transparent, the words within parentheses disappeared from the 1996 version of this text, which was originally published in 1992.

The loop has been looped. Also in 1996, issue #6 of The Monthly Letter of the Good Descent announced a debate: "Terrorism and the conspiracy vision of history: the example of Italy. Exposition by Serge Quadruppani: 'Guy Debord: did he exist or was he an invention of the spectacle?'" As for "the conspiracy vision of history," it was quite simply a question of denying the revelations of Debord, and then [Gianfranco] Sanguinetti, concerning the Moro Affair and the terrorism that was manipulated by the Italian State (and, beyond, as the new recipe for the modern powers), and all this despite the incontestable proofs and the dazzling confessions that have since verified them. State terrorism? Guy Debord? The deliriums of May 1968? Here is what must be effaced from the hard drive, after at first trying to efface the gas chambers!

The agents of integrated negation scramble the comprehension of the past so as to better disorient the critique of the present. They thus serve current domination, which must permanently remodel the past so as to perpetuate itself. To deny authentic critique, to discredit it, so as to liquidate it better. This was the very same Quadruppani who one found at the center of an ad hoc network that campaigned against The Time of AIDS, so as to dissuade the readers to which this book was principally addressed (cf. Incitation to Self-Defense and also The Art of Celine and His Times for denunciations of the revisionist operation; these two books, like The Time of AIDS, were written by Michel Bounan and published by Editions Allia).

[6] Nogent-sur-Seine is the location for a planned nuclear powerplant.

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[7] Author's note: This text was subsequently published in 1996 under the signature of F.G. Lavacquerie in a multi-author work, Libertarians and "Ultra-Left" against Negationism.

[8] Founded by Floriana Lebovici in 1984 in response to the murder of Gerard Lebovici, who was her husband and Guy Debord's close friend, this publishing house became the property of their children upon her death in 1990.

[9] And so it was Zone Books, and not Verso, that published Donald Nicholson-Smith's translation of La Societe du Spectacle in 1994.

[10] Published by Editions Allia, 1993. We have translated one of the appendices to it, the one entitled Editorial Politics.

[11] English in original.

[12] English in original.

[13] These were ideas held by Guy Debord. So far as we know, the first two ideas were absolutely correct; we are not sure about the second two.

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Chapter II

Among those who once appeared to refer to situationist critique, two tendencies of very unequal influence are thus pronounced and opposed in this affair. With the exceptions of Guy Debord -- completely negligible to the extent he was the gravedigger of this movement -- and the so-called "radicals" whose priceless extravagances Quaddruppani indicated by splitting his sides laughing and by mopping his brow, a certain unanimity is shown by those to whom the means have been offered to argue their opinions. Beyond several very well-known banalities concerning medicine, biology and language, the best meta-situationist critics agree that the author of the preceding publications especially distinguishes himself through his charlatanism, homophobia and mysticism.

Several pages of The Time of AIDS are devoted to the possible interest of a homeopathic remedy that is assuredly painless and liable to intensify the natural defenses against certain illnesses. This treatment is not proposed to those "sick from AIDS" but to certain, precisely qualified preAIDS patients. If the theoretical foundations of such a treatment are somewhat arguable, the experiments intended to verify the interest of it are recognized as insufficient. The rules of very strict hygiene -- little compatible with the current way of life -- are, on the contrary, presented as decisive in this book. And the conclusion of all this is that no treatment can be opposed to this epidemic of immuno-depression, but only the overthrow of the social organization of which it is the sanction.

One knows quite well what a charlatan is: a so-called therapist who exploits the credulity of a public that he scorns by praising the efficacy of illusory remedies, selling such remedies and enriching himself with his mendacious promises. Then perhaps it is not useless to recall to those who have the lack of awareness to publish under their names the preceding calumnies that I have nothing to sell, neither "magic powder" nor A.Z.T., and that the tribunals of the social organization that they serve sometimes severely sanction this type of defamation.

Furthermore, little charlatans are less numerous today than previously, because the development of capitalism has considerably reduced the importance of the old retail trade with the help of very strict regulations. In fact, it has monopolized all the sources of enrichment in better concentrated networks -- apparently without excluding medical charlatanism. Nevertheless, voices are beginning to be raised -- and appeal to tribunals -- so as to denounce medical charlatanism at the highest levels, that is, pharmaceutical trusts and the States (falsified experiments, mendacious promises, insufficient precautions, notorious enrichment, and even Page 19

complicity), with respect to vaccinations, chemotherapies, blood transfusions, organ transplants and AIDS. Thus, according to Professor Duesberg, the discoverer of the retrovirus, the administration of A.Z.T. to AIDS patients, which is "not only useless, but fatal," depends upon the purest medical charlatanism. Likewise, the politico-scientific people in charge of the French monopoly on blood transfusions have recently been caught in the act of an even more dangerous medical charlatanism and have sacrificed as quickly as possible a few of their employees so as to protect the business as a whole. And this criminal charlatanism of great scope has its source -- none can be unaware of it -- in the considerable profits that can be made, as in any charlatanism of more mediocre scope.

Obviously, those who have read The Time of AIDS know that the book is principally a denunciation of medical charlatanism; of its theoretical pseudo-foundations; of the scorn that it shows the sick, who are considered to be mechanisms; of the illusions that it entertains; of the dangers that it stirs up; and of the financial interests that it nourishes. Those who have spoken in this context of "charlatanism" cannot only be considered imbecilic simpletons. Their procedure is quite of their times, of their world, and of their party. And, until the end of market time, the same questions must be publicly posed to the servants of the crafty State: "Who speaks of what? In the name of whom?"

The so-called homophobia of The Time of AIDS obviously depends upon the same procedure. It was not so long ago that homosexuals were led to the slaughterhouse by the people in charge of a modern State that was in the midst of a pitiless social war. This sentence was pronounced in the name of a criminal code founded upon genetics -- of which the scientific experts and the authorized university professors of the era were the guarantors. Having judged degenerate all those whose behaviors, emotions and consciousnesses turned away from the model then demanded by the German economy in difficulty: the Jews and Gypsies, the psychopaths and homosexuals, those outside the law of the market. With its habitual historical opportuneness, official science thus approved the model of the monogamous and prolific, hard-working and sober German family, fanatically submitted to the law of the State.

Other scientists and experts, all selected and remunerated by the State, came to proclaim that the homosexuals, drug addicts and violent individuals would be "genetically programmed." In sum, one would be "homosexual in the same way that one has blue eyes" or delinquent in the same way that one has curly hair. This scientific finding currently remains independent of all value-judgment: today, what would the homosexuals, drug addicts and "asocial people" have to fear about the privileged financing of such research? Who could be worried that such costly investments will not remain unproductive?

