Two Game Disruptors (or How Jean-Pierre Voyer Outlasts Jacques Mesrine)

Our staggered memories would not want to admit it today, yet it was only in 1978-1979 that Stalinism reached the peak of its expansion. In addition to USSR and Eastern Europe, China, Indochina, North Korea, Mongolia and Cuba, which formed its core, there were also, in Asia, South Yemen and Afghanistan, and as partners Iraq, Syria and Burma; in Maghreb, Algeria, Libya and the official leadership of the Polisario front; in the rest of Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Benin, Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, and a little less formally, Congo, Burundi, Somalia and Sudan. However impressive this territorial expansion may have been (which anti-Pakistanis India, where several states were ruled by communist parties, came quite close to add to), its moral influence was especially what led to think that it was then at the bottom of the hill, not the peak. The states of Latin America, Africa, Asia, where Western democracy was ruling, often through self-confessed dictatorships, but still unable to refute its damning “imperialism”, were full of guerrillas, each more Stalinist than the next, and vying with each other in sympathy in Western opinion itself. Right-wing guerrillas were only starting to distinguish themselves in a few Stalinist states like the ex-Portuguese colonies or Afghanistan, but without much emotional support in the public. Since 1968, justice and youth were on the left, and each official conflict’s protagonists were the vileness of the right and the fairness of the left. Until the coup of the Turkish military, the year of the defeat of the Kwangju Commune and of the start of Reagan’s presidency, 1980, from awkwardness to depression, from concessions to rallyings, the end of the right-wing politicians was announcing the inevitable end of capitalism (the future French socialist prime minister, Rocard, said ten years before governing: “Socialism is the abolition of commodity”!). The whole world was supporting the Sandinista scum who was suppressing the revolt in Nicaragua, with the benevolent neutrality of the US government preceding the one that would support the “contra”, for the same reasons. And at the fall of the shah of Iran, the two favourite groups of the information’s tipsters for governing the new republic were the people’s mujahedin, Islamised Marxists, or the people’s fedaian, atheist Leninists, who fought a bloody street fight against each other in this perspective from the very twilight of the insurrection. The proletariat was one of the most respectable topics of conversation, and democracy was never alone: it was worker’s, bourgeois, liberal or direct. Making money (big bucks, I mean) was done in secret, and the external signs of the next decade’s disease, yuppie, AIDS, microcomputing and humanitarianism, were still only forming.

We transform an epoch not only by what we conceal, but also conversely by what we add to it in retrospect. In a 20-volume German encyclopaedia, between 1905 and 1917, the period of the explosion of the labour movement, whose leaders at the time, respectful followers of Marx, had such great calibre (Liebknecht, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács and many others), Marx himself is done away with in only about ten lines, less than any small city of 20,000 inhabitants! Of course, we have excellent reasons for transforming the past according to our perception and our interests, which change it. But most of the time we carry out this revision without being aware of it, and then it becomes a mistake. For the time that goes from 1975 to 1980, I want to associate two names, which today can be seen as the poles of its radicalism. Having to use these names of the past actually shows in how bad a shape today’s radicalism is.

Jean-Pierre Voyer and Jacques Mesrine in radicalism, just like Stalinism and the left-wing though in conformism, were at their peak at that time. I quite doubt that they knew each other. Some books of the former and the book of the latter were published by the same publisher, but Voyer and Champ Libre broke off before Mesrine’s death, and this publisher obtained Mesrine’s rights only afterwards. Besides, while Voyer obviously knew who Mesrine was, the reverse is very unlikely. I do not know Voyer’s date of birth, but he must have been a few years younger than Mesrine, born in 1936, ten at most.

