Translator's preface

This translation of Raoul Vaneigem's Le Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations was done a few years ago at the suggestion of Free Life Editions, New York. Although Free Life ceased all publication before the book could be brought out, I would like to thank them for sponsoring the project and for assisting me in a variety of ways while work was in progress.

I am also indebted to earlier translators of al or parts of the Traité , among them John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking, who in 1972 published the only full-length version that I know of (London: Practical Paradise Publications). I have stolen shamelessly from all such precursors, and I am especially obliged to CW, CG and BE.

Thanks are due too, for various forms of essential aid, to PL and YR in Paris; to RE and TJC in the United States; and to Rebel Press in London.

I must also express my gratitude to Raoul Vaneigem, who authorised the translation and answered al my queries without betraying the slightest sign of fatigue.

The Revolution of Everyday Life is not a title I care for; I would have preferred The Rudiments of Savoir-Vivre: A Guide for Young Persons Recently Established in the World, or more simply The Facts of Life for Younger Readers. The publishers are doubtless right, however, in preferring not to depart from the title by which the work has by now become known to the English-speak­ing public.

I have obstinately resisted the well-intentioned urgings of many people that I should overstep the role of translator and become an editor as well, by adding footnotes, glosses, biographical sketches of 'obscure personages', etc, etc. Nobody, I am afraid, has persuaded me of the need for any such spoonfeeding of the reader. I wish it were not necessary to state (though I am quite sure it is) that my part in the publication of this book does not imply my adherence to any or all of its theses, much less my affiliation with any real or conjectured, 'Vaneigemist' or 'Debordist', post-, pro-, crypto-, neo- (or, for that matter, anti-) situationist tendency or clique. The ardent student of the Situationist International, who is not such a rara avis as common sense might lead one to expect, may readily ascertain that I was expelled from that organisation in 1967. That parting of the ways seemed to me then - and still seems to me thoroughly justified on both sides.

It is nonetheless my earnest hope that this new edition of Vaneigem's book will serve both to enlighten another 'younger generation' and, by increasing the work's warts-and-all accessibility to English-language readers, militate against those absurd hagiographical impulses which mystify the Situationist International's doughty contributions instead of rescuing them from the clutches of enemies and pillagers with a shared interest in consign­ing them to oblivion.

I should like to dedicate this translation to Cathy Pozzo di Borgo.

Donald Nicholson-Smith
October 1982

Translator's note to the second Rebel Press/Left Bank edition

I hace taken this opportunity to make a considerable number of revisions to the translation. My thanks to MNR - and, once again, to Rebel Press.

D.N-S.
September 1993