Guy Debord 1956

Order for a Boycott


Source: Oeuvres. Gallimard, Paris, 2006;
Translated: from the original for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.


The festival of the Cité Radieuse, which is to open on August 4 in Marseilles, will gather under the roof of Firmin le Corbusier all the contemporary writers and artists known for having based their careers on the copying or the reactionary vulgarization of some previous novelty, itself generally lacking in reach.

The enterprise is homogeneous, and in order to immediately compromise those who haven’t yet proved their nullity, they have brought together Ionesco, Tapié, Pichette, Beckett, Adamov and Agnés Varda.

The participants in this parade – where nothing is lacking that in twenty years will represent the imbecility of the ‘50’s – will find themselves definitively marked by so indiscrete an adherence to the most perfect manifestation of the spirit of an era.

We thus invite the artists who were solicited, those at least who don’t feel themselves to be finished, to dissociate themselves without any delay from this amalgamation of deism, action painting, and impotence – re-chewed, re-vomited.

We call on the international avant-garde to denounce the meaning of this maneuver, and to spread the names of those who have made themselves accomplices in it.

July 31, 1956

For the Lettrist international:
G.-E. Debord, Asger Jorn, Gil J. Wolman