All the King's Horses

by Michele Bernstein, John Kelsey (Introduction)

Overview

A Situationist International roman à clef, written by Guy Debord's first wife, a founder of the movement and one of its influential thinkers.

“What do you do, exactly? I have no idea.” “I reify,” he answered. “It's a serious job,” I added. “Yes, it is,” he said. “I see,” Carol observed with admiration. “Serious work, with big books and a big table cluttered with papers.” “No,” said Gilles. “I walk. Mostly I walk.”—from All the King's Horses

Michèle Bernstein's novel, All the King's Horses (1960), is one of the odder and more elusive, entertaining, and revealing documents of the Situationist International. At the instigation of her first husband, Guy Debord, Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to help swell the Situationist International's coffers. When she objected to the idea of practicing a “dead art,” Debord suggested that it would be instead be détournement—the Situationist reuse of media toward different, subversive, ends. Inspired by the pseudo-scandalous success of Roger Vadim's filmed version of Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses and the adolescent Françoise Sagan's bestselling novel Bonjour tristesse, Bernstein lampooned and borrowed from both Sagan and de Laclos, concocting a roman à clef that succeeded on several levels. A moneymaker for the most radical front of the French avant-garde, the novel (by its very success) demonstrated the bankruptcy of contemporary French letters and the Situationist contempt for the psychological novel, while (perhaps unintentionally) holding up a playful mirror to the private lives of two of the Situationist International's most important members.All the King's Horses is a slippery rewrite of Dangerous Liaisons with Debord playing the role of cold libertine, Bernstein as his cohort, and disguised walk-on roles by the likes of the painter Asger Jorn and others. Though Greil Marcus sparked interest in this novel in his 1989 book Lipstick Traces, All the King's Horses remained unavailable until its 2004 republication in France. This Semiotext(e) edition is its first translation into English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584350651
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	10/10/2008
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Michèle Bernstein was a founding member of the Situationist International with her first husband Guy Debord. After the end of the SI, she became a literary critic for the French left-wing magazine Libération.

Artist, critic, and gallerist John Kelsey cofounded the artists' collective The Bernadette Corporation, author of the novel Reena Spaulings (Semiotext(e)).

Artist, critic, and gallerist John Kelsey cofounded the artists' collective The Bernadette Corporation, author of the novel Reena Spaulings (Semiotext(e)).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“All the King’s Horses is a profoundly original, explosively subversive study of the alliance between classical architecture and despotism forged in fifteenth-century Italy when the brilliant but ambiguous scholar-architect Leon Battista Alberti, armed with the Ten Books on Architecture of the ancient Roman writer Vitruvius, helped a series of popes and warlords to dismantle the communal institutions that had turned the cities of medieval Italy into models of prosperity, and create what we know as the Italian Renaissance. The scent of fresh air is positively intoxicating.”
—Ingrid Rowland, Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame

“By reading the reappraisal of Vitruvius by such authors as Alberti, Filarete and Francesco di Giorgio against the background of the profound and problematic political transformation of the main centers of the Italian renaissance, All the King’s Horses masterfully demonstrates how the imperial ideology that Indra Kagis McEwen uncovered in her earlier work on Vitruvius lies at the very core of what she terms ‘the politics of antique revival’ in the Quattrocento. At once wide-ranging, erudite and piercing, this book is an indispensable critical examination of the mythology of renaissance architecture, its purpose, and its afterlife.”
—Maarten Delbeke, Professor and Chair of the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zürich