But it is only here, in Debord’s essay on surrealism, that one can find in such succinct detail an account of the “self-annihilation” that appeared in the poetry and painting of the European avant-gardes. Certainly, a more theoretically nuanced elaboration of the self-abolition of culture and the decomposition of modern art can be found in chapter 8 of The Society of the Spectacle. Scattered over various, mostly brief articles, one can find the elaboration of the situationist critique of “decomposition”, as well as elements of an historical account of its development across the arts, culminating in the “active decomposition” of Dada and Surrealism. Debord had been refining his critique of what he also called the “decomposition of culture” since the 1950s. Particularly striking, in the introductory section of the essay, is Debord’s synthetic account of the “self-annihilation”, “dissolution” and “destruction” that appeared in poetry and painting in the century before the surrealists. And, despite the situationists never been named throughout the essay, Debord cunningly inserts them implicitly into the last line when he quotes André Breton as seer: “It will fall to the innocence and to the anger of some future men to extract from Surrealism what cannot fail to be still alive, and to restore, at the cost of a beautiful ransacking, Surrealism to its proper goal.” By Debord’s reckoning the situationists simply were those other horrible workers Rimbaud had foretold. Nonetheless, it demonstrates two things very clearly: first, his familiarity with the surrealists and secondly, the importance of the surrealist project, as it was originally conceived, for the situationists.

The author of this booklet was Guy Debord, despite no author being attributed on the brochure.Ĭonsidering the distinctly non-situationist nature of its publication (more on this below) Debord’s essay on surrealism is, perhaps, not one of his major works, despite being his longest published piece upon the subject.

In September 1968 a brochure entitled Le Surrealisme: une revolution irrationnel (Surrealism: An irrational revolution) was published under the Encyclopédie du monde actuel ( EMDA) imprint-one of its monthly Cahiers de l’encyclopédie du monde actuel (Notebooks from the Encyclopedia of the Contemporary World). This has also been posted on Notes from the Sinister Quarter. Note that there are some differences between the version presented below and pdf (most notably, the complete bibliography is only available in the pdf version). A PDF of this document can be found here.

Selected Writings by Henri Michaux