Indeed, at the height of Debord's influence over the Situationist
Indeed, at the height of Debord's influence c1 over php the Situationist International, a php c1 16 friend had said of him: "If Guy had had guns article then, modules denuncia view article he would have used them, and first of all modules on those who were once his friends."Debord's ability both to appal and to fascinate were the distinguishing features of his career. Born php in Paris in 1931, he came to prominence modules denuncia view article in view php c1 16 the Fifties, amid the turbulence view c1 16 of article the Parisian avant-garde scene. His first association was with the Lettristes, a 16 floating group of "delinquent intellectuals" led by the megalomaniac Romanian poet Isidore Isou; he denuncia - and they - set their faces against the mood of a Paris in denuncia which Sartre, Camus and their hangers-on postured modules endlessly c1 in debate. Debord attacked denuncia 16 the article shibboleths of work, art and leisure with an iconoclastic fury. His ideas php were worked out at cafe tables across Paris, in a blur of alcohol, tobacco and a furious desire to modules create moments of poetic intensity, or "situations", which stood in direct opposition to the mediocre view comforts of the new consumerism.
Inspired by De Quincey's intoxicated peregrinations around London, he and such like minds as his then girlfriend Michele Bernstein and Asger Jorn practised the "derive", a poetic game in the course of which they drifted drunkenly around Paris inventing their own city. At length, in 1957, at a bar in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia, the Situationist International was founded in a week of sprawling drunkenness and free love.Petulance and jealousy were to be the dominant forces in shaping the Situationist International, which, for all its congresses and declarations, never numbered more than 30 members at any one time. The mood of the organisation was far from brotherly; excommunications occurred with vicious frequency.Along with his friend and collaborator, Raoul Vaneigem, Debord was intransigent in his insistence on total cultural revolution. But if Vaneigem was the Romantic who taught his Lycee class while wearing a tutu, and was finally sacked for offering practical courses in sexuality to his students, Debord was a hardnosed strategist whose theories looked beyond the promises of liberation inherent in such slogans as "Abolish Work" and "Power to the Imagination". Indeed, the Situationist International anticipated and animated les evenements of May 1968. But once the barricades had been cleared from the streets, and de Gaulle's party had been voted back into power, les evenements began to appear to be just another failed insurrection.
Debord decided that the SI belonged to an historical moment that had passed; in 1972, he and his remaining comrades dissolved the SI.He had already quit Paris. It was no longer the city he had loved, the city in which he had practised the "derive"; after May 1968, it had come under assault from the developers. The splendid chaos of Les Halles was ripped out of the heart of Paris, leaving a gaping hole that would eventually be filled by a shopping mall. Property prices shot up, pushing the once revolutionary working class out towards the suburbs.