text archives > situationist international texts >

Letter to Guy Debord, René Viénet & René Riesel

Tony Verlaan & John Horelick

18 November 1970

COMRADES,

At the finish of our enclosed analysis yesterday, we received your "Declaration," and naturally that analysis does not take it into account. We must introduce some introductory remarks according to it, before we can achieve a common clarity, even if it applies to our fundamental disagreement. In the S.I. today it is important to achieve if necessary the maximum possible of objective coherence in a scission.

Concerning the "superficiality" of our last letter of Sept. 21, we believe Guy [Debord] was perfectly correct to expect more precision that reciprocated our own expectation. That letter sought to begin to answer more concretely the urgency of our organizational problem as put in its proper context by Guy in "Remarks on the SI Today." Our own particular activity on the american terrain, especially in the review, has been directly connected to that problem, and its urgency. And we were not satisfied with the apparent end of its critique.

Before any further precise disagreement begins to enlarge itself through further correspondence, however long it actually is, we must refer once more to the last paragraph of our letter of Sept. 21st, where we register the delimitations of the preliminaries toward a tendency.

To ignore that paragraph is a bluff in naming it as an "infantile pseudo-critique". We insist that you address ad hominem the suspicions expressed through the generalities of your "déclaration".

For the tendency for the truth of our practice,

Verlaan & Horelick