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Contrary to these painless scientific rediscoveries, The Time of AIDS exposed -- in detestable fashion -- that the emotions and the desires, the manners of thought and behavior, the professional and familial structures of an epoch are principally tied to the general social organization that produced or induced them. Thus, the question of the so-called bourgeois family and the sexual perversions, their old and often noted complicity, is sufficiently explained by their common origin. Is this not a condemnation of the sexual perversions and an apology for the "bourgeois" family?

The media-police organizations that promote "family values" and "moral rectification" have no doubt judged things otherwise, because they have hardly utilized such dangerous arguments. And the reason for this is obvious: a society as notoriously democratic as ours cannot publicly avow itself to be judge and jury; it can only neutralize its adversaries (or, in extreme cases, destroy them) by hiding the fact that they are the negative that it unavoidably produces against itself. The so-called genetic determination of homosexuality currently participates, and without any equivocation, in such a praiseworthy enterprise.

So as to now have done with the preceding calumnies, what do these swine want to say about mysticism or religion?

"The mystic," Feuerbach wrote, "speculates on the essence of nature and man, by imagining he speculates on another essence, personified, different from the two others" (The Essence of Christianity). And Marx: "Religion is only the illusory sun that turns around man, in so far as man does not turn around himself" (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). Certainly no one can claim to have been a Marxist once and be unfamiliar with what mysticism is from the perspective of this critique. And one must still remark that none of the innumerable contemporary religious sects have risked the favorable evocation of any text that I have published. They have had excellent reasons: all the idolaters have, without pleasure, recognized that The Time of AIDS is a radical critique of their religion; that it claims, inversely, to reduce all the idols and their historical avatars to the living subject itself, to its sole movements in the historical circumstances that it ceaselessly recreates and that animate it in return; in sum, to make man turn "around himself."

The forms of the various religions, the speculations on an essence of the world outside of mankind, are excessively plastic: they are tied to the general form of the society in question, the image of which they make divine; they proclaim the durability of that general form. Thus, the Page 21

old trinitarian form, called "Catholic," was originally that of European feudalism, while other forms -- in the same epoch -- were used to represent and protect the different socio-economic organizations in Africa and Asia. As for market civilization, after a phase of conquest that it declared to be for [the glory of] the Reformed Church, the Supreme Being and then Nature personified, market civilization discovered -- and imposed on the entire universe -- its real religion, founded on what Marx called "the fetishism of the commodity," the idolatry of "exchange value."

In the purely market view of things, any object takes on a foreign value, independent of the living desires of the seller. And the world likewise discovers it has a bizarre meaning, independent of the passions of the observer and even independent of his consciousness. This "other essence" of the world presents itself under a purely objective aspect, divisible into similar unities, measurable: that of a hundred-weight of potatoes or a stock of books, a representative sample of consumers or a social class, a molecular mass or a bit of human brains. And, through this properly metaphysical apparatus, these perceptions of the world and of oneself are imposed by the market view like an irrefutable truth and the absolute principle of all knowledge.

The science elaborated for several centuries in Europe and now universally recognized as canonical unquestionably rests upon such foundations: this is, nevertheless, only a religion, an illusory sun that only turns around mankind in so far as it does not turn around itself.

Metaphysical views form and ripen in life practices that require them, in social structures in which such practices are the very conditions of survival. Thus, the market view is not only that of the banker or the receiver of stolen goods; it is also that of the salaried worker, the researcher employed as a temp who pays his rent and vacations as part of a club, the student who invests in his work and increases his own exchange-value by several "units of value."

Contemporary universal science-idolatry results from a consciousness of self and of the world that is forged by a market life-practice from which one can only escape with difficulty when the economic system is still functioning. Nevertheless, it is an historical avatar of this protean idolatry that has always served to legitimate perishable social organizations, to credit them with a kind of eternity. Contemporary scientific experts and scholars are priests, become quite unworthy. They are the ones who rediscover the congenital bases of homosexuality, social aggressivity and drug addiction, and who guarantee the efficacy of A.Z.T. and B.C.G. [Bacille de Calmette et Guerin]. Contemporary science is indeed the miracle that permits all the others. Its foundations are sacred. Page 22

Nevertheless, over the course of the last half-century, scientific research has been sunk in several slightly improper affairs, in Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Seveso, etc; sales of indulgences; and quite obvious complicity in diverse social conflicts. Thus, today, some of its priests desire to free it from its filthy allegiances, from its ignoble vassalage. Isn't it above parties and social conflicts? But if -- do not appeal to God -- the market system can no longer maintain itself as it is, it will be the very principles of this science that are recognized as fundamentally improper. And all of this grandiose construction will collapse along with the civilization of which it is the religion.

Here it is not only a question of what one calls the natural sciences, but also the so-called "human" and "social" sciences as well. Thus the theories of historical development -- not intimately lived in a conscious practice of life, but lived as eternal laws, foreign to itself and contemplated as such -- are pure products of this very religion: the "class struggle" is only a reactionary dogma as long as it is not lived by the living subject of which it is the unique principle and the proof.

Theologians often act haughty and disgusted when faced with vulgar beliefs, and the pretty daughter of the squire has no place in the community of saints. Likewise, the stories about extraterrestrials are unworthy of the conquest of space, and the representations of the atom must not be confused with images from science-fiction.[1] But as the degraded forms of religion are popular expressions, they correspond to more miserable ways of life. Nevertheless, both are merely different manifestations of the same mystique, accomplices of the same civilization. Contemporary science is inseparably tied to the spectacle, as the spectacle is tied to the commodity, which, for some time now, is the real center of the world.

Today, the critique of science-idolatry is the preliminary to all social critique. But the necessary critique of religion is now diverted -- like social critique itself -- towards the out-of-date forms that allow its neutralization, and moreover it is not useless to maintain this effect as a contemptible alternative. The critique of a mummified form even reinforces the contemporary religion that participates in this critique, as in past times the Biblical denunciation of idolatry served a quite real and venomous idolatry; as more recently the Stalinist denunciation of capitalism served to protect its real form in the Stalinist empire.

Were not the Hungarian insurgents of 1956 dealt with by Moscow's bureaucrats as "the tools of Wall Street"? Why shouldn't the contemporary idolaters accuse of mysticism the denouncers of their own folly? Page 23

The calumnies concerning homophobia, charlatanism and mysticism hurled at The Time of AIDS - diffused by people who propagate the theories of "congenital homosexuality," who incite AIDS patients to have recourse to A.Z.T., "not only useless, but fatal," and who proclaim their faith in the commodity-ideology of science-idolatry and who expect from it a miracle that would save them in extremis from the next scourge -- have all been fashioned according to the same model.

But the question arises: among so many possible calumnies, why choose these? Because, finally -- following the same procedure -- one would have to accuse me of being a racist or a misogynist, a pedophile or a secret agent from the narcotics squad. Why have me prefer this bad reputation[2] among so many others that one could make for me?

