from Guy Debord

To Malcolm Imrie
21 January 1991
Dear Malcolm Imrie:


Thank you for the English press.[1] And for the other news that you sent me.

I will quite willingly read the work of "the beautiful merciless lady,"[2] even though she broke your heart or, more exactly, because she made it: because I cannot doubt the justness of your taste. It is good to attack the impostors of "post-modernism,"[3] the offensive emptiness of which one now begins to measure in several countries. I have long laughed at the impudence of the two mediatic clowns[4] that you mention, Baudrillard and Lyotard,[5] but my opinion -- on this point, in any case -- is about to be universally shared.

I love the translation by James Brook, and I agree that he should translate the book,[6] especially if you can help him. I would help him myself.

Keep me up to date on all the moves and responses concerning the unfortunate Editions Lebovici. It is disappearing at this moment. I send you a copy of the letter that I wrote to Gerard Voitey,[7] who formerly managed the publishing house: he is the last man who tried to save the enterprise, and he warned me on 18 January that he must give up. I do not know if several hardly serious (or simply simulated) chicaneries in the courtroom are still to come. In any case, I literally had no contract with this publishing house when it existed.

Still hoping to meet you soon,
Cordially,
Guy Debord

[1] Translator's note: presumably reviews of Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.

[2] Sadie Plant.

[3] Translator's note: Plant book, The Most Radical Gesture: the Situationist International in a Post-Modern Age, attempted to show the indebtedness of several "post-modern" writers (including Baudrillard and Deleuze & Guattari) to the theories of the situationists.

[4] Translator's note: English in original.

[5] Translator's note: Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard, authors of books that had a big impact in American and British universities in the 1980s.

[6] Panegyric. [Translator: volume I.]

[7] See letter dated 19 January 1991.


(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! January 2009. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)




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