The negation style Guy Debord, Situationists and Literature

Guy Debord's name remains today associated with memories of May 68, both the event and as collective adventure. May 68 witnessed the Internationale Situationiste (IS) the Situational International (SI) with Debord a leader at the peak of his activity and influence. For many years the SI had been proclaiming the death of art and literature, shifting its activity from the realm of culture to that of politics, opposing "The Society of the Spectacle" and promoting grassroots revolt. But the name Debord also evokes an opposite path, that of a man who having once been a foremost figure of political sedition then withdrew into literature in the late 1970s, little by little transitioning into a memorialist so fascinating in style that he is ultimately seen as one of the major writers of the second half of the 20th century. To elucidate the reasons for this astonishing reversal, this article reflects on the before and after of the May 68 events. Upstream, to see how the conviction of an historic preemption of literary forms induced IS to refuse or subscribe to the world of letters, instead formulating an anonymous and collective utterance mixed with social praxis; downstream, to see how Debord, having specifically abandoned the philosophy of history that underpinned these conceptions, came to perceive in the return to the literary not a regression but a final recourse to confront what he termed "the misfortune of the times."