6

A MAN WHO NEVER GIVES IN

It is unlikely that you could arm the revolution with nostalgia for the old world and incite people to resistance when you hold, with Ecclesiastes, that “unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”¹

It is unlikely that you could achieve the status of a cinema auteur when your only principle is to use images that are “all trivial or false.”²

Yet Guy Debord’s film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We turn in the night, consumed by fire) is made up of just such unlikelihoods.

It is even more unlikely that you will be able to speak about a film that intentionally precludes all commentary. Debord warned us: “Those who claim to like this film have liked too many other things to be capable of liking it.”³

Have I liked too many things to be capable of liking In girum? It is true that this film comes so close to the real that, to impart its virtue, you have to forget a few other films.

The image functions here as an allegory of a ruined world, our world. It works against the text, whose burden of meaning, loftily arranged in the purest syntax, epitomizes the legacy bequeathed us by an adventurous, undaunted Debord. Thus, the Situationist, at the conclusion of his project of solitude, affirms the ultimate superiority of the written word over the image, a superiority that is also that of the Revolution over careerism and of the proletarian over his own alienation. Everything is interrelated.

Through the figure of the film viewer’s abjection, the first part of the film describes the general abjection of the ordinary citizens of our big cities, who are methodically compared to slaves, serfs, and proletarians. This prologue leads to the film’s true subject matter, when Debord announces his intention to “replace the frivolous adventures typically recounted by the cinema with the examination of an important subject: myself.”

This “myself’ ” is a fifty-year-old man who “from the very beginning thought it fit to devote [him]self to overthrowing society, and acted accordingly.” As a result, the story of his life, however self-satisfied that remark may seem, is tantamount to the evaluation of thirty years of his own personal political action under the constant banner of the proletarian and communist revolution.

I acknowledge everything Debord speaks about as being precisely what really matters, the rest, practically all the rest, being only irrelevant debris. And I acknowledge this all the more since, with the exception of cities – Paris, which Debord says no longer exists; Florence, from which he was banned, like Dante; Venice, where everything ends and begins again – there is no mention in the film of any of the major events or places of the period. We thus go right to the temporal heart of things owing to their lack of a surface. In this respect, Debord is the anti-journalist par excellence.

Debord is a communist, with enough imperious certainty to say as much in an offhand, elegant aside. His film “does [the spectator] the bitter favor of revealing to him that his problems aren’t as mysterious as he thinks, nor even perhaps as incurable, provided we manage to abolish classes and the State someday.” Debord knows how worthless the labor-union vision of the world is and who its lackeys are: “the flourishing union and political officials, always ready to prolong the proletarian’s grievances for another thousand years with the sole aim of preserving their own role as his defender.”

Debord knows how to treat with the requisite detachment the reversals and desertions that we have witnessed on such a wide scale in recent years: “Unlike so many others, I have not changed my opinion once or several times with the changing of the times; it is rather the times that have changed as my opinions have changed.”

It is so rare to come out of a film, as we do from Debord’s, feeling fortified, light-hearted, and intelligent! Because the man we have seen giving an account of his personal transparency, at a magnificently slow pace, is someone who never gives in.

Debord knows that longstanding commitment is the tribunal of truth and that theories, however correct or ingenious their workings, “are military units of varying strength that must be sent into battle at the right moment.” Nor is Debord’s own theory, the society of the spectacle, an exception to this rule. Generalizing as it did the Hegelian theme of alienation, it had no more than a rudimentary or descriptive force, it must be said, and the watered-down form of the theory – the polemic against the “society of consumption” – never helped anyone to avoid surrendering.

If Debord is this savvy, it is because, very early on, he asked the question that all the others are explained by, because he wondered “whether the proletariat actually exists, and if so, what it might be.”

The course of that existence is basically the story of the truth to which his whole life was devoted, and the story of everything opposed to it as well. Paris glorified by the incipient movement of youth in revolt, Paris destroyed by Pompidou; May ’68, followed by the renegades; communism, followed by anti-Marxism; the Situationists, the Maoists, followed by Mitterrand …

We’ve kept a cool head and haven’t let go of the guiding thread of truth. Debord helps us say: no, we, the stubbornly unbowed revolutionaries of these past few decades, did not go astray. Not that we didn’t make enormous mistakes. But because the main thing is not to have given up, and thus to have the subjective resource of truth, and therefore of its progress, always at our disposal.

Has the time come to challenge this unscathed interlocutor? I could do so, inasmuch as his nostalgia blinds him, in spite of himself, to the current context of what all his perseverance derives from. You can’t just have thirty years of history end on a shot of the high waters of the Venice lagoon and expect to get away with it. The final words of the film, “Wisdom will never come,” reveal that too much solitude can end up being dangerous to you. To put an end to defensive poetry you must also bear in mind that the people are working on themselves, here and now, in a new alliance with a politics that would keep Debord, were he to be part of it, from regarding himself as the stoic survivor of a defeated avant-garde.

But we also need to understand poetry’s protective function. Why was it in the resource of art that twice – first with the Surrealists after October 1917 and then with the Situationists in the early 1960s – new historical circumstances produced, in France, a true break, unprecedented intensity, tremendous repercussions with regard to an ossified political Marxism? Marxism should learn from such amazing cunning! We won’t miss the opportunity this time.

This Marxism – of which Debord, in terms of the ethics of the subject, would be the interlocutor and, in his own way, the equal – I could call a living Marxism.

In this respect, rather than being a mere fellow traveler of such a Marxism he could be considered its true friend, because Debord rightly says – this is the theme of the film of his that is most permeated with nobility of feeling – that friendship boils down to the equality of friends.

Le Perroquet, November 11, 1981