The response seems obvious. The Time of AIDS is principally addressed to three categories of readers: to AIDS patients and their circles; to the homosexuals who were then on the firing line of the hecatomb epidemic; and to all those who submit to the conditions of modern servitude in its most terrifying aspects and who strive to grasp the source and coherence through a social critique elaborated for 150 years. These were the readers whom it was fitting to discourage. The accusations of charlatanism, homophobia and mysticism were forged for the sake of the sick, the homosexuals and the unsubjugated, respectively. These were perfectly targeted calumnies and made in an unquestionably strategic operation. Those who inspired, organized and diffused it through the "ad hoc networks" work for the same shop.

In 1864, Maurice Joly exposed how a modern State has the means to create its own oppositional groups concerning precise questions, to attract malcontents to them, to direct violence at inefficacious actions or even actions useful to the maintenance of order. The Stalinist propaganda services have more recently shown how -- by proclaiming oneself to be partisans of an old and fossilized social critique -- one can dress oneself in a kind of contestatory legitimacy and work to occult, falsify and calumny any new social critique that is really useful in the most modern conditions. In conformity with this well-proven tactic, the operation against The Time of AIDS has been conducted under the anarcho-situationist label, with the complicity of former members of the Situationist International: it doesn't matter who is merely a coarse beast and who has long been suspected of being a simple "disinformer."[3] The "unbelievable faults" of the founder and gravedigger of the SI have nevertheless ended up in a situation where few former situationists have been found usable for this role and where it has been necessary to invent a great many others, almost 30 years later. Page 24

One last question: why has the content of The Time of AIDS and that of the texts that followed it appeared so untimely and so unfortunate that such an operation had to be conducted? Today, writings, proclamations and claims are made and published, the tone of which is much more choleric and more insulting to the established order than mine. Actions are conducted by commandos of AIDS patients, "angry queers," the badly housed, the recently subproletarianized. Homosexuals are invited to take power, the entire medical establishment is presented as a conspiracy of assassins and AIDS patients hurl an ultimatum at the President of the Republic that he immediately stop the epidemic that is carrying them off. And all this is widely reported, encouraged and applauded by the very people who have affixed their signatures to the preceding defamatory proclamations. How have I merited the honor that is today conferred by such a bad reputation?

It is the knowledge of the current stakes that permits a response to such a question and, inversely, these stakes are made precise in the light of the preceding calumnies. Such is the risk of these kinds of aggression: if those who make them miss their mark, they reveal their own positions, the quality of their instruments and sometimes even the color of their uniforms.

[1] English in original.

[2] "Cette Mauvaise Reputation" is the title of a book by Guy Debord (1993) in which he reproduces and responds to particularly "disinforming" articles about his later writings.

[3] The reference here would appear to be the conclusions that Guy Debord reached concerning Serge Quadruppani and/or Donald Nicholson-Smith. For Nicholson-Smith, see Debord's letters to Gerard Lebovici dated 27 May 1979 and 11 July 1979.

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Chapter III

If the police forces of Napoleon III found it advantageous to accuse a bronzier affiliated with the International Association of Workers of being a Prussian or a vagabond, perhaps it was useful to the accused to refute this mendacious imputation, but then it was assuredly necessary for him to take exception to the criminal code and his accusers: the workers' International did not recognize the crime of being a Prussian, nor the personal shame of being deprived of a home. Who forced men into such misery? For what profit? Which interests separated the States from each other? On whom fell the crime and the shame?

Thus, it has been necessary for me to respond to the preceding accusations of charlatanism, mysticism and homophobia that one judged it interesting to make against me. I have shown that these crimes were not mine -- I have pursued others -- and that my defamers were themselves accomplices of a great charlatanism, of a more modern and dangerous mysticism, and of theses that have historically served a really criminal homophobia. But their trial assuredly aimed at other things: neurotic homophobia, archaic religion, and minor, private charlatanism, that is to say, more popular perversions: emotional, ideological and social, respectively. These perversions are actually quite common, and those who abominate them will certainly agree that it is a praiseworthy enterprise to seek the causes and combat them by all means. *

Charlatanism consists of mendaciously attributing to a commodity some kind of illusory use value so as to increase the demand for it and justify its excessive price. It is an abuse of commercial trust that concerns all kinds of commodities: B.C.G. [Bacille de Calmette et Guerin], proposed as "anti-tubercular protection"; dangerous sources of energy [proposed] as "proper"; Quadruppani as an "ex-situationist."

Tied to commercial activity, charlatanism has developed considerably since the Renaissance (the classic charlatan appeared in France at the end of the 16th century). It became almost universal when the new use-values demanded by insatiable clients -- "nature," "health," "liberty" and "life" -- became properly extravagant in the market civilization. A mode of production that was constrained to suppress all this could obviously not satisfy such unreasonable demands. But it could furnish in their places a documentary film, a polyvalent vaccine, a politician, some bath water. Today, when the largest part of the market offers illusory compensations for the deprivations and suffering that it itself produces, one can say that charlatanism completely

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covers the old "honest" market. And advertising in all of its forms is the modern means for the charlatan to ascend the bench and ring the bells with a luxurious array of mendacious promises.

Today, a marginal charlatanism still tries its chances in the midst of the generalized brigandage. The renter of the farm speaks of "ecology," the fortune-teller speaks of "prospective," and the bone-setter speaks of "revitalizing bio-energy." This minor, private charlatanism is often mocked, sometimes publicly denounced or prosecuted, but by whom? And for what supplemental profits? The denunciation of charlatanism certainly clamors for voices other than these, and other, more radical methods.

Contemporary, universal charlatanism is the bastard child of a mode of production that has become incapable of satisfying the most urgent human needs of today, those that result from the suffering occasioned by this mode of production. One cannot have done with one without suppressing the other. Thus, I have defended myself against this calumny, but I remark that such an accusation -- even directed knowingly against some tame oddball -- habitually serves to camouflage and reinforce a charlatanism of a completely different scope and especially to exonerate a system in which charlatanism has become the normal mode of functioning. *

What about the crime of mysticism that one today imputes so willingly to the zealots of the old, dismissed divinities, from the heights of an institutional idolatry that is far more powerful and dangerous? In its time, the triumphant Catholic Church already denounced the previous mystical residues. The tree of the fairies, the invocations of the enchanters and magic practices were all ridiculed, disapproved of, and sometimes even criminalized: because no dominant church can easily tolerate the competition of surviving micro-sects.

But it is the very foundations of mysticism that prohibit one from regarding it as a minor crime. In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx remarks that "the religious spirit is itself a social product"; elsewhere, he specifies that the religious spirit is both "an expression of real misery and a protest against this misery" (Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). Thus, it is never a question of accusing someone of mysticism or imputing to this person the crime of having "illusions about his/her situation," but exclusively of denouncing the social conditions that create mysticism and "the situation that needs illusions." Those who single out mysticism or charlatanism as a private crime, in a calumnious fashion or not, work to exonerate, to protect and to reinforce a social system that produces both.

