Thank you for the documents you have sent me. The affair has certainly gone further than I had at first believed. Semprun's letter[1] is actually not an effort to arbitrate, but a total choice of Fargette's position. There are two or three light, diplomatic reservations concerning it, but a dozen frank and scornful condemnations of your position (not counting several venomous implications). "The schoolteacher" and his master-director, who has the power to judge the main issue, and also the power give grades to the impertinent reactions of a student who has offended them. One does not at all say that it would be necessary to abstain from committing the mistake in question; one says that you were wrong to take a tone that the accomplices judge to be excessive! Moreover, one denies that this was a mistake. It thus was a deliberate tactic (but it will finally reveal itself to be a major mistake).
You were right to stop yourself at the essential: for the first time, the merited prestige of the Encyclopedia of Nuisances has been publicly used in a disgusting, small and personal maneuver. When this is known, such prestige will recede faster than the ozone.
Best wishes,[1] Jaime Semprun's letter to Jean-Pierre Baudet, dated 2 March 1987.
(Published in Jean-Francois Martos, Correspondance avec Guy Debord, Le fin mot de l'Histoire, August 1998. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2007. Footnotes by the translator.)