the sole reader

This civilization is on fire; the whole thing is capsizing and sinking. What splendid torpedoing!

And what has become of me amid this appalling collapse — this shipwreck which I believe was necessary, and which it could even be said that I have worked for, since it is certainly true that I have avoided working at anything else?

Could I apply what a poet of the T’ang period wrote — “On Parting from a Traveling Companion” — to this point in my own history?

“Dismounting from my horse, I offered him the wine of farewell and asked him the goal of his journey. He replied: ‘I have not succeeded in worldly affairs, so I am returning to the southern mountains to seek repose.’ ”

But no, I can see quite clearly that for me there will be no repose; first of all because nobody does me the honor of thinking that I have not succeeded in worldly affairs. But fortunately no one could say that I have been successful in such affairs, either. It thus has to be admitted that there has been neither success nor failure for Guy Debord and his extravagant pretensions.

It was already the dawn of this exhausting day that we are now seeing draw to a close when the young Marx wrote to Ruge: “You can hardly claim that I think too highly of the present time. If I nevertheless do not despair of it, it is because its own desperate situation fills me with hope.”

Preparing an era for a voyage through the cold waters of history has in no way dampened these passions of which I have presented such fine and sad examples.

As these final reflections on violence continue to demonstrate, for me there will be no turning back and no reconciliation.

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