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Finally, to accuse someone, in a defamatory fashion or not, of the crime of "homophobia" or any other phobia, or any other neurotic behavior, is obviously even more ignoble. The "emotional plague" and sexual misery are the most marvelous gifts that are offered to us in profusion by a mode of production in which all social relations are reified. Any contemporary desire or amorous behavior is -- permanently or episodically, to different degrees and in infinite varieties - perverse, affected by the reified consciousness of oneself and others (it is not superfluous to enunciate today that a free social or sexual relationship is a relationship between subjects who mutually recognize themselves as such).

The universality of sexual perversion nevertheless finds itself greatly occulted by an emotional perversion as widespread and as tied to market activity: puritanism (the conservation of "use value" by the mastery of desire conditions that of "exchange value": the merchant is thus traditionally -- sometimes even passionately -- sober, frugal, rigorous and puritanical, and literally without thinking about it).

The happy marriages between perversion and puritanism, between reification and retention, gives birth to varied characterological structures, which are completely compatible with modern social activity. One can even observe that emotional amputation and neurotic character[istics] are today the best conditions for satisfying social integration.

For example, among the causes of homosexuality two pre-dispositional factors have been revealed -- familial and congenital -- , which one willingly opposes, one to the other. But the "castrational" family, which the homosexual experiences precociously, is itself the concentrated product of a reified social organization in which the deprivation of the I is the very essence of this "castration." As for the morpho-psychological type of the homosexual, it is only remarkable due to an extreme sensitivity to all environmental aggressions, and particularly psychical aggressions. The only congenital terrain here is the hyperesthesia of the homosexual to this "castration" that he, like the others, suffers.[1]

But homosexuality is not simply the expression of this loss of the I, it is also a protest against this very loss. The protest of the homosexual can take the form of a mirror-identification with "domination" (as with Montherlant), or that of an affirmation of the subject with "servitude" (as with Genet). The choice between these protests is assuredly already a political choice. Page 28

Nevertheless, if homosexuals manifest more clearly than others the essential misery of all, they easily believe that their homosexual engagement spares them from a more general protest against the world of reification, with which they have found an acceptable accommodation. With the sole exception of their sexual conduct, of which one disapproves, the majority are highly honorable due to their enthusiastic contributions to all the mirages of consumptionparticipation, including the theories of congenital homosexuality that prepare a hell for them. In this respect, the psychiatrists have spoken of an astonishing "split of self" (Henry Ey, Manual of Psychiatry) between the homosexuals' excellent social adaptation and the precise failure of their sexual morality. On the contrary, it is obvious that the so-called failure and the supposed virtue mutually protect each other.

As for homophobia, one knows that it is a neurosis, that is to say, an intimate conflict between vivid homosexual inclinations and an even stronger moral prohibition. Like all the neuroses, this one is accompanied by panic attacks (known under the name "homosexual panic") that occur when environmental circumstances become too tempting.

The aversion of the homophobe for the devirilized "queer" pleasantly masks for him his own amputation and, obviously, the social origin of this misadventure. Inversely, for the homosexual, the homophobe incarnates "castrational" authority, and the hatred that he has of the homophobe dissimulates the real cause of his misery. Thus their mutual aversion allows them to be unaware of their shared unhappiness and to maintain it.[2]

Homosexuality and homophobia thus are not crimes, but forms of misery, the social origins of which are not difficult to recognize, and which will be maintained as long as the victims hatefully designate each other as the perpetrators of their own [respective] sufferings. *

Questions of charlatanism, mysticism and homophobia -- these alone are not the mendacious imputations that it has been necessary for me to highlight, but also the indecency of the people who have dared to reproach someone else for the crimes of a system of which they are the salaried domestic servants.

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The maintenance of the current social organization certainly has great need for this permanent civil war between victims: homophobes against queers, Calotins against science-idolaters, alcoholics against heroin addicts, hysterics against obsessives -- cannonballs against cannonballs. With accusing fingers, craftsmen point out the African immigrants to those who have recently been chased from their towns and forced to emigrate to neo-banlieus. And, at the same time, other professionals incite the Africans or their defenders against the "racists." Today, who denounces the economic system that has destroyed the native lands of both groups -- and that, additionally, pushes them to slit the others' throats -- without making itself suspect of complicity with the "terrorists" or the "racists"?

Assuredly, the fact of inciting the prisoners against each other and the slaves against each other does not constitute a real historical novelty. The squires of Texas sometimes amused themselves with their blacks, and the SS would also amuse themselves in the concentration camps. But the real innovation -- and quite worthy of our admirable "society of the spectacle" -- is that today these confrontations and these hatreds, which are absolute conditions for the maintenance of the current order, are aroused and encouraged in the name of "social critique" and sometimes even in [the name of] what one dares to call "the class struggle." Obviously, a large part of the animators must present themselves as violently opposed to the established order, whereas the other camp is inflamed by other kinds of actors.

I must recognize that neither The Time of AIDS nor the texts that I published afterwards respected the imperative rules of such a "social critique." Thus, it was just and foreseeable that those who participate in the dynamism of the delicate balances found no sympathy for these books. But today, those for whom I wrote them and those who have found them so detestable work on such divergent projects -- of which our social history has provided enough edifying examples -- that the expression "class struggle" perhaps would not be incongruous to designate their divergence.

[1] For a nice contrast to these ideas, see Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972; translated by Hurley, Seem and Lane; pp. 59-60): "Something common to the two sexes is required, but something that will be lacking in both, and that will distribute the lack in two nonsymmetrical series, establishing the exclusive use of the disjunctions: you are [a] girl or boy! Such is the case with Oedipus and its 'resolution,' different in boys and girls. Such is the case with castration, and its relationship to Oedipus in both instances. Castration is at once the common lot -- that is, the prevalent and transcendent Phallus, and the exclusive distribution that presents itself in girls as desire for the penis, and in boys as fear of losing it or refusal of a Page 30

passive attitude. This something in common must lay the foundation for the exclusive use of the disjunctions of the unconscious -- and teach us resignation. Resignation to Oedipus, to castration: for girls, renunciation of male protest -- in short, 'assumption of one's sex.' This something in common, the great Phallus, the Lack with two nonsuperimposable sides, is purely mythical; it is like the One in negative theology, in introduces lack into desire and causes exclusive series to emanate, to which it attributes a goal, an origin, and a path of resignation."

[2] No: homosexuals do not hate homophobes because of what (or who) they represent: they hate homophobes because of what they say and do. Furthermore, any real solution to this situation will not be representational, that is, will not be reached in a psychoanalytic setting, but will be social: the eradication of violence against homosexuals.

