04/27/2016
Jean-Marie Apostolidès on Guy Debord, Situationism, and Psychogeography
Jean-Marie Apostolidès was educated in France, where he received a doctorate in literature and the social sciences. He taught psychology in Canada for seven years and sociology in France for three years. In 1980 he came to the United States, teaching at Harvard and then Stanford, primarily French literature and drama. He is interested in […]
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This is KCSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
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from the Stanford campus.
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[ Music ]
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[ Music ]
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Take hearts advice to someone lost in a forest.
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You ought not to wander this way in that, or what is worse, remain in one place,
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but always walk as straight a line as you can in one direction and not change course
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for feeble reasons.
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For by this means, if you are not going where you wish, you will finally arrive at least
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somewhere where you will be better off than in the middle of a forest.
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The forest stands for many things in day cards discourse on method, error,
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errancy, the non-rational, the pre-rational.
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It also stands for cities that have grown up over the centuries without a master plan.
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The problem with cities like Rome or Paris before the revolution is that you can't walk in a straight line.
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Take heart again, I quote, "These ancient cities that were once merely straggling villages
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and have become in the course of time, great cities are commonly quite poorly laid out compared
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to those well-ordered towns that an engineer lays out on a vacant plane as its suits
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his fancy.
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Upon seeing how the buildings are arranged, here are a large one, they're a small one,
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and how they make the streets crooked and uneven, one will say that it is chance more than the will of some men
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using their reason that has arranged them thus."
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Now no one is more pledged to the principle of reason than I am, especially in the political sphere,
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but when it comes to city planning, I recoil from it in dread and horror.
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The engineers' vacant plane of geometrical abstraction has given rise to many urban disasters,
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especially in the latter half of the 20th century, and into our unseemly 21st century.
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Some of the greatest villains in our era belong to that vast army of engineers, builders,
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urban renewers, and so-called planners, who in their drawing rooms have taken it upon themselves
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to reconfigure, and in so doing vandalize our urban and suburban environments, all in the name of introducing rationality into the picture.
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It's sad but true that the most egregious crimes of our era are often crimes of construction rather than destruction.
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We all admire, mutilate or emissurate a public environment when you disfigure a city and
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descend it like a malignant tumor. The consequences are total and enduring.
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Long after the engineers and architects go underground, city dwellers and their offspring continue to inhabit the nightmare that issued forth from their misbegotten projects.
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The only thing is a city. No one can say exactly, not really, but we know that cities have a dream life that reaches deep into our desires, our memories, our fears and anxieties.
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It's because the surrounding environment has immediate and lasting effects on our human psyche that crimes of construction amount to crimes against humanity, against the basic human right,
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not to be forced to live inside a nightmare, day in and day out unto the end of days.
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Here's a quote from an obscure Frenchman, Ivan Steglof, who at 19 years of age wrote a searing manifesto called "Formulary for a New Urbanism," published in 1953 in the
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"The Tris International Journal," "Pot latch," all cities are geological. You can't take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the weight of their legends.
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We don't intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that lead to boring leisure.
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The architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams, of producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.
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Steglof knew something about the genetic connection between urban environments and the human psyche.
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He was one of the originators of what is known as psychoggyography, as well as the concept of "Ladehiv," which was fundamental to the situationous international movement founded by Steglof's friend, Gidabur.
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We're going to talk today about that movement and also about "Ladehiv," which is translated as "drift" in English, but which we could also call the art of not walking in a straight line, of drifting or
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or "divigating within the urban realms of psychoggyography." I have with me in the studio my friend and colleague, Jean-Marie Apusolides, author of a biography of Gidabur published just last year by Flamadio.
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He also authored a biography of the young man I just cited, even Steglof, published in France in 2006 by Alia Press.
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Professor Apusolides and I did a show on Alberkumu some years back, and it remains one of the all-time favorites among the listeners of entitled opinions.
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We followed that show up. A few years later with one on the Unabommer, "Go figure." Jean-Marie joins me today to discuss Gidabur,
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and the fascinating topic of psychoggyography as it was conceived by these two figures and other associated members of the situationists in the 50s and the 60s. Jean-Marie, welcome back to entitled opinions.
