from Guy Debord

To Alexander Trocchi
1 December 1964
My daer Alex:

After your response to "Guy Fawkes Day,"[1] I would like to clarify my preceding letter as much as possible.

1) I have withdrawn nothing of the personal friendship between us.

2) I did not say that the "sigma" operation is in contradiction with the situationist project in general; and I haven't refused to envision a collaboration (if it can be useful), either personally or with others.

3) I think -- and I see -- that a formalist ("official") reference to your membership in the S[ituationist] I[nternational] (your participation in the "Central Council") can not be made by your current projects. And I myself do not believe that it would be a good thing for the "sigma" project. Inversely, the SI cannot appear responsible for "sigma."

Nevertheless, if, despite all appearances, you want to make this reference, then I had no right to speak of your "official resignation." In other words, you aren't "resigned"! If there have been divergences of intention between you and I, they can only be exposed to all of my situationist friends. To everyone (those who don't know you personally), I have always presented you as and guaranteed you to be our friend, someone who shares our fundamental goals. I have said nothing otherwise, even now. And it is only with several friends that I have discussed the tactical meaning of "sigma" and the least constraining relationship between it and the SI. We want to reduce to a strict minimum the play of formal discipline within the entirety of the situationist movement because we have now advanced far enough with respect to the real problems that we can authorize this freedom (note that the "Central Council" is not mentioned in I[nternationale] S[ituationniste] #9).

4) Of course, if our current publications in England and France were to involve all of us in a reciprocal fashion, then very large amounts of coordination and information-exchange would be necessary in the preparation of each point: for example, your first "sigma" circular was sent to, among others, Adamov,[2] who, for seven or eight years, has been one of the worst fellow-travelers of Parisian Stalinism -- it would be contrary to all of our known positions for us to address ourselves to him.


All the same: quite amicably,
Guy

[1] Commemoration of the 5 November death of Guy Fawkes, one of the leaders of the Conspiracy of the Powder, who was decapitated in 1606, without having denounced his accomplices, despite being tortured.

[2] Arthur Adamov, dramatist.

(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 2, 1960-1964. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! May 2005.)



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