Born in 1767, executed in 1794, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just was the prophet of the Republic of Virtue: of a virtue, dormant in every human heart, suppressed and twisted by the masters of the old world, which had to be drawn out of each new citizen—or enforced. Recognizing a new desire for happiness, for a moment Saint-Just had the power to impose it: the words with which he followed “a new idea in Europe” were “I propose to you the following decree.” He spoke on the stage of world history, one foot in Paris and the other in Sparta. He spoke to Lycurgus and Thucydides, to Lenin and Pol Pot, and he knew they would hear what he said. The Letterist International spoke in a bar that sold franchise and solace along with beer and wine—“Cafe Megalomania,” the Berlin dadaists had called their version of the place. There the LI tried to recapture Saint-Just’s tone of voice, and it was hard to catch, austere and ecstatic, furious and still, the tone of the cryptic slogan: “The mind is a sophist who leads virtue to the scaffold.” You could puzzle that out for days, or you could look at Saint-Just’s face, at busts and engravings, but like the young man himself when his time was up, they said nothing. If one portrait was cold, all hard cheekbones and hooded eyes, the next was soft, the cheeks full and smooth, the eyes innocent. “To tell the truth, the only reason one fights is for what one loves,” said the philosopher of the Terror. “Fighting for everyone else is only the consequence.”
The LI, Eliane Brau wrote in 1968 (as Eliane Papai, she was the “Little Eliane” of Wolman’s letter), was “autoterrorist.” The group demanded that one practice terrorism on oneself—“a self-educational process,” Raoul Hausmann said of the psychology of the Berlin Dada Club, “in which routine and conventions have to be ruthlessly wiped out.” The LI worked hardest to maintain the conviction that nothing was more important, and so every person found unworthy of the game was excluded from it; Saint-Just, in whose ideal society banishment was to be the ultimate sanction, would have approved. Officially, the first to be removed were Isidore Isou, Gabriel Pomerand, and Maurice Lemaitre, who had never been present (claiming rights to the words “lettrist” and “lettrism” after the Chaplin incident, the LI incorporated the founders only to expel them as traitors to their own ideas)—and then, in the year between Wolman’s letter to Brau and “. . . A New Idea in Europe,” Brau himself (“militarist,” read the second number of Potlatch), Serge Berna (“lack of intellectual rigor”), the emblazoned Mension (“merely decorative”), and even the visionary Chtcheglov (“mythomania, delirium, lack of revolutionary consciousness”). “It’s pointless to hark back to the dead,” Wolman wrote to seal the LI’s first execution list. As in certain fundamentalist sects, those who remained within the group were never to speak to any who had been shut out, or even of them. But Debord did, in 1978, in his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, matching a picture of Chtcheglov to a blind quotation from Julius Caesar. Debord read it on the soundtrack: “ ‘How many times, through the ages, will the sublime drama we are creating be performed in unknown tongues, before an audience which is yet to be!’ ”
Lipstick Traces
Greil Marcus
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