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Thank you for inviting me over.
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I have here in my hands this very impressive biography of Gidabur that was published by Flamadio last year.
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In France, obviously, it's called "Dibod, La Nofraja" or "Dibod, the ship record."
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We want to talk about Gidabod later in our show, but as I was preparing for what I thought was going to be a show really only about Gidabod and the situationists, I became fascinated by this other figure that I cited earlier, Steglof, and you've written a biography of him as well.
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So, if you don't mind, I'd like to begin with Steglof and ask you who was Steglof and why does he deserve to be remembered now?
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Steglof is mainly remembered because he has been the boss friend and when the two of them were young, all those Steglof was slightly younger than the three years younger than the boss.
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He has been at the same time extremely influential and therefore, at the secret influence on Gidabur on many respects, not only in the domain of maps and psycho geographies that you have already presented, but also in the domain of literature.
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He introduced the boss to avant-garde literature, particularly to Surrealism, but he had also a most important influence on the boss in the domain of Azothirism.
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And, seriously enough, most people interested in the boss do not know that today, but the boss started by being influenced by this Azothiric literature which was transmitted to him by Steglof.
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Steglof was very quickly removed from the electricity international movement and unfortunately, few years after he was placed in a mental azillium because he had many psychic problems and basically he spent the most, if not all of his life, let's say, between 22 or 22.
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Until his death in different mental or spit or lint fronts.
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We'll talk a little bit about his psychic problems in a moment, but you mentioned the letchist movement.
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Letchist, Antonestin, can you tell our listeners what that movement was all about?
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At the origin, we have to remember the name and the importance of Azidorizu, who created in 1947 a movement called in France, letchism.
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In 1951, he met the young boy in the city of Cannes in the south of France on the occasion of the festival, the Cannes, and the boss was very much attracted by Azu.
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So, he came to Paris a year after to become a member of the small and obscure, letchist movement.
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And he remained close to Azu for the next two years.
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But, around 1943, he separated from Azuz movement and created with his friends a new movement called letchism international, letchist material.
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But, it is also given the similarities of name. It is a movement which was in the wake of Azuz men principle.
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What was the main principle of letchism?
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It was a decomposition of poetry to it's to to overwhelm to an event later on to letters, but it was a more important movement trying to face a new post-world war reality, and particularly in some domains such as film.
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In order to present a different way of creating in painting in film and in literature.
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Today, Azu was written a lot, particularly remembered for his famous film Trethe de Barve, the Dédernite, and the rest of his literature.
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Yes, it has many, many, many books. He is only accessible for the time being to few people because basically it has not been reprinted.
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When the book, the letter is meant to noceonal, is that also the founding of the journal Potlatch, which were
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Stegloff published this extraordinary manifesto that I was citing from.
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Yes and no. Before that, the book published two very obscure reviews, and basically the strong relationship between the book and Stegloff lasted only one year.
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As I met for the first time in June 1953, and they broke together in June 1954, and Potlatch was only created in July 1954, and Stegloff's text was not immediately published in the review, but rather was published only in 1956.
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I was in 1957 in the New Review, and Ternal's Situ as your host. However, Stegloff's text was written in 1952.
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Okay, so I'm going to have to correct myself in my intro when I said it was 1953.
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For some reason, it was under the impression that it was published in Potlatch, but that's not important.
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What we're interested in, what I'm interested in in particular is all the other stuff is interesting, namely the phonetic poetry of Yzu and the
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film theory and others, but I'm particularly interested here with the architecture and the notion of the public urban space and Stegloff's theories that are, let's say,
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the fragments of a theory that are put forward in the formulary for a new urbanism, and then we can speak about a situationism in a broader context, but how do you understand Stegloff's ideas about the city's architectural space and what needs to be done to revolutionize it?
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It has to be replaced in its social and historical context. Do not forget that at that time, France was not totally rebuilt.
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France was still reasonably poor country, and at the same time, the population increased enormously with the general movement known as
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"baby boom". Many new people would need to find a place to live, and nothing was really prepared for them.
