I understand your bitterness[1] if you have fought the ideas of Guy Debord since July 1959 with any kind of success. Neither your efforts nor those of many others have been able to stop the course of his triumphs, nor obscure his manifest glory.
In the case of the others, one immediately understands their failure, since they have only ever been failures moved by the most transparent and comic envy. But you, Sir, you are armed with a System of creation that dates back, unless I am deceived, to 1946. This is the center of the problem. In a third of a century, this System has truly not marked the history of the world, since all of its strength and coherence has never convinced more than ten people, and the majority of them for a very short time and yet, you yourself agree that many have had serious reservations about this System and do not hide the fact that they have other goals!
And if your System is without interest, all your opinions, which I believe legitimately issue from this System, are without value.
It is thus, to state two or three opinions, I have several reasons for estimating that what you have presented for more than twenty years as "the turpitudes of a passing success" -- I mean the universal enthusiasm and the innumerable praises with which the critics and the public everywhere have honored Debord -- do not go as far as it seems to you on the properly "commercial" plane. I do not believe that Debord is a neo-Nazi comparable to Himmler, nor that one could discern in me any effort to act in a neo-Nazi fashion, and I even think that, with respect to such judgments, one must speak of dementia, if they did not emanate from you.
From all the evidence, the big difference concerning your fate over the last twenty-seven years is that you more often dwell upon Debord than he dwells upon you. But, finally, if one day he wants to dwell on you (I will publish such a text), you would not be completely forgotten in the future.
Nevertheless, I find it abnormal that you come to solicit me, his publisher, who flatters himself with also being his producer -- even if this was only his last three films --, so as to get published, precisely with me, your anti-Debordist anathemas fulminated in the name of your antediluvian dogmas. Thus, address yourself to your customary publisher, M. Gallimard, who appears to me to merit it. Thus, you can attribute your famous "Prize of the Creators" to your own work, to general satisfaction and without mixing me up in it.
Quite sincerely,P.S. Included is your text.
[1] See later dated 19 November 1979.
(Published in Editions Champ Libre, Correspondance, Vol II, November 1981. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2007. All footnotes by the translator.)