 

 

Voyer is of no interest as an individual. His signature used his person as a decoy. Thus he was quite known for having the world’s worst character, which is quite funny when we know him as the author of ‘Reich: How to Use’, which is a critique of character. The whole small circle where this bad reputation was being built thus preferred to be indignant about his real or alleged mischiefs, rather than grapple with the much more complex provocations of his texts. I have always thought that Voyer exaggerated this attitude because he thought something like: if Marx had had a harem of four or five maids instead of just one, a lot of moralist idiots would have stopped at this scandalous contradiction, with the emancipatory and miserabilist egalitarianism that they came to look for even in the ‘Manifesto’, instead of letting their catholic understanding corrupt his theory. Voyer pushed this situationnist technique of the apparent scandal as far as he could, which protected his work from many suffocated tomb raiders, yet apparently without compromising over this other situationnist requirement, consistency between theory and practice. So the character submitted itself to an tortuous exercise, in which measuring if he left more is hard to measure, given the pleasure he seems to have had doing so.

So what could be called the individual Voyer is as blank as any other. Voyer is a theory. And as he wrote himself: “The theory is the artillery, that is, what is always too short.” When in 1972 the Situationnist International collapsed, exhausted by its weaknesses, it was leaving behind a misunderstood defeat, 1968, and a great work in progress: the situationnists had started to build an understanding by destroying a few convictions, by reversing a few genitives. There were two dominant ways to appreciate this effort: first, to hide it, like the ideology that was publishing ‘Meyer’s Konversations Lexikon’s had concealed Marx in the beginning of the century; second, to applaud it, a dubious fate that also happened to Marx, from 1917. That second attitude is even more hostile than the first, because it claims a thought to be complete, and defends it, preserves it. The merit of a theory is to be attacked a lot. It provides angles of attack against the world only once it has provided some against itself. The situationnists, however, in the end, had warned against the vanity of applauding them. But after having insulted the “prositus”, through improbable ‘Book of pleasures’ and never-ending ‘Panégyrique’, with their former radicalism, they raised themselves to become the leaders of their own followship.

Against a surrounding conformism all the more powerful that it gave itself appearances of happy few, both lucky to be the small chosen people and extremely bold for staying so in the midst of so much imaginary adversity, only Voyer seems not to have admired the completion of the situationnist theory. As the dominant activity of this neo-conformism was to throw together anti-spectacle mouldings, Voyer, between 1975, ‘Introduction to the Science of Publicity’, and 1982, ‘Journal of contemporary prehistory’, was the first to try to put the supersession of the situationnist theory into practice by criticising it, knowing that denigrating is not criticising. The world, which had been according to situationnist theory, had capriciously broken free or, rather, was violently ridiculing its shortcomings. Even though they were still widely unknown, and though post-situationnists were racking their brain on the relationship between pollution and proletariat, the retired members of the movement rushed up to a Portugal in turmoil, where they anticipated unlikely achievements. Why was 68 a defeat? Mainly because 68 had been declared a victory by those who had been defeated. If they had known the shame of this defeat rather than the pride of a “victory”, they would have had nothing to defend, and they would have felt compelled to carry their project much beyond this unsatisfaction. In other words: the understanding of the world by those who wanted to change it, their theory, was inadequate to really manage to change it.

In seven years, sheltered from followship by his emotional unpredictability, by the situationnist conservatism and by the fearful hostility of dominant information and intelligentsia, Voyer, safe from the spectacle, pushed the most radical extension of the situationnist theory. He applied its own method to it and was the only one, in spite of the exhortations to do so by the late International. And to do so, he made a small but significant detour: he tackled Marx’s theory. Not like primitive antimarxists, free-traders or proudhonists, who vied in bad faith and bitterness; not like Leninist recuperators from various cliques, who turned Marx’s subversiveness into police thought and who were then paralysing humanity’s thought, from these Iranian fedaians to the Italian “autonomists”, or from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to these Portuguese leftists, who had all transformed him into an untouchable and sacred intellectual authority; not even like the situationnists, who attacked Marx using Marx, opposing the good part of the theory to the bad, but making the bad part of this theory trivial, which was now nothing more than a bad interpretation of the good part (again, a harem would have been better). Voyer attacked Marx on the content. And this content is economy. Marx never criticised economy, even though he claimed so, even though he believed so himself. Marx only supported one form of economy against another, but he never called into question the primacy of economy. Besides, he never took economy itself as an object, but its content, at best. Yet economy is a sort of mirage, of system of thought, of ideology in Marx’s sense, of religion; economy is an explanation of the world,  but only for those who manage it, and Marx significantly helped them to make believe this explanation by all those who endure those who manage it. At the time when Voyer was putting this view, which was sacred in every mind, in perspective, even the old situationnists, already quite decrepit as it turned out, preferred to think that Voyer’s character was just going on with his childish provocations; admittedly, the alternative implied to hurtfully revise the whole situationnist theory, and that was much to ask from prematurely old men, whose claim to fame was just a defeat, which they had survived, without much glory. Faced with the outrage, they shut up. Furious about what was a major treason, Voyer broke off with Champ Libre, then Debord, who was not yet the scumbag he became on the same slope.

