Incitement to Self-Defense
"I come to explain to you from whence comes this reputation and these calumnies. Thus, listen. Certain people among you believe that I am joking; nevertheless, be sure that I will only say the tell."
-- Plato, Apology of Socrates.
"I will punish you for your ways, while your abominations are in your midst. Then you will know that I am the Lord."
-- Ezechiel, VII, 4.
Contents
New revised edition, published by Editions Allia, 2005. First edition published in 1995. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! November 2007.
According to Editions Alia, Michel Bounan was born in Paris in 1942. Today he is known as a physician and writer. A personal friend of Guy Debord, who strongly influenced his ideas, he has written nine books, all of them published by Allia. None of them has been published in English. It is this last fact or, rather, the circumstances in which The Time of AIDS (1990) was rejected by Verso Books that motivated him to write this Incitement to Self-Defense. Though we ourselves have a few reservations about some of his assertions, which we have indicated by way of footnotes, we believe that his books certainly merit being widely distributed, read and discussed in the English-speaking world. They undeniably enrich and increase the relevance and usefulness of the Marxist-situationist tradition of social critique.