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Chapter IV

The industrialization of the previous century gave the abolition of all human suffering as its ultimate goal. Thus, History had a meaning that passed through "economic and technical progress" and led to "moral and social progress," with universal happiness at the end. Thus, the development of banking networks and railroads, the militarization of the factories and forced child labor, prepared -- calmly but with giant steps -- a radiant future for all of the human race.

Nevertheless, a contestatory movement clamored for, with impatience and sometimes with anger, "social progress" hic et nunc: too many intolerable injustices! Too much scandalous poverty! One demanded immediate reform to take care of the suffering of those whom Napoleon III called with tenderness "my friends who are in the thatched cottages and workshops." One encouraged the workers of a guild or a region to demand salaries equal to those of the workers of other regions or other guilds, and the same equality for the duration of their days at work. One supported the creation of "mutual aid societies" and "mutual credit and savings" [banks]. Sometimes one organized subscriptions and banquets for the benefit of this or that category of poor people, in a great hullabaloo of solidarity and embraces.

This generous, courageous and energetic contestation was poisoned -- and sometimes even weakened -- by the agitators who avowed themselves to be "internationalists" and who spread criminal notions: the market system alone was responsible for the misery that it claimed to combat and its logic in fact constrained it to maintain the standard of living of the workers at the level required for their survival as producers; thus, the internationalists added, "the subjection of the worker to capital is the source of all political, moral and material servitude" (preamble to the statutes of the International Association of Workers, 1864). Thus, they proclaimed that it was the very bases of the market world that had to be changed, that it was the roots that had to be extirpated and destroyed, and that any other attempt to reduce particular miseries was only oil poured upon always-renewed wounds. They concluded that "all the efforts made until now had failed, lacking solidarity between the workers of the different professions in each country and a fraternal union between the workers of the different countries" (preamble to the statutes of the I.A.W.).

Such a radicalization of social critique was obviously not a game played by aesthetes fascinated by beautiful theoretical constructions, nor even a supplementary effort with a view to obtain the maximum results as quickly as possible. It appeared from the start as the minimum basis for

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an efficacious critical activity: nothing could be durably obtained without overthrowing the entirety of the market system.

Against this dangerous association of malefactors were mobilized the armies of spies at the service of all the police forces of Europe. Precisely targeted calumnies were effectively propagated against its members with a view to opposing them to the entirety of the exploited people, and the suicide of Dombrowski, for example, on the barricades at Paris resulted from such a defamatory operation.

In the 60s of our own century, an almost identical confrontation opposed the just and generous social critique of the era to the whims and obsessions of the Situationist International, principally animated by Guy Debord.

Many novelties had then appeared in our market society. Capitalism had surmounted its initial contradictions, namely, the greater and greater accumulations of producers who were deprived of everything, and the just as monstrous accumulation of commodities that no one could [afford to] buy any longer. Asphyxiated in the 1920s, production was reconverted into the fabrication of strange commodities: to those whom the mode of production had deprived of their human space, the free use of their time, their consciousness and even their own images, the economic system abundantly furnished -- on the quite benign condition of maintaining the current mode of production -- popular automobiles in which to freely travel through the space of the commodity; moments of leisure to democratically consume what one made the producers produce; culture in which to learn the new rules of virtuous life; and photographic cameras with which to surveill -- in uncertainty and anguish -- their own new identities. The necessity of guaranteeing the adequation of such commodities with their announced use-values (liberty, happiness, culture, etc.) involved the monstrous development of what one no longer called "advertising," but "publicity." Certainly the duration of the illusions remained weak and required the incessant renewal of market lures: but it was exactly this that the mode of concentrated and accelerated production had the greatest need.

This liberation of market production was associated with an inverse movement of the enclosure of the producers, whose revolts one had just come to fear. The networks of workers' unions and old socialist parties were made to accept the idea of never practically contesting the center of the market system, and, additionally, in an immense part of the world, the great social revolution for which the workers of the 19th century had fought so hard, for which many had died, was finally realized (or so one said). One could see and even hear its spokespeople: the Page 33

chiefs of state surrounded by rather ordinary governmental apparatuses, but who managed a "socialist" production and "socialist" salaried workers, with a great reinforcement of angrily "anti-capitalist" speeches, according to the martial tone that suited the "class struggle." This "dictatorship of the proletariat" protected itself, moreover, like any other, against its class enemies, with the means of an excessive but "proletarian" police force, with a network of "reeducational" penitentiaries, and sometimes even massacres of "objectively counterrevolutionary" populations.

Everything was thus accessible to the most demanding clientele in this universal market: wellbeing in the form of new refrigerators, liberty in the form of new diversions, intelligence in Le Nouvel Observateur, art in the New Wave, and even social revolution in Kruschev and Mao TseTung. Several scrupulous critics nevertheless worried about the repercussions of such a brilliant success. They pointed their fingers at the poverty of the Third World, which paid the price for "Western luxury." Sometimes they evoked the existence of Stalinist concentration camps, and denounced the "embourgeoisification" of the unions. They also asked themselves about the excesses of publicity and propaganda, thus the risks of "mental manipulation." They questioned the leaders and warned the public. All of this generous activity nevertheless did not hinder them from acceding to a chair in a sociology department, an editorial position, or a Nobel Prize for literature.

The hardly recommendable individuals who then formed the Situationist International had the impudence to insult all these ardent and zealous protesters, and even to dishonor them. The situationists claimed that these people's virtuous remonstrances only served to lubricate the mechanisms of a system whose "excesses" were the only thing they deplored. They added that, in truth, the novelties over which they were in ecstasy or which they deplored -- union freedoms or Stalinism, popular automobiles or outrageous publicity, progress in sociology or progress of the police State -- were all dependent on a unique phenomenon: the universal production of images of what the market mode of production was constrained to prohibit. The situationists even spat upon the great Cuban, Yugoslavian and Algerian Revolutions, which the entire Left then loved passionately, and on the "Western luxury" of the automobile [quatre-chevaux] and television: images, they said, of the new proletarian poverty, of its aggravated alienation. In sum, the situationists concluded that the spectacle was the new face of capital, which had provisionally resolved its initial contradictions, and that it was necessary to resume Marx's critique on the basis of this new reality.

Many of those who initially composed the Situationist International came from the milieus of the artistic avant-garde, where one knew a bit about images and where one was not unfamiliar with their use-value. Thus, they recognized that the new social environment was in sum the Page 34

virtual reality that computer science had not yet dared to invent: each person found him- or herself cut off from his/her true life and immersed in the strange universe of the spectacle.