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So the government of the fourth republic tried to create a new environment in the suburbs of Paris, which were built very, very quickly, and with new material such as the
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concrete. However, the target, the real target of both Stegloff and the bar are not these obscure architects who are totally forgotten today, but rather someone who had an enormous influence at that time and whose pseudo name was Lucor Buse,
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was described by this young, literist as their enemy, and for good or bad reason I don't have a definitive judgment on their position, but the target in for is a new realization, particularly in Marseille,
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and on some known as "Lacite Radures", which was between 1947 and 1952, and that was the center of their criticism.
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I'm glad you brought up Lucor Buse. Let me just flesh out his profile a little.
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Lucor Buse was a Swiss French architect and city planner, died in 1965. One of the founders of the international style and architecture, a highly rationalistic,
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aesthetic, anti-ornamental, functionalistic, and above all mechanistic. Lucor Buse, for example, he called houses machines for living.
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He and his modernist school have been attacked from several quarters for its excessive abstraction. It's in difference to local context, history, and geography.
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Lucor Buse is response to the urban crisis in Europe in the 20th century called for large blocks of tower buildings like cell-like individual apartments stacked one on top of the other,
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and just to give our listeners a sense of his modernist predilections, he drew up a scheme for a contemporary city,
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He called it with three million inhabitants. Its centerpiece was a group of 66 story, cruciform skyscrapers set within large rectangular grass lawns.
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At its center was a huge multi-level transportation hub for buses and trains, with intersecting motorways. It even had an airport on top of the structure.
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You mentioned Lesitee had used the radiant city that was a city with 24-powering skyscrapers inside a great park.
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I mean, Descartes would have loved this guy. I don't know what you think of Lucor Buse as you know, but here is what Steglov had to say about him in his formulary. I quote,
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We will leave Missoula could Buse style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals and no doubt eventually for prisons.
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Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual whose face is as ugly as his conceptions of the world, such that he wants to squash people under the innoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of the land.
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The final aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant gothic style. His creatonizing influence is immense.
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A Lucor Buse model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide.
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He is destroying the last remnants of joy and of love, passion, freedom.
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Those are fighting words. So Jean-Marie, I know you're not timid when it comes to voicing your opinions and I remind you that the name of this program is entitled opinions.
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So let me ask you, in your opinion, is Lucor Buse guilty as charged?
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If you ask for my personal opinion, my answer is no. Definitely not because I have seen several of these realisation and given the context, and if you compare to what was built at that time,
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in the suburb of Paris, it is much more interesting and much more well achieved than the regular construction.
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So in my view, no, Steglov was definitely excessive and the boat was as well-existing.
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I don't know, I tend to think Lucor Buse is guilty as charged, not only because his suburban housing projects have a dehumanising and homogenising quality about him,
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but above all because he glorified the automobile as a means of transportation, and his design segregated pedestrians and turned the city over to the motorways and to the automobile, and that in my view already makes him a villain.
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But we don't need to reach a verdict on Lucor Buse today. The point is that Steglov and Dubois were horrified at the transformations that were taking place in traditional neighbourhoods of Paris,
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especially in the Cachilatin around Saint-Germandibre, and in one of the oldest neighbourhoods of Paris, Leal, and these mixed, diversified highly stratified neighbourhoods were under assault by aggressive city planners and modernisation projects, Leal in particular, which had an open market that went all the way back to the middle ages, was getting reconfigured and paved over in the 60s.
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Steglov and Dubois were fiercely defensive about Leal, no?
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It was indeed the source of inspiration for Steglov, but particularly for Dubois, and for his spouse, Michel Biernstein, who wrote two important novel out of these areas and out of the notion of the Reeves'
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of the French government. The two novels by Michel Biernstein have been translated into English, one is called "Touleshe Vodio" and the first one, "Lanyvi", the night, and they are famous for describing this theory of young people wandering in Paris for the night long.
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The bar himself at the same time did two short movies, which are considered by Dubois's admirer as two little masterpiece, and they are also in illustration of the relief.
