Michèle Bernstein
| Michèle Bernstein | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
April 28, 1932 Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Organization | Situationist International |
| Spouse(s) | Guy Debord |
Michèle Bernstein (born 28 April 1932) is a French novelist and critic, most often remembered as a member of the Situationist International from its foundation in 1957 until 1967, and as the first wife of its most prominent member, Guy Debord.
Bernstein was born in Paris, of Russian descent. In 1952, bored by her studies at the nearby Sorbonne, she began to frequent Chez Moineau, a bar at 22 rue du Four. There she encountered a circle of artists, writers, vagabonds and petty criminals who were beginning to establish themselves as the Letterist International. With one of these, Patrick Straram, she toured Le Havre in August, 1952, in order to see the places upon which Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea had been modelled. On 17 August, 1954, she married another member of the group, Guy Debord, and took a more active role in contributing to its publications (primarily its bulletin, Potlatch). Bernstein recalls that Debord had earlier tried to pick her up in a café in front of the Sorbonne, but that she had shaken her cigarette and said something disparaging. However, they first became friends, and then lovers: 'I did love him, and I am sorry he is not here with us now'.
The Letterist International were primarily concerned with (i) transcending traditional artistic activities to produce 'situations' for themselves; (ii) to drifting aimlessly around urban environments in order to assess their psychogeography; and (iii) to diverting pre-existing texts and other materials to new ends. By 1957, however, most of the members of the Letterist International had either quit or been forcibly excluded, and the remnants opted to fuse with two other groups to form the Situationist International. Bernstein and Debord visited Cosio di Arroscia in July 1957: the Situationist International officially came into being there on July 28. The other two groups involved were the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Committee. The former was an offshoot of the earlier CoBrA group of artists; the latter was not really a 'group' at all, but merely a name given to a single British artist, Ralph Rumney.
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