It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Gianfranco Sanguinetti, which occured on October 3. He was 77 years old. The news were shared on his website, with the following press release (translation into English is mine):
Gianfranco Sanguinetti, a writer and major figure of the Situationist International, who denounced state terrorism, the crisis of capitalism, and the emergence of “Western despotism” from the 1970s onward, died in Prague on October 3, 2025, at the age of seventy-seven.
He was born in Pully, Switzerland, on July 16, 1948, to Teresa Mattei, a member of the French Resistance and politician, and Bruno Sanguinetti, a member of the French Resistance and industrialist.
From his youth, he was active in the avant-garde and rebel movements that, from the mid-1960s onward, shook Europe and the world at large. A member of the Situationist International, he founded its Italian section in 1969. Three years later, with Guy Debord, he affirmed the need to move beyond this period by co-signing the dissolution of the organization (The True Split in the International).
A connoisseur of the letters and thought of the Ancients, he used them as a powerful tool for interpreting contemporary reality with a sharp and relentless critique, lifting the veil that concealed the truth of things and highlighting the subversions carried out by the established powers.
In 1975, under the pseudonym Censor, he wrote and published the Rapporto veridico sulle ultime possibilità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia. It was a resounding hoax that kept politicians, authorities, security services, and the press busy for months, all of whom were committed to discovering the identity of the author of this cynical and merciless political-economic diagnosis, hailed as the work of a great right-wing operative.
He later revealed his identity in Proofs of the Inexistence of Censor Stated by its Author (1976), explaining the subversive intentions of this Report, revealing unspeakable truths.
He continued his work of demystification with On Terrorism and the State (1979), in which he was the first to expose the use of “false flag” terrorism by states—first and foremost the Italian state at the time—and their apparatuses.
He was responsible for the publication of Leopardi’s work in France.
During the years of his voluntary “exile” in Prague, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, while enriching his vast personal library, amassed a significant collection of erotic art. He also continued to write and publish on art, thought, and international political dynamics, always keeping a keen eye on what dominant propaganda strives to conceal, and denouncing the orchestration of appearances as well as the forms of contemporary authoritarianism, which he called “Western despotism.”
His archives are housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. A dedicated website https://www.gianfrancosanguinetti.com/ offers a complete biography and photos.
From some of our posts on about Sanguinetti and his work, see:
- Internazionale Situazionista (1969)
- Internazionale Situazionista – Corrispondenza con un’editore [1972]
- Debat d’orientation de l’ex-Internationale Situationniste [1974]
- Rapporto Veridico Sulle Ultime Opportunia di Salvare il Capitalismo en Italia [1975]; Prove Dell’Inesistenza di Censor [1976]
- Le Secret c’est de tout dire! [1989]
Situationniste Blog 
He led an honourable life. Farewell fellow worker.
Reification is what happens when our minds transform objects into living subjects and living subjects into passive objects.
”In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other the rights of private proprietors.”
– Marx, 1867
“as persons whose will resides in those objects”
“The commodity can be understood in its undistorted essence only when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the attitudes that people adopt toward it, as it subjugates their consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression. . . . As labor is increasingly rationalized and mechanized, this subjugation is reinforced by the fact that people’s activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.”
—Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
35
In the spectacle’s basic practice of incorporating into itself all the fluid aspects of human activity so as to possess them in a congealed form, and of inverting living values into purely abstract values, we recognize our old enemy the commodity, which seems at first glance so trivial and obvious, yet which is actually so complex and full of metaphysical subtleties.
36
The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “imperceptible as well as perceptible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a selection of images which is projected above it, yet which at the same time succeeds in making itself regarded as the perceptible par excellence.
37
The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its development is identical to people’s estrangement from each other and from their total production.
full: https://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/2.htm
Hurlements en faveur de Sanguinetti
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Bonjour
Savez-vous si un ou des ouvrages concernant G.Sanguinetti sont en cours de préparation ?
Merci d’avance
Thierry
je ne crois pas; mais dites moi si vous avez des infos!