I suffered throughout the week, not eating, just drinking. · 5 December 06 by Ray Crowley
Extract from:
Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International
Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristin Ross
Printed in October 79, Winter 1997
K.R: You even wrote an article entitled “You Will All Be Situationists.”
H.L: Oh yes, I did that to help bring about the replacement of Arguments by the Internationale Situationniste. Guy Debord accused me of having done nothing to get it published. Yes, it was Herval who was supposed to publish it. Lucky for me that it didn’t appear because afterwards they would have reproached me for it. But there’s a point I want to go back to — the question of plagiarism. That bothered me quite a bit. Not a lot, just a little bit. We worked together day and night at Navarrenx, we went to sleep at nine in the morning (that was how they lived, going to sleep in the morning and sleeping all day). We ate nothing. It was appalling. I suffered throughout the week, not eating, just drinking. We must have drunk a hundred bottles. In a few days. Five . . . and we were working while drinking. The text was almost a doctrinal resume of everything we were thinking, about situations, about transformations of life; it wasn’t very long, just a few pages, handwritten. They took it away and typed it up, and afterwards thought they had a right to the ideas. These were ideas we tossed around on a little country walk I took them on. With a nice touch of perversity, I took them down a path that led nowhere, that got lost in the woods, fields, and so on. Michele Bernstein had a complete nervous breakdown, she didn’t enjoy it at all. It’s true, it wasn’t urban, it was very deep in the country.
tags: debord, lefebvre, philosophy, process, theory