With respect to Champ Libre, one can say that, for the first time ever, a publishing house has aroused the passions of people who do not read. Passions that are forced to remain far away are generally spiteful. The contemporary spectator appears to perpetually seek out fugitive occasions to make known his opinions on a great variety of things about which he is ignorant, but in all cases he only expresses the dominant emotions: omniform envy, ambition without means, and pretention without illusions. Because such are the traits that are massively imparted by a productive system that cannot dream of fabricating consumers who are more successful than its commodities.

This desperate mediocrity has regularly hastened to say anything at all with authority so as to slightly resemble the authorities, who say anything at all. It systematically forgets the obvious, creates dogmas out of rumors that it has invented itself, and blindly talks nonsense about its own falsifications.

And yet Champ Libre, to dissipate with a single blow all of the rumors that surround it, has only to publish – without any other commentary – the part of its correspondence that has a polemical character. Thus, here is an irreplaceable document of the conditions of what, fortunately, can no longer be called intellectual life in the era in which all of society is decomposing.

Publishing houses aren’t only defined by the authors they accept or reject, but also by the manner in which they accept or reject. Until now, no publisher – preoccupied by commercial profitability or careful with certain political arrangements – has ever undertaken to place its activity under such a revealing light.

[1] See letter by Guy Debord dated 7 May 1978.

(Published in Editions Champ Libre, Correspondance, Vol. 1, Editions Champ Libre, Paris, 1978. Translated from the French and footnoted by NOT BORED! June 2012.)