We hear from several students in Strasbourg that your group of friends is generally known as "situationist." I suppose that you keep this rather in the domain of a pleasantry, and it would be good to mark it still more clearly [in the future], because there is, at the very least, a point that is in complete contradiction with the accord between my comrades and I. This point is the question of your more or less amicable or "trusting" relations with [Henri] Lefebvre.
You know our divergences from and our "public" judgment of Lefebvre. All personal relations, even very indirect ones, have been rendered impossible by his act and [if continued] could only serve his crude confusionism. In a recent discussion with a third party, this old man, out of pique, hasn't recoiled from referring to us as "avid little shits of publicity." To match the many shitty characteristics that have notoriously marked his whole life, Lefebvre only gave one necessary and sufficient proof of our shitty quality: the fact that we have published "Into the Trashcan of History"! Thus, he considers it sufficiently established that, in this affair, we are wrong and he is right. Meanwhile, over the course of the last thirteen months, all the honest witnesses have had to state that we are right and that Lefebvre hasn't even dared to defend his position, instead restraining himself to half-confessions mixed in with whisps of excuses so fake and contradictory that he must change one for another as they collapse. I believe that you yourself are among the witnesses who know, without any doubt, where the lie is. If Lefebvre, and others, have an interest in completely forgetting, rendering vague, mixing things up and making compromises, it is certain that our politics are exactly the contrary. We simply oblige people to choose what is "shitty," and to keep to their choice and its consequences. Even if the conclusion on the plane of personal relations between you and I is regrettable, it is quite necessary to say that flirting with the term "situationist" and Lefebvre at the same time can, unfortunately, only expose you to a disagreeable contradiction; and it isn't from Lefebvre that it will come.
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 2, 1960-1964. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! May 2005.)