Greetings, all:
I've been reacquainting myself with the radical left-libertarian tradition of the Situationist International and the still very relevant economic and cultural analysis of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Comments on SotS.
He died quite awhile ago now, an apparent suicide, but I've always wondered. Certainly, his was not a very hopeful view of our current condition and he fancied the drink, and is reported to have attempted suicide once in 1955, so maybe his death is what it looked like.
However, ten years before his death, his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici was assassinated and several French papers tried to implicate Debord.
Courtesy http://www.notbored.org/considerations.html:
But then, on 5 March 1984, Debord's friend, Gerard Lebovici, was assassinated in an ambush. Though it was clear that Debord didn't have anything to do with the murder, and that it was far more likely that police officers executed Lebovici for supporting the memory and family of a convicted bank-robber named Jacques Mesrine, the French press kept insisting that Debord or one of his "entourage" was responsible for the killing. "They were wrong to go that far," Debord says in Considerations. "I found this instance so exceptional that I made an exception. I therefore sued several newspapers for libel."
He won every case, of course. "The defamers were ordered to pay me a certain amount of money, and in addition to have published at their own expense each one of these libel judgments in three newspapers of my choice." He choose L'Humanite, published by the French Communist Party, Minute, a right-wing daily, and Le Journal du Dimanche, a national newspaper published on Sundays.
Debord used the opportunity to outline how the assassination of his friend was not an isolated case, but part of a pattern of what he described as "artificial terrorism" and which we folks on this side of the pond refer to as "false flag" terror. He was writing with knowledge of P2 and the phony Red Brigades and all of those cases of state-sponsored terror against their own subjects.
So, that makes me wonder about his suicide. That and a report that several other former Situationists committed suicide either on the same day or same week as he had. (Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate this report again since I first saw it over 10 years ago on the net.)
Maybe there was a pact or something, but I wonder.
Then, there's this cryptic statement from Debord's Commentaries:
An unexplained crime can also be called suicide, in prison as elsewhere; the collapse of logic allows trials and inquiries which soar into irrationality, and which are frequently falsified right from the start through absurd autopsies, performed by extraordinary experts.
Debord deliberately made himself an obscure person after the failed revolutions of 1968, so it seems difficult to find out what if anything there is to my uncertainty about his suicide, but if anyone has any good leads for places to look--or thoughts on this--that's greatly appreciated.
