We have read your letter of 19 November [1970]. We take note of the fact that you don't want to participate in a tendency that would be in opposition to ours. We understand that you envision a resignation [from the Situationist International], of which we would be the judges. Considering that your position essentially permits us to conserve the estimation that we have accorded you (several details of your letter, however, call for clarification, below), we must ask you again for responses to the principal questions absent from your letter:

1. Beyond the superficial problem of the editing of #13 [1] -- which takes up almost all of your letter -- what is the meaning of the refusal to take responsibility for the SI's activity? De facto inequality? The silence on this inequality? Our tendency isn't constituted by the criteria of those who have done the most work on #13, but of those who have most clearly rejected the absence and the lie in the SI.

2. What do you think of the American tendency?

3. If you justly deplore the lack of theoretical contributions to the work of the Editorial Committee [2] over the last six months, what are the points that you yourself are ready to treat immediately?

4. What do you think of [Raoul] Vaneigem's response, other than the fact that it was "radically laconic"?

This is the place to say that your letter lamentably eluded the central questions and that an explanation is needed.

On the one hand: from where do you get the right to say that no work of truly serious research, individual or collective, has been done? On the other hand: when you saw Riesel on the 12th [of November 1970], he didn't say to you that "it is a certain lifestyle" for which "you will be most particularly reproached." What he did say to you was the last of the points he'd wanted to bring up after totally refuting the idea that the non-production of #13 is the center of the crisis, and explaining the general goals of our tendency. Moreover, if, on that particular evening, you had said to him that it wasn't a little band that he'd encountered, but that you were all going to dinner, he would have said that the little band was going to dinner.

Note: written 24 November 1970. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! August 2004.

[1] The last issue of Internationale Situationniste was number #12 (September 1969). A 13th issue was planned, but never completed.

[2] Rene Riesel, Christian Sebastiani and Rene Vienet.