On 1 November 1996, a short missive appeared in the letters section of the French newspaper of record, Le Monde. Signed by Alice Becker-Ho, Guy Debord’s widow, and Patrick Mosconi, who had been charged with establishing his literary estate, it took up the question of the legacy of the founder of the Situationist International and read, in part: 

Debord’s legacy poses no problem. Only Debord himself poses a problem. […] There’s nothing to build on, or rehabilitate, or embellish, or falsify. There is, finally, only Debord, his art and his time as he has revealed them, and that is obviously much more than all these people can support. […] There are no heirs. Debord must inherit Debord.¹ 

This statement of Debord’s absolute singularity was, on the one hand, a central element of the estate’s conflict with his publisher since the early 1990s, the venerable house of Gallimard. The ‘legacy’ in question concerned, quite specifically, the rights to his work, and only two months later Becker-Ho and Mosconi would announce their break with the publishers over offense taken at the fictional representation of Debord in a mystery novel they released.² On the other hand, however, the issue was broader than this particular dispute. The vision of legacy detailed here was profoundly curtailed: Debord, having devoted himself by the late 1980s to the aestheticisation of his life — to conceiving of his life as an artwork — would have no inheritors, just as he had refused all inheritances, whether familial or cultural. This was the myth of Debord that became dominant in the years following his suicide in late 1994, at least among a group of