Jean-Michel Mension
(24 septembre 1934 - 6 mai 2006)

The Tribe
by Jean-Michel Mension translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

(City Lights Publishers ; First US edition. edition (October 1, 2001)

ABSTRACT

Between 1952 and 1954, Jean-Michel Mension haunted Saint-Germain-des-Prés as a member of the legendary Letterist International, direct progenitor of the Situationist International. In a series of conversations, Mension recounts this very particular vie de bohème whiled away with Guy Debord and a rogue’s gallery of hard drinkers and thinkers.

The Tribe is a rare, vivid tour of a moment and milieu barely noticed at the time by the tourists who flocked to the Left Bank for a glimpse of Sartre & Co. The rich iconography includes many of Ed van der Elsken’s celebrated photographs of "the tribe" and a trove of Letterist leaflets and posters. A rare, vivid tour of a moment and milieu barely noticed at the time by the tourists flocking to Saint-Germain for a glimpse of Sartre & Co.

"The Tribe relates the Parisian wanderings of a heterogeneous group of individuals who cultivated laziness and revolt, alcohol and talk, drift and chance, creative hopes and encounters . . . in quest of a Rimbaldian derangement of all the senses, of détournement of art and daily life in the defiance of order, by vandalism, by deliquency, but also by an altogether contemporary quest for a supersession of Marxism." —Le Monde libertaire

"In his oral memoir The Tribe, Jean-Michel Mension provides a useful context for [Guy] Debord’s particular estrangement from postwar modernity. Mension reveals a multicultural dimension that is rarely explored in the burgeoning literature on this group . . . " —McKenzie Wark, Bookforum

"Mension, who began submitting writing to the Letterist journal at 18, recounts life in this fascinating, emphatically improvident, quasi-anarchist subculture, delivering vivid anecdotes and a still-fresh scoff-law sensibility." —Publishers Weekly

Jean-Michel Mension (1934 - 2006) misspent his youth in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the early 1950s before joining the Communist Party in 1962 and the Ligue Communiste in 1968. The Tribe is Mension’s first book ; he published his second in 2001 : Le Temps gage : aventures politiques et artistique d’un irrégulier à Paris.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1105832.Jean_Michel_Mension

La Tribu : entretiens avec Gérard Berréby et Francesco Milo Di Villagrazia
Jean-Michel Mension

éd. Allia (1997 - septembre 2001)

NOTE DE L’EDITEUR

“Avec Debord, on allait boire tous les deux tout seuls, lui sa bouteille, moi la mienne, dans la cour de Rohan. Il y avait un petit escalier, on s’asseyait en bas, sur les marches, et on soliloquait, en buvant parfois un litre, parfois deux… C’était l’apéritif, en quelque sorte, et après on allait chez Moineau. Guy avait une culture déjà très développée. Moi, j’étais la révolte.”
De 1952 à 1954, Jean-Michel Mension participa entre la rue de Buci et la rue du Four à l’existence chaotique et alcoolisée de l’Internationale lettriste. Il évoque dans ces entretiens ces années de révolte à Saint- Germain-des-Prés en compagnie de Debord, mais aussi d’autres figures moins connues et souvent fascinantes, comme Chtcheglov, Wolman, Guilbert, etc.

https://www.amazon.fr/Jean-Michel-Mension/e/B001K74VMK

Jean-Michel Mension