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Jean-Michel-Mension-Tribe-Translated-Donald-Nicholson-Smith-1.Pdf JEAN-MICHEL MENSION CONVERSATIONS WITH GERARD BERREB Y AND FRANCESCO MILO TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time, Vol. I CITY LIGHTS BOOKS SAN FRANCISCO © 2001 by Donald Nicholson-Smith for this translation © 1998 by Editions Allia, Paris, for La Tribu by Jean-Michel Mension © by Ed van der Elsken{fhe Netherlands Photo Archives for his photographs All rights reserved 10 98 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover & book design: Stefan Gutermuth/doubleu-gee Editor: James Brook This work, published as part of the program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States. Cet ouvrage publie dans Ie cadre du programme d'aide a la publication beneficie du soutien du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres et du Service Culture I de l'Ambassade de France represente aux Etats-Unis. Mension, Jean-Michel. [Tribu. English] The tribe / by Jean-Michel Mension ; translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith. p. cm. Interviews with Gerard Berreby and Francesco Milo. ISBN 0-87286-392-1 1. Mension, Jean-Michel-Friends and associates-Interviews. 2. Paris (France)-intellectual life-20th century-Interviews. 3. Radicalism-France-Paris. l. Berreby, Gerard. II. Milo, Francesco. III. Title. DC715 .M39413 2001 944'.36083'092-dc21 2001042129 CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. Visit us on the Web at www.citylights.com. ... 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INTERNATlONALE LETTRISTE No.2 general strike Impassive man of marble, there is no relationship between me and other he set his foot on the staircase of that same metal. people. the world begins on 24 september 1934. i Greetings, Guilbert! am eighteen years old, the fine age of reformatories and sadism has at last replaced god. the beauty of man lies in his destruction. i am a dream that would love a dreamer. any act is cowardly because it justi­ fies. i have never done anything. nothingness per­ petually sought is, simply, our life. descartes has as much value as a gardener. only one movement is possible: that I be the plague and hand out the buboes. all means are good fo r forgetting oneself: suicide, death sentence, drugs, alcoholism, mad­ ness. but it is also needful to do away with wearers of uniforms, girls over fifteen but still virgins, osten­ sibly healthy people with their prisons. if there are a few of us ready to chance everything, it is because we now know that we never have anything to chance or lose. to love or not to love this man or that woman is exactly the same thing. jean-michel mension Yo u signedth is text in Internationale Lettriste No.2, which app eared in February 1953. Yo u were eighteen .... Ye s, but in fa ct I had arrived in the "neighbor­ hood" younger-I must have just turned sixteen. I arrived because I disliked whatever was not the neighborhood more and more, especially high school, and I was in search of a place where I could be free. This was a world that I liked because I dis­ liked the world of my parents. My parents were old Communist militants-old in terms of their veteran status; they had joined very young. My fa ther was a fu ll-time Party worker, my mother was a fu ll-time technical employee of the Party­ a typical sexual division of labor, of course. THE TRIBE What section of th e Party were th ey in? It wasn't exactly the Party. It was a sports organiza­ tion, a fe deration very close to the Communists. My father was the Party's man in the organization. Where was th is? It was at the 1933 Fete de In Paris. I was born in Paris in 1934, my father was I'Humanite [the Communist Party's born in Paris, my mother was born in Paris, and ... annual fair-Trans.] that Robert well, actually, my grandmothers were not born in Mension and Rose Fuchsmann decided to have a child. Paris: one, a Russian Jew, was born in the depths of At a counterdemonstration on 9 the Ukraine, and the other was born in Picardy or February 1934, pregnant with me, something of the sort-I'm not sure now. Rose was shot at. They missed us. My first photo shows me, naked, at a Party gathering in Montreuil in What was your childhood like with your family before June 1935. you got to th e neighborhood? It was very bad-but that wasn't my parents' fault, more the fault of the times. I barely remember the prewar years-I was almost exactly five when war was declared. I do have a firstme mory: we were in a house in the Yo nne: I had an operation for appen­ dicitis and my brother broke his arm .... They put a plate in him, and that's how he was identified later, when they found his body at Buchenwald after the war. And I very well remember my father's face when he opened the Communist newspaper L'Humanitt the day the Hitler-Stalin Pact was announced: he was livid. It was one of my first big shocks. When he came home from the army, my father went underground immediately, which was contrary to Party directives at the time. So I was living with my mother, and one day a woman arrived in tears, saying, "They have arrested Auguste Delaune." You see stadiums named after Auguste Delaune all over France, especially in Communist municipalities. He was the national
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