I have already asked you, and I now I must insist, that the location of our meeting -- and thus the address of our hotel -- in Antwerp[1] on the evening of 11 November [1962] be settled upon (not for me, who will rejoin you in advance in Brussels, but for those of our friends who will be coming directly to Antwerp).
I emphasize that it is necessary to keep the location of this meeting place rigorously secret (that is to say, only known to the people who will be attending this conference,[2] and 3 or 4 sympathetic people from Antwerp, to whom discretion must be recommended).
It is indeed necessary to bear in mind two possibilities, about which I have no specific information, but that one can abstractly foresee:
1) efforts of different Belgians (Hennebertists[3] or others) to involve themselves in the conference.
2) efforts of the Nashist gang (and its Belgian aureole in the style of The Situationist Times), either to present itself at our conference or to hold a dissident situationist conference at the same time in Antwerp. In view of the last possibility, it might be necessary to prepare and have at the ready, on the side of those from Antwerp, a certain explicative piece of propaganda on the horrors of Nashism, so that we could launch a commando of auxiliary Antwerpians who could help us disperse a Nashist meeting by force. It won't be necessary that the people of Antwerp find themselves surprised or doubtful if, all of a sudden, they discover the pretensions of a "situationist dissidence."
Although not very probable, this development could lead to the public rout of Nashism, which produces itself, even in Scandanavia, at the moment. Their last chance (to pose as a "serious avant-garde") is to hang on to the SI [Situationist International], in one manner or another, in the weeks to come.
I await news from you, all the more so because it won't be possible for me to come to Brussels this week.
GuyP.S. Do you need other collections of I.S. [Internationale Situationniste] to sell? You can record the orders (and even the names of those who pay in advance) and deliver the copies after a delay or 2 or 3 weeks. This goes for the "precious commercial items."
[1] Cafe Tienpont.
[2] The IVth Conference of the SI that took place at the Zigeunerkelder in Antwerp between 12 and 16 November 1962.
[3] Those surrounding the Belgian Jean-Michel Hennebert.
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 2, 1960-1964. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! May 2005.)