Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici
by Guy Debord (1931-1994)
Translated from the French & with Introduction by Robert Greene (Available May 2001)

Guy Debord was the leading light in the Situationist International. He and the group were the first to criticize and comment on the role of the consumer in Western society . If Dada was an artistic movement that somehow pushed its artistic values into the political arena, then the Situationists were political and urban theorists who transformed politics into an art forum. Debord's masterpiece "Society of the Spectacle" is a stunning and witty critique on contemporary society where the work week and consumerism alienates the individual.

Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici is a book length rant against the French media with regards to the murder of his good friend and financial supporter Gerard Lebovici. Lebovici was a gangster-tinted businessman, movie producer, publisher (of great taste), and a major financial supporter of Situationist activity - including ownership of a movie theater that screened only the films by Debord & other Situationists. It's suspected that Lebovici was killed by gangsters, but certain groupings of the media connected his death with the Situationists. In this passionate book length rebuttal, Debord lashes out with great humor and intensity towards the media and defends his good friend Gerard Lebovici.

In his 1988 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord ominously stated that "under the rule of the integrated spectacle, we live and die at the confluence of innumerable mysteries." Although the context had been a particularly unsettling passage on terrorism, the statement bore an obvious allusion to Debord's friend: mainstream film producer and avant-garde/political publisher Gerard Lebovici, who was murdered in 1984. The assassination remains unsolved, and its motives unknown: Lebovici received a phone call and left his office; his body was found two days later in an underground parking lot, four bullets in his head. In between a missing event is buried.

Novelists make careers out of bridging (or "integrating") such severed facts - facts that reporters supposedly make their careers out of reporting. In the wake of Lebovici's death, reporters seemingly decided to switch professions: his "secret" life as Leftist publisher was exploited for all it was worth, and Debord, "third-rate Mephistopheles," "nihilist," and "guru," became a focus of attention. Several papers, in their efforts to fill in the blanks, went so far as to insinuate that he and his leftist "influences" had some involvement with the murder. After winning some libel suits, Debord followed up with this book, a virulent attack on the French press, but more broadly an expose on secrecy and disinformation, on which he would later elaborate in his increasingly pertinent Comments. Considerations also functions, almost unavoidably in face of the media's portrait of him, as something of an autobiographical preface to Panegyric, the autobiographical preface he would write five years later.

Who was this "mystery man," this "mad sadist"? "Never have so many false witnesses surrounded a man so obsure," Debord here writes, ironically, later adding: "I am only 'mysterious' for those who do not know how to read me." The English translation of this short book (a shrunken version of the entire text has actually been squeezed onto the cover) should go some way in lifting this veil of "opacity" that has blanketed his work; far from opaque, Debord was, if anything, one of the few true classicists of the 20th century. Opening with an almost schoolboy exposition, Debord delivers his engaging and scathing critique in his characteristically elegant and memorable prose. Gone is the haunting (and as odd as it may sound, revolutionary) melancholy of his early filmscripts; Debord here develops the chillingly dour tone that would characterize his late writings.

In one of the book's more optimistic moments, though, Debord states, almost as an aside: "One doesn't choose his era, although one can transform it." The question, though, is what happens to those who attempt and fail to transform it? In Plato's Crito, Socrates chose to die by his untransformed society's ruling rather than escape into exile. Indeed, exile used to be a harsh punishment; today it has become almost a badge of honor. "I have had the pleasures of exile," Debord concludes, " as others have had the pains of submission."Socrates submitted. Some choose neither, though, and others end up choosing for them. Lebovici was, as Debord reminds us, assassinated. Judgment came after, in the media.

Mark Lowenthal, Rain Taxi vol. 7 No. 1, spring 2002