To criticise Marx, Voyer used a weapon that was as formidable as it was unexpected: Hegel. One of the most untouchable dogmas of Marx’s theory so far was indeed his position on Hegel. In this Marxist (in a broad sense) world, understanding Hegel had become impossible, because the filter through which Marx saw him then belonged as much to Hegel as to Marx, and there was, as far as I know, no mind that even thought of questioning it. This reversal operated by Voyer gave his theory its content; because, after the critique of Marx as an economist, after the critique of economy, a conclusion was yet to come. Supported by the Hegelian method, but which a priori no longer walked on its head, Voyer had to supersede the negative and, from the indetermination, extract the principle of its object, which was the world. That is how Voyer revealed communication as the principle of the world. Three years later, in 1982, not without having defended his critique of economy and continued to develop the concept of communication in relation to the concept of alienation, he, in turn, shut up.

Voyer’s conclusions look like the arson while the situationnist theory is now just the matches. The situationnist theory, which had seemed as haughty as its tone, was actually just the start of a questioning stemming from common sense and of the indignation resulting from a few dominant inauthenticities and injustices. But Voyer’s theory had burst the society aspect that impeded the situationnist thought so much: in form as much as in content, it created a requirement, a sink-or-swim, which eradicates many post-situationnist compromises. Voyer’s theory started to give the lie to his author’s modesty, still very situationnist: no, theory is not what is too short. Actually, if one looks carefully what artillery is, one has to admit that in war, artillery is what goes the furthest; except, of course, what leads the artillery: the mind.

The world took revenge on Voyer, who thought he was taking revenge on it. By avoiding the spectacle, he received the censorship of silence. The guardians of his theory, the only ones who met it, were his enemies, the post-situationnists. Some did not understand it, and they can be excused, because it is not only shocking, but difficult; but most refused to understand, because the difficulty of a theory is not in its words or its sentences, but in the demand in life. The world went on as if Voyer had not said anything. So much so that ten years later, when critique was finally returned to him [1], the world had reduced Voyer to the silence he had criticised ten years earlier. As he had stated himself, calling it the law of history: “Woe to the vanquished.”

 

 

Mesrine is not radical because of a theory that he built or propagated. And I am as wary of the direct testimonies about him as of those about Voyer, because he has become a sort of myth, and even if those who talk about him are not mystifiers, they are usually mystified, which also distorts their judgement. So I can only use one source in order to talk about Mesrine: his autobiography, published in 1977, and called ‘l’Instinct de mort’ (‘The Death Instinct’).

In this book, Mesrine retells his outlaw’s life. The most striking anachronism is probably the closed milieu in which the outlaw belongs, as its limit has been so deformed or has even disappeared in many ways today, especially through the rise of drugs. And what already supports this dilution of the “milieu”, is the way Mesrine entered it. He was not starving or an orphan: his father was a small boss; there is no single important event that “threw” him into crime, but an elusive and, so to speak, continuous course. His few required predispositions are very common: an early fascination for firearms and a definite taste for physical conflict. Although he took up very early the career he ended up mastering, Mesrine is an embodiment of the proximity between the “milieu” and the middle of society, and how anyone can become an extreme considered unimaginable through an ordinary combination of circumstances. While he sometimes likes to play to the gallery, Mesrine shows without ostentation that becoming public enemy No. 1 does not result from a particular quality. Yes, sorry, from one, a little paradoxical actually: being extremely honest is necessary and sufficient. And the first step of this honesty is the hardest: to become more honest than the hypocritical society that claims to teach us this virtue by placing it in an iniquitous, contradictory and ever-tampered with code of laws. Indeed, the average citizen obeys it because he is also satisfied with this relativity of honesty.

