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Our Game in May
Situationist Internationale #1 (June 1969)
THOSE WHO ARE acquainted with situationist thought found many of the aphorisms that covered Parisian walls last May familiar, even though the press, large and small, was not about to talk of the origin (or the source of inspiration), reception or spread of these graffiti. And so it has been that during the past year many of the inquiries coming to us have concerned the nature of the participation of the SI in the May celebrations and the availability of an analysis of those events. In early June 1968 situationists in New York (with the Council for the Liberation of Daily Life) released "The Enraged in France," a skeletal account of the events leading to the occupation of the Sorbonne, with commentary on the general movement following. This was issued along with the "Minimum Definition," and a translation of the "Address to All Workers," signed by the Comité Enragés-IS and the Conseil pour le Maintein des Occupations.
Despite the glut of verbiage hawked thusfar, the true history of those days has yet to appear in English; however, that will soon be remedied if Grove Press publishes a translation of our comrade René Viénet's Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations. This profusely illustrated book, published last October by Gallimard, has been described (in Bulletin #17 of the Centre internationale de recherches sur l'anarchisme) as "the most wicked and the most beautiful" of all the books to appear on the May events. (Several of the 'documents' that comprise the final hundred pages of Vienet's book have been published in Italian and Portuguese in a book of situationist texts, l'estremismo coerente dei situazionisti — o extremismo coerente dos Situacionistas (Ed. 912, Milan, Italy). Other texts and photographs from the book were published this March as a special supplement to Situationistisk Revolution #2, in Denmark.) Its translation and publication here will counter the thousands of pages of ideological "analysis" spewing out of the "left" and will also give the lie to the passing slanders in a piece of purely commercial shit like Red Flag, Black Flag.
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