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The first one was called "Cretig de la Cépacean" and "Suel Pésage de Calcéperson" and "Pémé Unacecécouc unite de dout" these two films, which are accessible and available today, describe indeed the psycho-jogra-fique attitude in concrete manner in this area, particularly Leal, that we have mentioned, but also some other part of Paris.
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And this is a very important part of the artistic creation of the literary international movement.
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So two issues, Leal de Hiv, can you give it a more full-bodied account than what I did in the introduction?
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It's a key concept, I think, for the situation, and I think Stikblof was the originator of it. First one, to use the term. What did they mean by "Ladé Hiv"?
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Let the relief start from the constitution that the outside has an influence on our psyche, on our mind.
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So if you are in a certain part, let's say, of Paris or Rome, if you are a plazades, a spania, for example, you develop whether you want it or not certain flow of ideas of emotion, of sensibility, which opens your mind to many different things.
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So, Leal de Hiv is a way to destroy your own mental personal structure, and destroy it either with alcohol or with drug, in order to be totally open to the geographical environment, and therefore to let yourself make unconscious of the third,
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or the fourth kind, with people you would not otherwise speak to or even relate to. So it's in a certain way, drunken
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to create unconscious that you would never do otherwise, and they thought that it was a duration of new ideas,
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of new creation, and of a better understanding of modern society. Did they formulate a method for la de rív or was it just this drifting Oazad around certain appropriate neighborhoods?
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They do not define the method except that they establish in different texts that they wrote some rules, that means you could do de rív alone, or with two, three persons, up to seven persons usually.
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You could do some drift during few hours, but some of them have lasted for three days in a row without almost sleeping, and some other rules like that, and the M1 of the purpose of this de rív was to build psycho geographical maps of the city of PICE,
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that means to create maps which on one side were totally objective because related to different areas of the city, but at the same time we wrote to you when you move from one street to another one, it's different atmosphere, so for them they wanted to represent this transformation of atmosphere on a map to make it more visible for other people.
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If you allow me to say that, or some tricks to force, yet must be, for example, in London, or even in Paris, they would visit the city, not with current map, but map drawn 80 years or 100 years before, so that the streets would not be the same, and they would try to reconfigure their work,
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in the city, according to a normal map, which did not correspond at all to the current city, and therefore creating new encounters or surprised things of this sort.
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So here is a fundamental difference between the possibility of Ledet Hiv in France, and let's say here in the United States, where if there's anything that corresponds to this de hiv, it would be in the car, here the myth in the United States is the road trip, and being on the road in an automobile, and having this de hiv, it's a big well-represented,
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Jean-Réhere in America. In France, I think Ledet Hiv is predicated on pedestrianism.
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Absolutely.
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And in that respect, it has links to the 19th century, especially Bodleur, who had his famous concept of Le Flannur.
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The one who would set out to wander in the city to drift without a specific destination in mind, without a goal, and to open himself for herself to the inner, especially psychic life of the city, through encounters,
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and other, on-program encounters with strangers and others. This pedestrian pairs, the loss of pedestrian pairs seems to have been a point of political importance for the situation is because they felt that these changes that were taking place in the post-war period in terms of the reconfiguring of the city,
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were hostile to the pedestrian and favorable to the automobile.
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Yes, definitely. Let me go back to what you said, because you said plenty of important things.
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It is definitely a very good parallel to make between road movies in America, and de hiv in France.
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But definitely, French people do not have anything equivalent to road movies, and they are even not understood even by people who love American cinema.
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It is something basically ignored in Europe or at least in France.
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As far as the origin of the revis concern, you are absolutely right to mention both layers, even if at that time the work of Walter Benjamin was not known by these people and was basically ignored.
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But after a good layer, you have a very long line of poets or writers, a rainbow, a gimme a polliner above all, a l'imple, far, the other languages to name a few of them were instrumental in this dimension of walking in the city.
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It seems to me, Robert, without criticizing your option, that you are mixing two things which were separated in historical time.
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The Berlin Stegloff belonged to a part during which the car was not so important in Paris at that time.
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What was more important was the rebuilding of new suburbs or new areas in Paris, whereas the car and the used transformation of the inner city goes back mainly to pump it to the other side.