Then, Mesrine’s life is like a career in a particular professional environment. He always takes the time to place himself within this environment, because he knows it, and does not claim to know everyone. He often insists on his “professionalism”. His esteem for his environment is as ambivalent as the one of the best of the class for the average. Twice, he attempted sorts of internships of several months in the outside world, that is, legal waged labour. Whatever he may think, his treatment in this world was not worse than the majority of those who spend their whole existence there. As a man used to the respect due to his excellence in his environment, he felt frustrated, although always modest, in ordinary waged labour. Besides, while that other environment does not seem enviable to him, neither does it seem unbearable. And this great thief and killer will be absolutely indignant at being accused of stealing and assassinating a random civilian woman. He calls “villainy” both this accusation and what he is accused of.

There are no direct references to the great bandits of the past in ‘l’Instinct de mort’, from Robin Hood to Bonnot via Lacenaire or Ravachol; there is no mention of the past or present movements of revolt either. The events of 1968, for instance, during which he was 32 years old, are never evoked. We do not know explicitely if he had political sympathies, and he does not talk about religion, which does not indicate whether or not he had one. Very early, however, he took and named “society” as the object of his blame. To him, this “society” is the whole of a system and its logic, personified by the bureaucracy and its armed forces, and characterised by a pettiness, a dryness and a narrowness of views and of life, a permanent and fierce resentment, which he finds concentrated in the penitentiary and insertion system. He realises with disillusioned lucidity how this society, which disgusts him, transforms its prisoners into irreconcilable enemies, and its irreconcilable enemies into prisoners, in an absurd vicious circle. This rule, OK, he admits it, but his enemies will have to admit what he brings in: a great anger.

The legacy of Mesrine is his code of life. It is a number of rules that he imposed upon himself, and that he tried to impose upon others. Mesrine is not a Solon. These rules are in part random, in part dictated by the surrounding rules, in part stemming from his experience. In this, he is like everyone else: everybody is forced to extend or divert the law depending on their particular situation. But what sets Mesrine apart, is that even when his laws became hard, for others or for him, he concluded that he could not compromise; and that he published them, through his book, only at the end unfortunately. Indeed, the great difficulty of our own, individual rules, is that even where they seem undisputable, obvious, the other does not know them and may not share them. If I had met Mesrine, for instance, about the validity of murder, we would probably have agreed; but if the encounter had been about the respect of family, we would certainly have become enemies. Mesrine worshiped his father and his daughter, and never saw family as the basis of what he hated in “society”.

He called his choice of life “adventure”. And it is not an idealised or touristic adventure. It is a high stake for a hypothetical benefit. To simplify: the pleasure, the benefit, is freedom (where attacking banks become a relaxation); the stake, the price to pay, is prison (where escaping becomes the main concern). A few great principles underlie this non-idealised adventure. First, respect for the word. This simple rule is the most shared, in intent. All the states and all the religions make respect for the word, so truth, a commandment. But what honours Mesrine is that, unlike institutions and most individuals, whatever the temptation, whatever the threat, he keeps his word. When he promises a vengeance while angry, it is a word. And so, with suicidal recklessness, he attacked a prison he had escaped from! His reputation as a rigorist, which to him was mere dignity, resulted in journalists speaking of him carefully when he was free, but then even when he was back in jail, which has ever only happened to Stalin in this half-century, and because of an opposite method; and in the last months of his life, he was one of the most popular people in France.

Friendship was his second most sacred principles. When a man is a friend, one does not ask questions, one trusts. One can kill or be killed for him. Friendship for Mesrine seems to have always prime over love; the friend always has priority over the lover. Almost as old as respect for the word, this principle is much debated. The sociologist Luhmann puts forward the odd argument that, in the codification of intimacy, friendship and love “started even” in the beginning of the 18^th century, but then love stood out. To find the opposite in Mesrine, although he seems to have been hot-headed, echoes the archaism of the outlaw “milieu”, this closed society that many novels and films tried to present as a sort of chivalry.