For the situationists, it was a question of a social critique that was elaborated on the basis of the roots of the new alienation -- what one had called a "radical" critique for 150 years -- such as Marx and the first internationalists had undertaken on the basis of capital. This redefinition of the center of the world involved a redefinition of the proletariat (those who are deprived of the use of their lives and who know it). It permitted the union upon new bases of those whom the spectacle had not only isolated, but opposed to each other.

The extravagances of such a critique naturally aroused legitimate reactions. Nevertheless, it was necessary to defend oneself against the criminal usage that these people were making of a liberty that was so democratically accorded. For almost ten years, a conspiracy of silence thus covered the investigations, writings, activity and even the existence of the Situationist International. Some elements of its social critique were sometimes recuperated, separated from the ensemble and diverted from their meaning, according to the methods that Maurice Joly had successively denounced and then experienced. Efforts to infiltrate and manipulate the situationist group were also attempted, but they did not lead to any fortunate results: the fakers always found themselves rapidly expelled, often at the moment of their first fruitless attempts. Finally, calumnies were widely diffused against the situationists as a group and especially against the organization's founder, forged and propagated by individuals who often presented themselves as revolutionaries. One then spoke of CIA agents or KGB agents, rich bourgeois idlers or ambitious artists, but the goal was always the same: to separate the situationists from those whom they claimed to unite, to designate them as "natural enemies of the revolutionary class."

The type of celebrity acquired by Debord (despite everything) gave way to a new type of defamation in the form of praise. One was now ecstatic about his "great century" style,[1] his "strategic" genius, his "nihilist" taste for destruction: haughty aristocrat, cold calculator, implacable destroyer; the picture was widely reproduced by all the media people "specialized in the treatment of advanced critique." But from organized silence to excessive calumnies and perverse praises, the goal was obviously the same. Such an insistence could even suggest to an unwarned public that this critic remained completely intolerable in today's much more dramatic circumstances.

[1] The style of the 17th Century in France.

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Chapter V

Over the last 20 years, other novelties have appeared in our world that have tragically confirmed the Marxist and situationist critiques. In truth, everything happens today as if the sinister masquerade of the spectacle only serves -- by worsening the effects -- to delay the collapse that Marx announced.

Certainly the evanescent and labile nature of modern production has (beyond generalized dispossession) not involved the accumulation of stocks of unsaleable commodities, but merely the accumulation of polluting waste-products, as Debord already remarked at the beginning of the 1970s.[1] Our garbage-covered beaches show the crudest perceivable aspect. But the worst, the most dangerous and the most scandalous aspect -- quantitatively and qualitatively -- is obviously invisible: chemical and radioactive. In this domain, accidents -- although they are more and more frequent -- only represent the extraordinary part of the space and time of a progressive, accelerated and uniform poisoning of the planet. For example, those who observe the conditions of our forests and rivers can suspect what is taking place in our own living cells. The explosion of human cancers, the recrudescence of tuberculosis and the unexpected appearance of new infections are today tied to a general immunological deficit, of which chemical and radioactive pollutants are the co-factors and AIDS is the most recent expression.

Moreover, the accelerated production of neo-commodities and the illusions that they have supported for the last 60 years -- necessary to the maintenance of order -- have caused an exhaustion of living "resources" and the reappearance of deprivations that market civilization had promised to suppress definitively. Massive deforestation, irreversible desertification, impoverishment of the land and the oceans are today responsible for episodic famines and especially an endemic malnutrition that effects one in four individuals. And the return of oldtime poverty worsens the perverse effects of the preceding poisons in what concerns immunodepression, fatal infections, cancer and AIDS.

The only remedies that the market world can conceive and elaborate have already produced their intolerable secondary effects. Fertilizers and pesticides intended to reduce famine increase cancer. Anti-infection and anti-cancer medical treatments are themselves immuno-depressants. If one wants to also consider the fact that the agri-business and pharmaceutical industries are among the most dangerous polluters, one can measure the difficulties of managing such a world. * Page 36

The monstrous acceleration of market production over the last three-quarters of a century, which has led us to the brink of planetary destruction and fatal poisoning, has nevertheless permitted the prolonged survival of market socio-economic organization. It has assured full employment, progressively increasing salaries and social peace through the means of multiple compensatory lucky charms. And yet one can no longer maintain such an accelerated production. The era of full employment and guaranteed salaries is over. The era in which no one in Europe is forced to sleep outside on packing crates and to beg for food or search for it in trashcans is also over. The air of our modern towns "emancipates," certainly, because ThirdWorld conditions of life invade them more each year. And this new Third-World that envelops us will not return by charter to Africa, which had to be destroyed to obtain the historical postponement that is today completed. At the peripheries of the modern towns, there accumulate new immigrants, the children of the old inhabitants of these towns, whom one incites against the Africans, themselves chased from their ravaged countries. Among their TV sets and anxiolytic tablets, the haggard old people await the cancer or the infection that will led them (without return) to C.H.U.[2] More and more youths hide from the police to take drugs, many to commit suicide as well.

To respond to the growing disquiet of the public that is faced with such surprising novelties, new concepts of normality -- including what everyone now estimates to be extravagant -- have been hastily forged and diffused, the very novelty of which is in fact explained by an increase of collective well-being. Thus, for 20 years, one has heard many speak of "natural chemical pollution" (produced by volcanoes) and "natural radioactivity" (from certain rocks): the waste products produced by industrial pollution are thus completely relative phenomena. Certainly it is necessary to hospitalize more people each year, but the concept of sickness itself must be relativized: it has become normal, and even admirable, due to our new demands for comfort and delicacy, to consume remedies daily, a few antibiotics or anti-depressants, or A.Z.T., each according to his/her small differences, demands and comforts. But the suicides of the young testify to a kind of normality and a new well-being: simple effects of an existential dissatisfaction, obviously greater today due to a material comfort unknown to preceding generations. The World Health Organization nevertheless relays the following alarming news: everywhere vitality, biological self-defenses and resistances to aggression are weakening, and disastrous epidemics can be expected in the next few years. But, after all, isn't that life? A quite vague, uncertain and relative concept!

With the end of market illusions and the return of old-time poverty, it is naturally the public peace and social consensus that are in the process of dissolving. The importance of current unemployment and economic recession have the effect of discrediting models of behavior, Page 37

without which a social organization such as ours can no longer function. The young workers can no longer believe that any security will be automatically conceded to them as a counterpart to their silent submission to work. Their elders can no longer believe that 40 years of perfect resignation will guarantee them retirement when they are infirm. The students can no longer believe, as before, that the diplomas that they strive to acquire will assure them of any subsequent soporific peace of mind. And even the merchants no longer believe in a "rebound" that would bring an end to the current "crisis": they have discovered that, this time, it is not a question of a sharp and violent illness, as in 1929, but rather a progressive and inexorable collapse, as in death throes. In sum, almost no one any longer believes in an acceptable future than could guarantee good management. And the discrediting of the "values" on which our society of "progress" rests has contributed to rendering common previously marginal behaviors, which one today ranks under the modest name "minor delinquency."

