MERCIER, Luc. Présent fait aux lecteurs de Lire Debord, traitant des curiosités et difficultés rencontrées dans l’ouvrage. n.p. [Luc Mercier]: n.p.[France], 22 September 2022. Comb-bound pamphlet. 49 p.; 21 x 30 cm.; black ink on plain white stock
Edited by Guy Emmanuel and Laurence LeBras, Lire Debord (Paris: L’Echappée, 2016) made available to readers several never-published texts, notes and documents by Guy Debord. Scholarly articles by Anselm Jappe, Greil Marcus, Tom McDonough, and Patrick Marcolini, among others, helped contextualize and bring into light this new original content.
While Lire Debord provides a rich repository of primary and second material, and despite the editors’ best intentions, it is not without gaps, errors, and misinterpretations. Mercier’s Présent fait aux lecteurs de Lire Debord, traitant des curiosités et difficultés rencontrées dans l’ouvrage provides readers a rich set of additions and corrections. Among those are details about topics like the Fronde (a series of civil wars in France between 1648 and 1653), Orson Welles, and some aspects of Debord’s cinema. There are many others
The author of this brochure is no stranger to Debord and the S.I. more broadly. Born in 1954, Mercier is perhaps best known for having played a key role in the dissemination of Situationist material in the 1980s and 1990s. For instance, he circulated Le Port-Folio Situationniste (Paris: Le Lundi au soleil, 1993), a two-volume compilation of texts by the S.I. Mercier also published a translation of texts by the Italian section (Paris: Contre-Moule, 1988), and a translation of documents by various sections of the S.I. (Archives situationnistes Volume 1: Documents traduits (1958-1970). Paris: Contre-Moule / Paralleles, 1997). The latter features the first translation into French of texts by Gruppe SPUR. Other Situationist-related texts by Mercier include Le vraisemblable sur l’assassinat de Gerard Lebovici (Paris, 1984) — which Debord lauded — and Apostrophe à l’auteur de « Guy Debord ou la beauté du négatif (Paris, 1998). Mercier was also a founding member of Comité irradiés de tous les pays, unissons-nous, an anti-nuclear collective influenced by Situationist ideas (their manifesto can be found here), but would depart a year later as the group split into two opposing factions
If interested in acquiring Présent fait aux lecteurs… please get in touch with us, and we will connect you with Luc Mercier.
[11/29 update: adding links to the text and errata file below
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