New from NOT BORED!, a translation-détournement of Rien n’est fini, tout commence, by Gérard Berréby and Raoul Vaneigem.
From the translator’s preface:
To date, though there have been dozens of detailed histories written about the development of the Situationist International (the “SI”), which went through three overlapping phases between 1957 and 1972, none of them were written by a former member. […]
Always the exception, Guy Debord – the only co-founder of the organization still a member of it when it disbanded – commented often and extensively about certain moments in the SI’s history […] Almost unavoidably, Debord has become the face of the SI and the SI has been semi-successfully presented as just one of Debord’s many artistic creations.
With the very recent arrival of what amounts to Raoul Vaneigem’s autobiography – Rien n’est fini, tout commence (“Nothing has ended, everything begins”), published by Editions Allia in October 2014 – all this will have to change. […]
In its original form, this book is credited to both Raoul Vaneigem and Gérard Berréby, who put it together “with the help of Sébastien Coffy and Fabienne Lesage.” Indeed, Rien n’est fini presents itself as a kind of collaboration between Vaneigem and Berréby, as if the two men were equals with respect to the subject at hand. […]
Rien n’est fini is a deformed creation – deformed by the ego of Gérard Berréby, who, it would seem, is ready to rest on his laurels for having published 15 situationist-related titles (as well as dozens of others) over the course of the last 30 years. My translation tries to ameliorate this deformity. On the one hand, I have removed – that is to say, I have declined to translate – everything that is not relevant to Raoul Vaneigem himself and/or the SI as a whole. Here the reader should not worry: there were no gray areas; no texts that I had reservations about deleting. (As for the texts by the other situationists, they, too, have been translated, but have been posted as separate texts on the NOT BORED! website. Via hypertext links, my footnotes point the reader towards these texts at appropriate moments in the interview.) On the other hand, I have provided an index, a bibliography and this preface. As a result, Vaneigem: Self-Portraits and Caricatures of the Situationist International is shorter, leaner and easier to use than Rien n’est fini. […]
To read the unexpurgated translator’s preface, and the important new translation-détournement of Rien n’est fini, tout commence, press on the linked title below:
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