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That means after the Goldingsey early 1970s and at that time the situation is to move Montuise or most finished.
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That's true, I'm sure you're correct about that. However, you were present in Paris in 1968.
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Yes.
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And this fundamental cultural moment, this phenomenon which Gita Baud is associated as being one of the inspirators of it, he writes his associated respect that will speak about that book in a moment in 1967.
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But in 1968 when the students took over the Castile T'A
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that you're referring to, all of a sudden now it was closed off to cars and everyone had a sense that they had this reclamation of the city where now the city belonged again to the pedestrian was a revelation.
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And it was experienced as a liberation and a kind of restitution of the proper rights of the city dwellers to take possession again of their streets without the invasion of the car.
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So the cars had clearly been an important presence before 1968 in Paris.
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Well, I can only answer with my own memories. It seems to me that in spite of the many cars you had in Paris in 1968 it was nothing comparable with the trans situation today where cars are so numerous that it creates totally different cities.
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And this is true that during the 1968 people burn many cars and add the feeling of certain liberation.
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But it seems to me that this feeling of recreating something new was more associated with the conquest of some public space which were not accessible to everyone.
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And namely in my recollection, Les Arbourn, you cannot imagine what Les Arbourn became during this period of Messix T'Ait transform into a mixture of theater, public sphere and a brother, let's say it in, in quite well.
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Or the theater of Laudeong, which was under the guidance of Jean-Wieberou at that time, but suddenly became a place of public speech where everybody could enter freely and speak freely and place himself or herself upon the stage and deliver discourse in front of everybody.
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That in my recollection at least was the expression of this new feeling of liberty rather than the disappearance of the cars.
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Good.
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So if we can talk about Gidivore a little bit now, please, more let's say directly and systematically.
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Well, actually, one last thing on Stegloff, you mentioned that he quickly is put into a mental asylum, mental hospital.
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I read that he actually was arrested for intending to blow up the Eiffel Tower along with his friend, Arri Le Breon, which is...
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That was before... It was before the young concert with Gidivore, it was during the period of 1952 or '51.
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And there's about some material in order to blow up... Some dynamite. Yeah, some dynamite, but it was not very serious and there were release immediately after being interrogated by the police.
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The board transformed that into a great deed of literary people, but that was not very serious. We should not take that totally seriously.
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But Stegloff did show signs of mental instability and he was... When was he committed to an asylum?
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Probably, well, it changed... It's a mental else, degraded gradually.
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So, at the beginning, when he was placed first for a few weeks, in Paris at the Ospitol Santaan, then he was sent to a very modern clinic called 'Chai'.
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And in these clinics where you had many important people, writers, artists, actors, he was extremely active during this period. He wrote a lot and staged some players.
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| 00:36:45.880 |
And he did some script, so it was very good on Virenmann. That was the time where he reconnected briefly with Michel-Bernstein and Gidivore.
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| 00:36:57.880 |
But later on, he was kicked out of this clinic and reduced to a mental institution, which were not as open as the 'Chai' clinic was, and then started to...
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| 00:37:13.880 |
The degree is mined up to the point where he was a total Ots d'Orce's keys of finance without even capacity to react and create anything.
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| 00:37:26.880 |
And does he die in the 90s? Yes, in the early 90s, in the French and the well.
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| 00:37:36.880 |
Gidivore, also now after the 50s, and after the dissolution of the situation is international, which was in the late 50s or early 60s.
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| 00:37:52.880 |
The dissolution of the late-risk movement was in 1957, but in order immediately to recreate the movement that he would call the situation is international, that last between 1957 and 1972.
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| 00:38:12.880 |
And at a certain point there, Gidivore shifts his own emphasis away from things like psychogography, adheri, and thinks more and more about the role of spectacle in contemporary society.
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| 00:38:30.880 |
And he writes this book, "Lassosiete de Uspectac," with the Society of Spectacle, published in '67, which is the major work that he's most well known for.
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| 00:38:41.880 |
Yes. What did he mean by the Society of Spectacle?
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| 00:38:47.880 |
The Society of Spectacle could be in a certain way seen in the wake of his work on psychogography.
