Guy Debord never recovered from the crisis of the 1970s. His late life was beset by chronic illness brought on by an ever growing gluttony in food and drink. By March 8, 1978 Debord's former glory as a radical filmmaker and author had faded. 'The cinema seems to me to be over,' he wrote in a letter. 'These times don't deserve a filmmaker like me.'
These times were times of crisis. On March 16, 1978--eight days after Debord's dalliance about the cinema being 'over'--the world awoke to a dramatic turn of events. The longtime Prime Minister of Italy, Christian Democrat Aldo Moro, had been kidnapped during a brazen intervention by the far left communist militant group the Red Brigades. In Italy the progressive militancy of the sixties had metastasized during the following decade into an actually existing low-level guerrilla war. Held in secret and sentenced to death in a so-called people's trial on or about April 15, Moro received little solidarity from his former government colleagues, and sensing the immanent culmination of events, the presumed future president of Italy stipulated that no Christian Democrat leaders should be present at his funeral. There were none.
Moro's body was discovered in the trunk of a red Renault R4 hatchback; he had been shot ten times. Wistful was the police report: 'The cuffs of his trousers were full of sand as if he had been walking on a beach or been dragged across rough soil shortly before his death' (The New York Times, 1978).
The decade of the seventies was long in Italy. It 'began in 1967-68 and ended in 1983,' recalled Antonio Negri, the man scooped up by the police in April 1979 and indicted for the Moro events, then exonerated, then indicted again and hounded in various forms for the next twenty plus years.1
'In 1967-68, as in all the developed countries, the student movement took to the barricades. However, the breadth and impact of this part of the movement was not as extensive as in other European countries: in Italy [...] May 1968 was not a particularly significant moment' (1998).
Debord soon left Paris to settle in one of the hexagon's more remote outposts, the rural Auvergne. The new social movements of the sixties, having swollen in importance, were soon met by an iron fist and eventually crushed by the freshly transformed post-Fordist economies of the middle to late seventies. If the sixties represented a certain triumph, the seventies were a decade of defeat. 'The first to be defeated were the social movements,' remembers Negri. 'Having cut themselves off totally from the representatives of the traditional left [...], the social movements were thus dragged into the abyss of an extremism that was becoming increasingly blind and violent. The kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro was the beginning of the end' (1998).
When he did finally address Moro and the Red Brigades, in his 1979 preface to the fourth Italian edition of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord spat on the guerrilla movement, claiming that the Red Brigades were in fact unknowing pawns of the state Stalinist forces.
With his life obscured today by the romantic mist of apotheosis, it is easy to forget that Debord was something of a fading violet when it came to actual conflict. He preferred the mischievous potshot to the Molotov cocktail. But the raw heroic drama of militancy forever excited him. Like many political thinkers, it was the thrill of revolution that was so seductive, of the possibility that this depraved life might one day be cast off and refashioned anew. 'I am very interested in war,' Debord confessed unapologetically in his late autobiographical work, Panegyric, amid glowing citations from Carl von Clausewitz on the emotional intensity of going to battle. 'I've thus been studying the logic of war. And I even had some success, already some time ago, in realizing the essence of these processes in the context of a simple chessboard' (1993: 69-70).
While his fascination with war was not ironic and indeed perhaps uncritical, it's plausible to assume that Debord knew of Engels' famous assessment of Clausewitz, contained in a 1858 letter from Engels to Marx. Clausewitz's approach to philosophy was 'odd,' cautioned Engels, but 'per se very good.' More than anything else, war resembles commerce, he told Marx. 'Combat is to war what cash payment is to commerce; however seldom it need happen in reality, everything is directed towards it and ultimately it is bound to occur and proves decisive' (Marx & Engels, 1929: 241)
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Sonny Sharrock/Once Upon a Time
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