The respect for the word and for friendship is kept in Mesrine only because of a very rare courage, and an extreme lucidity supported by a much trained intelligence. But these two qualities only became exceptional because Mesrine brought down very early two mental blocks inherent in our education, and which seems only rarely overcome even among other professional outlaws. First, he considers offense to be as legitimate as defense, that there is no guilt in attacking before the enemy; second, and consequently, that killing is not a fault, when it comes to enemies. He identifies two kinds of enemies: those in his milieu who fail to live up to their word, friendship of respect; and those who are paid by society to bear arms against thieves and killers like him.

By publishing ‘l’Instinct de mort’, Mesrine was as honest and courageous as in his other actions. He displayed his opinions, but also his crimes, his escapes and his intentions. Si when he succeeded his fourth and last escape, putting back in prison such an honest (may I remind the reader that attacking a bank, a jewellery, a company pay, is only dishonest for the party of bankers, jewellers and company bosses, who in turn are considered as dishonest by all the other parties), dangerous man, who had strongly stated he was “at war” with society, was now out of the question. On 3 November 1979, the French police ambushed and killed him, against the laws of this state, and in accordance with Mesrine’s accusations: while society’s law is its word, Mesrine was the guardian of the word, of truth. Only the ability to overcome the legal and moral prejudices lacked for this proof to be transported into the streets by a great anger of the silent, who had just lost one of their rare spokespersons who had not usurped their voice.

 

 

I always found a touching desuetude in the seriousness with which Paul Mattick handed down to posterity the biographies of his brothers in arms of a lost movement, the councilist movement of the early 20^th century. Korsch, Pannekoek, Rühle appeared in this gallery for a certain comradeship and a definite nostalgia. My evocation of Voyer and Mesrine is far from similar. First, I have never known either of them personally, which I never had the opportunity or the desire to do anyway. Then, I do not belong to their generation, be it by age or by common references. I feel, on the opposite, part of a movement who was the first, and it is one of its rare victories, to reject leadership and stardom, although insufficiently to ban them from the whole epoch.

A large area, not officially marked out, left us a priori free to choose our behaviours, our goals and our relationships, with each other and with society. The more the informal rules of this blurred area appear to be hypocritical laws concealed as a lack of laws, the more we need models to build and justify our existence. The revolted generations since the revolution in Iran, when they find the models hammered by “culture” pathetic, and since they quite efficiently refused for their own acts of revolts to be career springboards, look for models in the recent past. The eulogy of Voyer and Mesrine firstly contribute to end this need, which is thus retroactive. By presenting past radicalism positively, one mostly says that it is past. This is easy to notice from the content itself: only the Bibliothèque des Emeutes [Riots’ Library] could perform Voyer’s eulogy, because it is the only one that criticised him according to his own method; as for Mesrine, he is dead, and the film industry, which was able to take him over with impunity, has by itself gauged the extent of his defeat. From the point of view of revolt, that Mesrine could enter into the spectacle, as a hero, is not a strength of that spectacle, but indeed a weakness of Mesrine, ignorant of the critique of the spectacle which was beginning in his time, and which nowadays results in any journalist being thrown out of any riot, any act of revolt. Voyer could be hushed up, and Mesrine shouted, by the same liars on which they each had declared their intention to take revenge. No at all: they were the ones on which “society”, in Mesrine’s sense, took revenge.

Today, the Voyer’s and Mesrine’s children met. First they convey an old demand, which Voyer and Mesrine shared: the unity of word and action, of theory and practice. The situationnists had proclaimed the intangibility of this law, but essentially in reaction to a time when the urbane theorist could announce a radical change of the existing conditions, at the same time every day, at the terrace of the Deux Magots café. By affirming that their thought’s excellence was their life’s excellence, and vice versa, as proven in 1968, they restored, for the last time, the authenticity and integrity of the individual, who could be understood as potentially being the total individual, or the universal man with an encyclopaedic knowledge. But the revolution in Iran has already shown the significantprogress of the separation between thought and practice, which continued. In the same way, and at the same time, the very differences between Voyer and Mesrine, which set them absolutely apart from each other, confirmed that this separation was continuing to progress everywhere with alienation. And the situationnists themselves, enemies of this world, are peacefully dying of old age, crowned with the laurels of their renunciations. So that thinking like Voyer while living like Mesrine really is a fantasy of orphans who were not able to criticise their genitors.