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| 00:39:02.880 |
Because the creation of what he calls the spectacle is associated definitely to the creation of new city. When you have bills and posters, all over the city, advertising commodities, that creates a link between the two.
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| 00:39:21.880 |
What he calls Society of the Spectacle is the division between the dominant class, controlling the industrial creation, and transforming goods into commodities.
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| 00:39:39.880 |
That means good, which could be exchanged through money. And Society of the Spectacle describe a split between the dominant class, and the main reason, if I can use this term, by which it is not only the imposition of new industrial commodities, but the total transformation of life.
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| 00:40:08.880 |
Including space, time, and relationships between human beings. So basically what he describes and the name of Society of the Spectacle is the birth of postmodernity, of total industrial society, where everything is transformed into commodity.
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| 00:40:34.880 |
A commodity as well as an image. Is there not a difference between a commodity and an image?
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| 00:40:40.880 |
A commodity in order to circulate must be exchanged through two things on one side, money, and on another side images.
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| 00:40:54.880 |
So images in the way the birth of the terms are necessary to exchange commodity. If you don't know the image of what you have to buy, then you don't buy it.
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| 00:41:09.880 |
So in a certain way, money and images have the same process of circulation, except that money deals with the quantitative aspect of the commodity, by the pardon me from being pedantic, whereas the image deals with the qualitative aspect of the commodity.
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| 00:41:32.880 |
But the two are related with one another.
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| 00:41:37.880 |
Would it be fair to say that in the Associated U. Spectacle, the ball is prophetic, or that there are some sort of forward looking insight into the world of virtuality that would not come into existence until the invention of personal computers, et cetera, and the kind of world that we live in now.
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| 00:42:06.880 |
We live more in a virtual than a real world.
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| 00:42:12.880 |
People who admire a lot of the bar and who see in the birth of great profit of modern times would go in your direction.
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| 00:42:26.880 |
I thought one would have my reservation if for so this new world, but was very suspicious about it, knew basically nothing about it, and refused to enter into this quote-unquote "promised land".
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| 00:42:47.880 |
And I would dare say that one of his contemporary Jean-Boudrea was much more perceptive about this society of simulation.
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| 00:42:59.880 |
In a certain way, the concept of spectacle goes back to something more traditional.
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| 00:43:07.880 |
The central metaphor is brought from the domain of theater in which you have people on stage the men on society giving the show, and people in the house uploading the show and receiving the show.
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| 00:43:24.880 |
It seems to me that the bar did not go beyond that, but I might be wrong, and I would understand if someone would disagree with my own analysis.
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| 00:43:36.880 |
I agree with your analysis. I also believe that Jean-Boudrea was a bigger visionary of the virtual, the tragic images that have now become independent, live a life of their own.
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| 00:43:52.880 |
I think Gita Baud in a certain sense still remains within a rousoistic framework, where Rousseau writes the letter, contour de spectax.
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| 00:44:02.880 |
We let her down there, which is the letter against spectax. Yes. Yes. Where you have a passive consumption of something that's on stage, and he was more for the participation of the people in the community.
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| 00:44:17.880 |
Therefore, festival would be better than spectacle. Exactly. You see that genealogy at work.
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| 00:44:24.880 |
Absolutely. Even if the bar quotes more of Marx as an also definitely a zim frienne of Rousseau is extremely important in the bar's work.
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| 00:44:38.880 |
Given that we're doing a show about these characters and these movements some 40 years after the end of it, what do you think are the most important legacies of
|
| 00:44:52.880 |
Stegloff de Bo, the situation is international. Is it in their radical thinking about urban space and psychogography? Is it in the thinking about spectacle or is it in certain avant-garde practices in film or painting and poetry?
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| 00:45:19.880 |
I would say all these domain, the only dimension that seems to me obsolete in the bar's work, is a call for an absolute revolution.
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| 00:45:38.880 |
But it's a personal opinion, needless to say, because many people in France are still expecting this revolution to come, and I certainly do not believe in that.
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| 00:45:51.880 |
But the psychogographical aspect of his work is still very important.
