Works Selected by Marcel Mariën

The texts in this volume by the leader of the Belgian section of the Surrealist movement were selected by his old friend and co-conspirator Marcel Mariën a few months before the latter’s recent death. Mariën, however, was more than just a colleague of Nougé’s, most of Nougé’s writings first saw print in Mariën’s magazine Les Lèvres nues (12 issues between 1954 and 1958) and later appeared in books bearing the same publishing imprint. Mariën’s selection was hardly representative! - no theoretical or political texts, and only one poem. His introduction stresses Nougé’s predeliction for re-writing other authors’ works (as exemplified in the longest text included here), a form of plagiarism promoted by the Situationists as détournement, and the writings of Debord, Wolman et al., including their essay on this particular method, also made their first appearances in the pages of Les Lèvres nues.