Even more seriously, such a loss of trust in the current socio-economic system appears -- for the first time in our century -- without the existence of any other model that would be more satisfactory, that could be opposed to this system. The old model called "socialist" actually collapsed almost everywhere under the same pressures of the economic downturn and the pollution that had, in the West, destroyed the mirage of market happiness. The Stalinist empire collapsed and the old mafiosi who collectively managed it have given way to their degenerate children. These children no longer even care to keep up an appearance of legitimacy, assured in any case of the obligated complicity of the western States, who still prefer them to the frightening possibility of proletarian revolt. In several countries in which the revolutionary mirage reigns as master, one has even seen the resurgence of what the spectacle had just a little while ago assured us were improbable historical accidents: State racism and ethnic cleansing.

The collapse of the revolutionary lie produced its own effects in the West, where its illusions had long permitted the encysting of any proletarian revolt. Our banlieus "at risk" thus are no longer kept in check by the Stalinists. They are currently and simultaneously controlled by the drug networks, the socio-cultural animators and especially the police, who have always known how to arrange alliances in all the milieus.

The "social climate" has thus changed a lot in thirty years. The automobile and television, those old irrecusable witnesses to "Western luxury," have said their last words in the pollution of the towns and the irrationality of their inhabitants. The Cuban, Algerian and Yugoslavian Revolutions have said their last words in famine, State terrorism and ethnic massacres. Heroin and suicide have replaced Coca-Cola and Leftist militancy; the old songs about the "little banlieus" have changed tone, and one especially hears this anguished refrain: "Where is all this leading us?"

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In truth, great anger and frenzied demands are publicly expressed today. To each particular suffering there corresponds a main protest group or several of them, according to the variable sensibilities of the public, with their signs and pamphlets, their vocabularies and slogans, responsible leaders or wild lunatics. Here one clamors for jobs or housing with great cries, and one threatens to occupy a cathedral that is no longer used. Further on, one requires more police officers against the drug dealers, but fewer unfortunate mistakes made by the police in workingclass neighborhoods. Still elsewhere, one strives to obtain the closure of a nuclear power plant or even the closure of all nuclear power plants. Several exotic people protest against the bombardment of Sarajevo, against the deforestation of the Amazon, or even against the slow death throes of the children in Chernobyl. There are not lacking some comedians who demand that priests be given the right to get married by a judge and that homosexuals be given the right to get married in a church. Finally, one furiously demands of the government that it stop the AIDS epidemic as quickly as possible.

The media often democratically retransmit these claims and demands. Moreover, is it not virtuous to defend the homeless and the endangered species, the homosexuals and Abbe Pierre, purchasing power and the Bishop of Evreux, the old Belleville and the new Opera? Is it not dignified and courageous to denounce the police-architects, the wormy doctors, the corrupt judges and, of course, the bad leaders whom one must change one more time?

Moreover, some governments strive to satisfy the just demands as best they can. But nevertheless it is necessary to bear everyone in mind. How to assure the protection of jobs and satisfy the ecologists? How to get the ecologists to agree with each other? The all-carbon antinuclearists and the protectors of the ozone layer? A responsible government can only propose a "negotiated multi-party solution" between the prisoners of Paris and those of Timbuktu, between the workers' unions and the associations of ecologists, between the police delegates and the representatives of the bludgeoned, and especially between all these fine demands and the terrible "economic imperatives."

Despite their contradictory protests, the main protesters nevertheless present a remarkable shared character. None of them link the sufferings that they denounce to the market root of the social organization that produced them, whether these sufferings concern the destruction of the environment, workplace conflicts or material deprivations. Thus they are not at all troubled by

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recognizing the legitimacy of a government to which they present their firmly worded petitions and which willingly receives their spokespeople.

On the other hand, they can not recognize any shared demand: they are isolated because they are separated from the root of the evil that they claim to denounce. "Stop AIDS" has nothing to do with "Nogent Out," nor do those expelled from Belleville have anything to do with those expelled from la Goutte-d'Or; they have no chance to encounter each other elsewhere than in front of the President's palace. Their leaders, moreover, carefully protect them from all risk of contamination. Thus, in the current social system, these protest groups quite exactly occupy the place that the workers' unions occupied in the 1960s.

[1] See The Sick Planet (written in 1971 but unpublished in Debord's lifetime) and Theses 11-15 in Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time (published in 1972).

[2] The University Hospital Center.

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Chapter VI

By publishing The Time of AIDS and, subsequently, Unnameable Life, I attempted to show that the new morbidity, and the AIDS epidemic in particular, were tied to a certain number of cofactors (toxicological, emotional and social), the convergence of which is really disastrous and which results from all of the perverse effects of the market economy at its current stage of development -- that it is a question of endemic malnutrition, agri-business chemistry, chemical and radioactive pollution, psychical and behavioral disturbances, drug addiction and diverse modern medical procedures. The result is that it is extravagant to ask a [government] minister or a group of ministers -- in any tone of voice -- to do anything in such a situation: a minister can do no more than what he himself is made to do: participate in the management of a socioeconomic organization of which AIDS is the logical conclusion.

From this point of view, the sufferings of AIDS patients meet those of the inhabitants of Chernobyl or Bhopal; those of the emigrants of any origin; those of starving, suicided or drugged children. Today, all pay the price for the considerable efforts deployed during the course of the last half-century to maintain in a state of prolonged survival a social organization that has, nevertheless, led us to this collective death. It is these efforts (that is to say, the alwaysaccelerated production of compensatory delusions) and this maintenance of the market system that have reduced the planet to such a state of exhaustion and poisoning, and that have led its inhabitants to these desertified lands and these sordid banlieus, to this suicidal conduct and these epidemics.

Faced with such a system, which is founded in principle on the non-dialectical logic of things and carries within itself (today, visibly so) an impending collective death, a condemned people is thus forced to define itself as the irreducible enemy of the market system -- that is to say, as the proletariat delivered from its last illusions. Who can doubt that the expansion of the contemporary tragedy will pose the social question in new terms and that the dialogue which will begin with the managers of the market world will open up with this frank salutation: "Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!"?[1] *

The radicality of their social critique led the first internationalists to proclaim their solidarity beyond all national and professional determinations; it constrained them to recognize in these determinations forms of alienation imposed by the social organization that they combatted. But there are now other determinations, even more alienated, that each must recognize in him or Page 41

herself and in the others as being tied to the current system. Not only his or her socio-economic activity as executive or "job seeker," but his or her own image as black or queer; his or her emotional perversions as racist or homophobe; and, finally, his or her "opinions" on the contemporary novel or the class struggle. All these determinations (social, emotional and ideological) must be denounced as foreign and alienating, among the others and oneself, simultaneously.