Here they are, discussing the world, unlike Mesrine. Here they are, discussing their life, unlike Voyer. But in order to understand this world, one needs time, and a good observatory, and to go unnoticed in the crowd is better than to express one’s rage; but wait, how odd are these principles: as enemies of this world, are we not enemies of this crowd’s docility, and is the understanding of this world not so obvious that choosing one place over another is pointless, and that patience seems to be the enemy’s quality?

Voyer’s and Mesrine’s radicalism is proportional of their courage. Mesrine’s courage is better known, it corresponds to the common meaning of courage, physical courage. What is at stake is physical integrity, life, in detail and in whole. This courage is quite frequent, but Mesrine excelled in it because he made it last long. Those who risk their life usually do it once, or during the age when they are “reckless”; but Mesrine took as many risks for twenty years, without the same taste for it. He showed a common courage, but a lot of common courage.

Voyer showed little courage, but a rare courage. It is the courage of ideas. Mesrine, for instance, only criticises the imperfections of this world: it is a world that says that word and friendship must be respected, but does not do it. The causes of this contradiction do not concern him. Stealing and killing is fair, this world does it too, and take revenge on this world is fair, just as this world takes revenge on those who steal and kill its defenders. Mesrine does not want to disrupt this world, let alone end it; reforming it seems to be enough. Voyer goes much further. By criticising economy, deep beliefs, hierarchies of values collapse. By applying the negative to Marx and the situationnists, the perspectives of human history are changed. What seemed certain for the most critical is also criticised; the certainty we have of things and people is no longer based on what has been said or done, but on what will be said and done, no longer on the past, but on the future. The risk is not essentially death, but being wrong; the stake is not formal truth, but actual truth.

In the war against this world, these two attitudes appear to be contradictory today. If my life is the centre of this war, then what do I care about Voyer’s distant views, what do I care about the perspectives of history? Mesrine’s pleasure, honour and the taste for fighting, for adventure, this is what this war consists in. But if the realisation of which I am a part is the main thing, then the pleasure if the pleasure of the idea (it is surprising how much this particular sensation of pleasure is ignored or denied as if it were a kind of perversion) , and I have the taste for victory, for logic. In this war, Voyer has the strategist’s role, behind the lines, and Mesrine has the warrior’s, at the front lines.

The time where the insurrection in Algeria downgrades to a war, and where the same wearing replaces the greatness of a perspective with the relentlessness of a bloody struggle in the townships of South Africa, the main cities of Kashmir and the autonomous districts of Mogadiscio, is a time where there is an abundance of the taste for tactics, which is the art of the battle, while there is a shortage of the pleasure of strategy, which is the art of war. The warriors without strategy, defeated in detail, are not only defeated, they also weaken those, more numerous, who stayed one step behind. Facing tragic and pointless vanities, what lacks is to know in which direction to attack. While less flashy, while it dazzles the opposite sex less than the direct and specific attack, this indication is the most precious, the most sought-after.

That is why Jean-Pierre Voyer survives Jacques Mesrine.

 

 

[1] In 1991, following an article by Jean-Pierre Voyer in the paper ‘l’Imbécile de Paris’, Adreba Solneman undertakes this critique at the same time as ‘From 9 January 1978 to 4 November 1979’ is published. (Note of the editor.)

 

 

(Abstract from the ‘Bulletin n° 8 de la Bibliothèque des Emeutes’ [‘Bulletin No. 8 of the Riots’ Library’], text from 1995.)

