We read in a biographical note in #55 of your journal that a certain Jacques Darquin "was part of the Situationist International for a brief moment." He is nothing of the sort. No one among us has even met this person. No one has ever heard mention of his existence.
We hope that, as soon as possible, you would like to accord fitting attention to an incident so bizarre. The fact that a pretension so brazenly mendacious was emitted, not in some report by the sensationalist press, but in the bulletin of the International Center for Poetic Study, which seems to place itself on the terrain of the requisite intellectual rigor, obviously adds to this a character of completely unacceptable seriousness.
This imposture is all the more significant in that it serves to qualify a laudator of Mr Kostas Alexos, whose work the situationists have mentioned in the light of opposition several times. The advertising behavior of Mr Darquin here reveals in a frightening light what Axelosian thought understands by the discovery that "false consciousness has a part linked to the consciousness that thinks to seize the true." For example: for this Mr Darquin to have had "a part linked" to the situationists, it was necessary to invent for himself a false past. The triviality of this case will show everyone that he is "connected" to us in the way Mr Axelos "connects himself to Heraclitus and Marx, Rimbaud and Nietzsche, etc." But the imprudence of the connections of Mr Darquin is even more immediately demonstrable.
Naturally, we expect you will make us know that your good faith was surprised by this affair; and that your next issue will mention it, by publishing this letter, if you like.[2]
Please accept, Mr Director, the assurance of our distinguished sentiments.
The Director(Written on the letterhead of the journal Internationale Situationniste.)
[1] Director of the Bulletin of the International Center for Poetic Study, in Brussels.
[2] Not having judged it useful to respond, Mr Verhesen, after being roughed up a little, avowed the hoax: Darquin was none other than Kostas Axelos (cf. ["When Axelos Found A Disciple"] I.S. #11, p. 56).
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 3, 1965-1968. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! August 2005.)