I know that you are a stupid creature and, among all the "pro-situs," you are the most notorious imbecile in Italy, the most mystified cretin, a head experienced in all the prostitutions. I have learned that a well-known whore house, which wants to make its publicity as a place of "rendez-vous" for professional anti-situationists, and which you frequent (everyone sees and knows it); [I have learned] that this house has conceived the project of taking up the enterprise of an Italian edition -- as surely falsified as fatally deceptive -- of the journal Internationale Situationniste; and that, to top it all off, these people would be assured of your services.
One could say that you are, moreover, a simple-minded person.
In truth, if one did not know your desperate opportunism, one would refuse to believe that you could have committed the unpardonable frivolity of agreeing to collaborate, nay, to propose your own involvement, in such an impudent operation. "The painter-philosopher, who truly knows all that one can know about situationism," and who modestly lets this be known in L'Espresso of 1 June 1975, must also know that such a thing would be above his means. By saying this, I do not mean to say that, in such a circumstance, you would not be able to show us all what could not be done in a text; and this is especially because I count on not seeing it. But it is definite that the pretentious and malevolent illiteracy that is your manufacturing label, and the fact that you take part in the poverty of all these vain enterprises to recretinize the youth and to commercially exploit our party, leave no doubt about the quality of the results that one could expect to see. Moreover, the [real] question is elsewhere.
You piece of shit, you are not ignorant of how much we scorn you -- and your associates, [Pasquale] Galante and [Giuseppe] Alferi, have been personally informed of this fact since 1969.[1] Thus you can only be ignorant that such an edition is unwanted by us.
I am sure that you will agree that it is extremely improbable that this thing that we do not want will never see the light of day.
Nevertheless, to dissipate any misunderstandings that you might have been exposed to, and so as to help you not fall into an error that would be unfortunate to a great degree, because of the displeasures that it would occasion for you, I would like to draw your attention to the personal risks that you run from the sole fact that public rumors have designated you as the possible translator of such a hypothetical edition, whereas so many honorable people are ready to clarify the matter with all the arguments at hand.
Because if, later on, this affair does not remain here; if you only want to see in the anti-copyright[2] of the original texts one of the "absences of prejudices" that serve your mercantile interests so well, without seeing that this only breaks the miserable conventions of literary property with the goal of re-establishing the responsibility for the use of theory; if, in a few words, you must obstinately consider that the SI dissolved so that you, a new philosopher in the company of other champions of neo-thought, can proclaim the "supercession" of clearance-sale prices and do business: very well! In such a case, I believe that you would have the right, without another word, to a tangible proof of the reality of the phantoms that have for some time desired to make you feel their lively dissatisfaction.
Unfortunately for your peace of mind, the response[3] that the keeper of the house in question, the one named Enzo Nizza, has revealed -- at the same time that it has revealed this little rogue, as much by the indecency of the tone as by the rest -- your difficulty in denying the existence of a project that he no longer dares to admit and that would be quite unhealthy for him, too, to pursue. By sending you a copy, I also attach a pair of letters that concern you and that, concerning you, could figure (but not much) in your archives of "the history of the movement in Italy," announced in the issue of Panorama dated 25 May 1978; and thus you know that I am not the only one to have supposed that these archives are not sufficient to finish such projects -- which, in the end, only proves that they are even more profoundly equivocal than they already appear.
No doubt there is no accident in the meeting of a common falsifier playing the role of publisher (who, one tells me, has been freshly "de-Stalinized" so as to better figure, of course, in "the discovery of the negative") with a sophisticated ignoramus who is avid to be commissioned as a specialist in translation (and who has come to offer to a party -- Stalinist, naturally -- his poor head, which no longer knows where to knock itself to seek profit). It is you who have declared that, by doing this, you want to accomplish "a Dadaist action." What awaits you, without leaving anything to chance, is "the simplest surrealist act."[4]
Cosa fatta, capo ha.[5] Put yourself in order.
Paolo Salvadori[1] A reference to the second part of "Touched by enemy hands, the gold of the International turns to coal," Internazionale situazionista #1, July 1969.
[2] English in original.
[3] Letter to Gerard Lebovici dated 19 December 1978.
[4] Getting shot to death.
[5] "A thing done has an end": a remark attributed to Mosca de' Lamberti (1215), meaning that a vendetta should be carried through to the end.
(Published in Editions Champ Libre, Correspondance, Vol. II, November 1981. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2007. All footnotes by the translator.)