Pushed by the excess of suffering, by the recognition of their unique source, by the recognition of the mechanisms that it animates, more and more wretches will howl under the balcony of the market, exhibiting their sores, bloody stumps and running ulcers. And, assuredly, in the stench of reification, no one will have anything to envy in his or her neighborhood. Thus, each will observe in it, sobered up and become sudden accomplices, his or her old adversaries laughing; and the maintenance of the contemporary order has everything to fear in this laughing: because there is nothing worse on the battlefield than such fraternization among troops whom one has excited to carnage.

Such is the real frontline in modern social war: it lies between the market system of reification and its mortal enemy, the living subject freed from its alienating determinations. It lies between those who defend the rights of workers and whores, blacks and Bretons, queers and puritans, philosophers and artists, and those who defend -- for all -- the right to no longer be a worker or a whore, a black or a Breton, a pervert or a neurotic, a philosopher or an artist; between those who protect alienation and those who want to emancipate themselves. And it is the reappearance of death in the world that renders the frontline of such a war visible. Today, any other conflict can only serve to make this world turn: it has the habit [of doing so]. One can even say that, since the origin of the "society of the spectacle," it hasn't demanded [anything] better. *

I have thus supported this point of view in The Time of AIDS and Unnameable Life. It had previously been the view of the first internationalists, who designated market logic as "the source of all servitude, political, moral and material." More recently, it was the view of the situationists and the nameless population who, in 1968, expressed its joy and freedom through strange wall inscriptions: "Hide, object!" and "Life instead!" Before me, both groups of internationalists had identified the proletariat as the irreducible enemy of market logic and its exploits. Both had likewise declared themselves in solidarity with the proletariat's selfemancipation.[2] My crime was thus no worse than theirs, certainly, but I do not pity myself for having been treated like they were.

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[1] Hail, Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.

[2] Yes, this may be true, but it elides a basic difference between the two Internationals: while the Marxists identified the proletariat with its central position in the economy and thus its ability to shut that economy down, the situationists identified the proletariat not with position, but with consciousness, with consciousness of their alienation ("a proletarian being someone who has no power over his life and who knows it" -- On the Poverty of Student Life). For Marx, the individual's consciousness of alienation would not have been sufficient: he required class consciousness, the proletariat's consciousness of itself as a whole.

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Chapter VII

The descriptions of me as a mystic, a homophobe and a charlatan -- which were intended to be offensive -- were thus forged, when The Time of AIDS was published, to put off readers who were Marxist, homosexual or stricken with AIDS. But other judgments have been pronounced about me. On the one hand, they concern the socio-contestatory label that it is fitting to give me and, on the other hand, particularly repellent, psychopathological personal traits.

In several specialized milieus, one has attributed to me the slightly out-of-date quality of being "pro-situ." By this name were called the impotent admirers of the prestige of the Situationist International in the 1960s and 1970s. One already recognized them by the insult of being called "pro-situ," which they threw in each other's faces because all knew -- having read about it in Debord -- that it was bad and undignified to be a "pro-situ." These admirers did not survive for long after the disappearance of the Situationist International and its prestige. Since then, they have found other models that are more advantageous in the always-changing spectacle. The very numerous competing groups that they formed in every district were of course infiltrated by police officers who were more intelligent than them and perhaps even more "ludic." For some time, such groups served to attract and then disgust those whom situationist critique had troubled over the course of those same years. Today, there only remain individuals who are quite shady and who evoke their false past as "situationists" in a tone that is both critical and disabused, who use a certain vocabulary, make a certain denunciation of the "political spectacle," the "medical spectacle" and the "sport spectacle," and who especially manifest a particular hatred of Debord that is now disguised as perverse praise. The description "pro-situ" certainly no longer fits such people; one can instead describe them with the monstrous term "meta-situ."

The "pro-situ" -- or even "merely pro-situ" -- description does not fit me for another sufficient reason: I am the opposite of a model of identification or a publicity poster. The situationists, especially those who did nothing, were young, brilliant, beautiful, intelligent and talented. The quality of their discussions, their meetings, their celebrations and their adventures testify to such rare gifts and such exceptional aptitudes that one still wonders what more they could have hoped for from the revolutionary transformation of a world that had endowed them so well. On the contrary, I am neither young nor remarkable in any way. No particular talent has been accorded to me by the conditions of life that are mine and any effort to write costs me. Thus, I have inherited nothing, my current life does not seem more worthy of being envied than that of many of my contemporaries, and thus I have several reasons to feel solidarity with them.

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Such mediocrity associated with such impudent demands speaks volumes about our era. Even supposing that I have several -- congenital? -- guilty dispositions to crime, they can only be quite common. And, all the same, after 50 years of integrating mechanisms and compensatory delusions, to have arrived here: what a strange era! And what care for public order!

Thus, one has charged me with possessing particular psychopathological traits so as to dissimulate my much more troubling banality. One thus speaks of paranoia with delusions of persecution, of absolute and sterilizing despair, and narcissism with exaltation of "Me, I."

Paranoid delirium is characterized by logical and coherent reasoning developed upon false premises. Any logical and coherent discourse is today suspected of being issued from a paranoid brain. But the matter is settled when the conclusions of this discourse are opposed to those that the spectacle recognizes a priori as true. Thus, the theory of the "class struggle" -- with the kind of persecuted-persecutor relation that it implies -- is an unquestionably "paranoid" theory. Likewise, Debord's thought is "paranoid" thought. Obviously, if the class struggle exists, paranoia is necessary, but what unheard-of meaning is it thus necessary to give the "class struggle"?

Is not my absolute and sterilizing despair likewise manifest when I despair, not only of the future of the market society, but also of all the means that it can henceforth invent to maintain itself for much longer? According to what I ceaselessly hear murmured around me, it nevertheless seems to me that I belong to the larger and larger population that does not at all despair about the impending end of this civilization and about what will follow it.

Nevertheless, I find indecent the reproach of speaking about oneself addressed to someone who precisely recommends such conduct to all those who strive to resist the weight of market reification. Only this method can put back on its feet the real and scandalous "dialectic of subject and object" too often invoked these days to designate this swindle: the likable controversy between the Me and its environment, between alienation and the spectacle.

Moreover, it seems to me that I have greatly abused the advantages that one can derive from such a position. Because -- beyond the anecdotal framework of a kind of author and the calumnies about his kind of books -- it is quite another thing that is advantageously demonstrated here and that likewise reveals itself to all those who will be constrained, before long, to place themselves in the same position of self-defense. It is a question of the current Page 45

stakes, of the terrain on which they appear, of the conflicts for these stakes, of the defensive mechanisms on both sides, and -- through all this -- the dynamics of an historical movement that is not finished. August-September 1995

(New revised edition, published by Editions Allia, 2005. First edition published in 1995. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! November 2007.)

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