Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry
Vincent Kaufmann, translated by Robert Bononno
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 370 pages. $30.

Biography is an implicit rebuke to autobiography, especially if the subject is a man who was obsessed with publicly calibrating his relation to the world and for whom the "need for clandestinity . . . was almost a question of taste." Yet Vincent Kaufmann, professor of French literature at the University of St. Gallen and author of a study of twentiety-century avant-garde movements in poetry, has scoured Guy Debord's writings and films—and the thicket of exegetical, frequently partisan scholarship they have inspired—to produce a compelling if necessarily incomplete portrait of the man, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, newly translated into English by Robert Bononno. "Necessarily incomplete" is the operative phrase: Debord used the long-gestating ideas lodged in the prescient, totalizing critique of La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle, 1967) as a kind of handbook for evading the magnetic pull of all institutions—media, state, culture, even friendship—in the name of ultimate personal freedom. The extremity of his stance is polarizing—one is either drawn to the figure of the romantic, solitary artist or repulsed by his narcissism—and it shapes the biographical gaze; one can watch it seduce Kaufmann as he proceeds chronologically through the provocateur's life.

"In the final analysis, we are differentiated only by our works," announces an anonymous voice in Hurlements en faveur du Sade (Howls for Sade, 1952), a film more famous for what it doesn't do (put an image onscreen; have any sound track for its final twenty-four minutes) than what it does. It was Debord's barbaric yawp over the roofs of staid French culture, marking, along with the formation of the Lettrist International, the period of 1951 to 1953, which Debord spent in the Paris quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and which Kaufmann posits as the anni mirabilis to which Debord would return, melancholically, for the rest of his life. It didn't take long for him to look back; Debord's Mémoires, composed entirely of text appropriated from potboilers, comic books, newspapers, and other material and constructed in collaboration with the Dutch artist Asger Jorn, was first "published" (distributed for free to friends in what Debord considered a form of potlatch) only five years later, when the author was merely twenty-seven.

By that time, Debord had formed the Situationist International, the group with which he remains most closely identified, though Kaufmann claims—following Anselm Jappe, whose 1993 Italian biography appeared in English in 1999—the identification should point in the other direction: The SI "should be considered, in every sense of the term, as the work . . . of Debord alone." The fifteen-year history of the group was divided into two main phases by the expulsion, in 1960, of the remaining visual-artist members, among them the Dutch architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, and the subsequent consolidation of the group's lucid, compelling rhetoric, which became a lever to be deployed "situationally" by anyone engaged in revolutionary activity.

The theoretical gambit was picked up most widely during the raucous events of May 1968, a watershed moment in postwar France to which Kaufmann devotes twenty pages, parsing the historical record in an attempt to locate Deboard and his dozen cohorts. He finds them everywhere and nowhere, "more important to the 'culture'" of the time and place than any other organization but attempting to deliver a revolution "without a signature." (Its members shuttled messages back and forth between workers at various factories—like stylish Paul Reveres—more often than they fought in the streets alongside students, of whom Debord had quickly tired.

Having seen the Situationist virus infect the population, and then having seen society recover from the delirium tremens caused by a temporary rupture of the spectacle, Debord, with ultimate fidelity to his own proclamations, disbanded the SI in 1971 and retreated into exile and relative silence until his suicide in 1994, a period spent with his partner, Alice Becker-Ho, in Italy, Spain, and the French countryside. He continued to launch films, including La Société du spectacle (1973) and In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), at the monolith, aiming for pulverizing effect, and, later, books, such as the slim, elegant, and notably unexhaustive two-volume autobiography Panégyrique, the first part of which appeared in 1989. Yet for all their style, Kaufmann rightly notes, each victory—including a defamation lawsuit won after a newspaper speculated about Debord's connection to European terrorist groups initially suspected of the murder of his friend Gérard Lebovici—must have proved hollow to a man yearning for the communitarian spirit that infused his early years in a Paris made extinct by the tide of modernization.

"The characteristic of the biography of famous men is that they wanted to be famous," wrote Eugène Ionesco in 1935. Debord, who believed that "all representation is treason," became famous despite his best efforts. At its worst, this volume offers an uninspired rehash of Debord's words, leaching them of the fluidity of their famously classical style. At his best, for roughly the last hundred pages of the book, Kaufmann inches toward impassioned writing, offering an inspired rereading of material rendered stagnant by fealty to received critical opinion, including a close look at Debord's relationship with Henri Lefebvre that cuts through other, hagiographic interpretations. Along with his trenchant analyses of society, Debord's legacy may rest on the fact that one can't help but be borne along on this enthusiasm.