 

 

 

POST FESTUM

 

Singing praises is not part of the methods of this book’s authors, and when they force oneself to do so, like for Voyer and Mesrine, they are quite justly punished. Since Mesrine is dead, he did not contradict us; but Voyer continued to survive, apparently with the only purpose of giving the lie to the generous praises of the Riots’ Library.

The correspondence between Voyer and Adreba Solneman, in ‘l’Imbécile de Paris’ in 1991 and beyond this sinister paper, which had allowed Voyer to tamper with Adreba Solneman’s first letter before its publication, and had then been very careful not to let its audience know about the disagreements of this correspondent, had ended with Voyer’s headlong flight. Facing massive critiques from his interlocutor, Voyer begged him to let him be free to be silent; otherwise Adreba Solneman would be “an oppressor”. The courage of critique, which Voyer showed against Debord, and which the text above was still complimenting him for, had already deserted him when his turn came to be criticised.

In 1995, the members of the Riots’ Library thought that Voyer had simply become an old dead tree which had once fine fruits, and we still think so. But what the authors of ‘Mesrine and Voyer’ did not know, is that as soon as 1992, Voyer had published an edition of his articles in ‘l’Imbécile de Paris’ in an homonymous book, and included the part of the correspondence with Adreba Solneman that he had already doctored in the rag in question. The second part, which is the critical part (most of it is included in the next chapter in ‘End of the infinite communication’), is not even mentioned, so that Voyer, who cleared off so pathetically, even seems to have had the last word in his own edition! The third parties who may have been interested in the exchange could not have known that the dispute did not end there, let alone that it was only starting, and that it led to a critique of Voyer’s theory from top to bottom.

In 1998, we found out about this blatant falsification. In disbelief, we first accused the publisher – the Editions Anonymes – before becoming convinced that Voyer himself had wanted this falsification, whose purpose was simply to shield his outdated theory from critique. Later, this sterile and deceitful old man stood out through further manipulations and falsifications, always aimed at staging his own excellence and hiding what showed his limits. He even resorted to quote his doormat of a publisher, who used to boast that Voyer’s replies are like balls: some had some, some did not. Voyer’s replies are indeed like balls: when he replies, it means there is no need for them, and when he does not reply, that is because he does not have any.

So we only know since 1998 that Voyer had given up formal truth at the same time as he had given up actual truth, in other words, that he started to falsify as soon as he was unable to bring his theory into play again. Since then, with a caution still related to the same incredulity, we note that the showing off and the polishing for the public were already present in his past theory, which was still influencing us so much in 1995. We also noted that while “Voyer’s conclusions look like the arson while the situationnist theory is now just the matches”, those conclusions were not Voyer’s true conclusions. One has to accept it: Voyer superseded the situationnists in theory, then in compromise of principle and dishonesty. Today, this likeable emotional person has followers whom he flatters, finds foils for himself in order to keep publically bringing up his old and already obsolete theories, and no longer works but on his posthumous fame, by fleeing from any real confrontation. While the whole could still seem subversive in 1995, in 2001 the most accurate description of the work of this theorist turned falsifier is: theory of resignation.

So Voyer had the rare misfortune of being a brief meteor in the sky of “theory” which shone alone for twenty years without succeeding to break through obscurity, and which only starts to emerge from the shadow precisely when, with his theory refuted for good and his dishonest methods exposed, he has become one of the most despicable wrecks of his time.

The detail of the Adreba Solenman-Voyer correspondence is published on the Teleology Observatory’s site (www.teleologie.org). At the same address, the range of the shameful defences initiated since 1998 by the publisher and some of Voyer’s other followers, who tried to prove him innocent, to protect his flight and to bury the fundamental questions raised by modern teleology by imputing us motives and making various inventions, slanders and falsifications, again and again.

 

(Text from 2001.)

 

 

Translator’s note: the first part of this text was originally published in French as “Deux briseurs de jeu (ou comment Jean-Pierre Voyer survit à Jacques Mesrine)” in the Bulletin No. 8 of the ‘Bibliothèque des Emeutes’ in 1995, and the full text including the ‘post festum’ published on teleologie.org in 2001, and again in ‘La Naissance d’une idée, tome II. Téléologie moderne‘ in 2002.