CHAPTER 10 On the Passage of Guy Debord’s Life after the Situationist International, 1972–1994

After the circumstances I have just recalled, it is undoubtedly the rapidly acquired habit of drinking that has most marked my entire life. Wines, spirits, and beers: the moments when some of them became essential and the moments when they returned have marked out the main course of the meanders of days, weeks, years. Two or three passions, of which I will speak, have been more or less continuously important in my life. But drinking has been the most constant and the most present. Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink. Guy Debord, Panegyric ∵

Though Guy Debord’s finances have always been a murky area in SI scholar- ship, most accounts are clear that a significant portion of Debord’s post-SI finances came from Gerard Lebovici. After Debord dissolved the SI, Debord became very involved in Champ Libre, eventually becoming “the central driv- ing force behind Champ Libre.”1 Lebovici and Debord created an arrangement in which Debord, as “literary director,” suggested books for Lebovici to con- sider publishing by Champ Libre. What this meant is that “the publishing list of Champ Libre was … entirely dictated by Debord’s tastes and interpretations.”2 Soon, Debord had become a “confidant and hero of Lebovici and was immedi- ately in a position of influence over Champ Libre.”3 In return for his contribu- tion to Champ Libre, Lebovici became Debord’s financial patron. Lebovici’s patronage of Debord, which lasted throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, enabled Debord and Alice Becker-Ho to live quite well. One fea- ture of Debord’s post-SI life was that he and Alice lived long periods of it out- side of France. According to Andrew Hussey, Debord had become disillusioned with Paris: “Debord had decided to leave Paris, the city that he loved but which

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004402010_010 384 CHAPTER 10 seemed to be changing before his eyes into a monstrous version of the spectac- ular society which he had so recently predicted …. Financed by Lebovici, Guy and Alice set out to live life as far as possible away from constraints of the soci- ety of the spectacle: this principle justified drinking for days on end … and their aristocratic disdain for work, leisure, and the mediocrity of consumerism.”4 The first country of self-exile that Debord and Alice lived in off and on for many years was Italy. Debord “acquired, with Lebovici’s money, a four- teenth-century palazzo in some state of disrepair at 28 vie Delle Caldaie, a narrow street in the old part of Florence.” Hussey explains that Debord spent several years in Italy drinking, enjoying fine meals, traveling, and falling in love now and then with other women: “He actively sought out the bars of the semi-criminal underworld and reveled in the fact that, like the poet Li Po, he had “hidden his fame in taverns.” From the house in Florence,

Debord would make sorties to the bars of the Otrarno district, to the south of the river Arno, extending drinking sessions over days in bars and in a favorite vinaio (a traditional Florentine wine cellar) in this artisanal medieval quarter. He also fell in love, briefly and under the watchful eye of Alice, with a young Florentine …. All of this activity [was] financed by the patron Lebovici.5

Along with Italy, Debord and Alice also spent long periods in Spain, particu- larly Barcelona and Seville. Hussey explains that Debord and Alice took many trips “in the company of Lebovici to Barcelona in the early 1970s, mainly as a way of paying homage to the country’s revolutionary history.”6

Asger Jorn’s Death

Asger Jorn died of lung cancer on May 1, 1973. At that time, Debord and Alice were in Italy, living in the house in Florence. In January, Jorn had writ- ten to Debord that he was in a hospital in Arhus, Denmark, because of an unidentified spot on his lung, but that he was in hopeful spirits and would like to see Debord and Alice after leaving the hospital, sometime in Febru- ary or March. Debord replied, stating, “I am distressed knowing you are ill,” adding: “We want to see you very soon,” and that he and Alice would be in Italy until April, but then they could meet Jorn wherever he was convalesc- ing.7 Jorn eventually replied to Debord in a letter sent on March 19, inform- ing Debord that he had been diagnosed with cancer. Unfortunately, he had addressed the letter to Debord and Alice’s apartment in Paris, and Debord did