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| 00:45:57.880 |
In my view, and the bar also in more personal texts such as Panécéric or his film in Germany, Mousnacht, can be considered as one of the fine writers of the 20th century.
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| 00:46:13.880 |
The same form as a Rongol, it seems to me that the place of Gidubor is similar to where the classical writers, such as La Roche Foucault or Pascal in the 17th century,
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| 00:46:37.880 |
is writer, in French, and Morales, is the equivalent of this great Morales of the 17th century.
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| 00:46:49.880 |
That means he has a very negative judgement on his own society, but if we take it, we are not obliged to digest or to accept everything he says.
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| 00:47:01.880 |
But he has an extremely critical vision of his own society which still contains the seeds of lucidity, intelligence, and good interpretation, and that should not be forgotten.
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| 00:47:18.880 |
Between Steglov and Dubor, do you believe that Steglov was the greater visionary?
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| 00:47:26.880 |
Yes, but he was unable to transform it into work.
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| 00:47:32.880 |
Everything he has done was never as finished or achieved or transformed into a book.
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| 00:47:41.880 |
So basically all his life has been under the sign of the failure, whereas Dubor might not be as visionary as some of his friends were, but he was capable of taking ideas from his environment and transform them into a piece of art which is still solid and valuable and interesting today.
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| 00:48:09.880 |
In your biography, it was very long biography, you had special access that no one has had before to certain documents, and you were quite surprised that some of the morally dim behavior of your protagonist.
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| 00:48:27.880 |
Absolutely, I should say that we are lucky enough in North America to have access if we want to new situation is to archive gathered at Beno Curl Library by Kevin Reiper, who was a former history student at Stanford University.
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| 00:48:50.880 |
Kevin, as done over the last 10 years, Nino Musworth to buy and together situation is to archive, and some of them are the first one to look in these archives, and I discovered thanks to Kevin plenty of information which transform basically my vision of Dubor.
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| 00:49:16.880 |
Needless to say that the man is not as great as people think he was when you have access to these documents, but I think it's a necessity to re-evaluate the board's work and the board's life through these new archives today.
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| 00:49:38.880 |
We are not going to go back and to admire him as a great thinker who has done everything he said he has done without comparing his own discourse with what can be found in the archives.
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| 00:49:56.880 |
So for you, was it an experience of disenchantment?
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| 00:50:03.880 |
Totally, but at the same time it was a pleasure of historical discovery, needless to say, but it was also disenchantment, definitely yes.
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| 00:50:12.880 |
Although I tried not to translate it into bitterness in my work, but that as influence where I would speak of this character in the biography I devoted to him.
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| 00:50:28.880 |
It wouldn't be going too far to call him a "sallow".
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| 00:50:31.880 |
No, it's not going too far, he has been a real "sallow", a sexual predator, practicing incest with his sister all his life long, and being very cynical, extremely manipulative with most of his friends, and in spite of what he says interested in money and in power more than many other people.
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| 00:50:57.880 |
So in a certain way, yes, he was both "sallows" and that's true.
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| 00:51:03.880 |
So we have these archives there in the Bienaqui Library at Yale University, and Kevin, you mentioned what's he a student of yours at Stanford?
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| 00:51:12.880 |
He is a spouse, did a thesis under my direction in the drama department, but he was himself a student in history, and he did his thesis in history, and he chose to become a creator instead of a professor of history, and he had an enormous success doing that.
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| 00:51:36.880 |
Well, Kudos to Kevin, and also to you, Jean-Marie, for the fascinating biography of Gita Bör called "Lunufraja" came out in 2015 with "Plamadio", and also the biography of Steglof that came out in 2005 with "Atila Press" in Paris.
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| 00:51:56.880 |
I'm sorry, "Atila Press" in Paris. Reminding our listeners that we've been speaking with Professor Jean-Marie Apostoli this about psychogography and people associated with that rather interesting chapter in our cultural history of the 20th century.
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| 00:52:15.880 |
So Jean-Marie, congratulations again, and look forward to having you on in title opinions in the near future.
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| 00:52:22.880 |
Thank you all, and take care.
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