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Articles

Dead Bored: Debord’s Dead!

Andrew Hussey on the death of a turbulent thinker.

All followers of pop culture will know that 1994 was a good year for death: not on a par with 1969-70 (Jim, Jim, Janis), but epochal enough as the heroes of slackjawed moron culture, on both sides of the Atlantic, mumbled endlessly about smack’n’suicide and Kurt ’n’ Courtney. Suicide wasn’t only an Anglo-American obsession: on the other side of the Channel, the death of Guy-Ernest Debord, who shot himself in the head in his lonely farmhouse in the Haute-Loire on November 30th 1994, shocked the remnants of the 1968 generation in France, throwing a whole generation of ageing politicos and postmodernists into mourning and confusion.

Debord’s death was a shock and also a mystery. Debord was intensely secretive about his private life: even his closest associates were unaware of his house in the Haute-Loire and how much time he spent there; many of the generation of ’68 had assumed he was already dead. Added to this are the gloomy facts of his personality: he drank heavily; he was aggressive and sometimes vindictive, he was prone to depression; he talked of his work being ‘finished’.

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