dilbert1

Well-known member
I did end up going to the event, mostly because I wanted to ask Eric-John Russell about his journal Cured Quail. The British ex-situationist Donald Nicholson-Smith, whose presence and life experience I can appreciate well enough, made an ass of himself and kind of revealed himself to be quite politically senile, or else essentially a liberal, warning of MAGA followers’ fascist threat and praising the Democrats in America as a revived and formidable Left. The book they were presenting on, recently translated by Russell and originally published in 1975 by situationist fellow travelers, was a compilation of inflammatory ad-hominem filled essays directed at many different then-popular French intellectuals and public figures. Russell giddily read a meandering, frankly vapid passage dealing with Foucault, delighting in the author Semprum’s admission of having never read a word of Foucault, because what was key here was the gesture of preserving the SI’s “revolutionary style of critique,” which in this case meant artfully baseless insult and snobbery. If you’ve read “The Poverty of Student Life” pamphlet the SI put out ten years prior to Semprum’s book, the latter can be seen as a desperate but completely redundant attempt, at Guy Debord’s behest and in the aftermath of his group’s utter collapse and irrelevance, to place themselves once again at the top of the French intellectual hierarchy, while flattering themselves about having never become “recuperated” sell-outs.

I posed two questions in the Q&A and found their responses disappointing. There were other things to cringe at too, but I think it was a healthy experience for me. I’ll probably read more of Russell’s work on Debord. He actually dismissed the situationist perspective on art altogether and said he appeals instead to a more bourgeois idea of aesthetic experience much closer to what you find in Adorno, for instance. So if Debord falls below Adorno on a (or maybe the) principle aspect of the SI’s project, I wonder what Russell and his associates around CQ see there that’s worth holding onto, besides this juvenile antinomian elitism at the level of style.
 

dilbert1

Well-known member
Imagine Marx at the beginning of The Poverty of Philosophy saying, “Now, I’ve never read a word of Proudhon, but hear me out, because I’ve got incredible swag…”
 
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