After having lived in Montreal, this professor of French literature at Stanford University was passionate about the figure of the revolutionary Guy Debord as much as for the character of Tintin.
The essayist Jean-Marie Apostolidès is dead. Born in France in 1943, in Saint-Bonnet-Tronçais, he spent several years in Quebec, where he had his share of friends, before teaching at Harvard, then becoming a professor of French literature and theater studies at Stanford University.
He had contributed to rediscovering the work of Patrick Straram, the Bison ravished, monument of the Quebec counter-culture, while also taking a close interest in the situationist movement and Guy Debord in particular.
A specialist in the avant-gardes, Apostolidès has published The Tombs of Guy Debord (2006). He is also the author of a biography of the author of The entertainment society titled Guy Debord, the wrecker (2015). He sees in the figure of the revolutionary Debord that of a moralist of the XXe century with a very classic style. His perspective on it was very strongly criticized by a fellow traveler of the situationist movement, Gianfranco Sanguinetti. For Apostolidès, Guy Debord “embodied in his own way the contradictions of left-wing intellectuals, which he was nevertheless able to denounce, and with what virulence, from Morin to Godard”.
It was Apostolidès again who had translated into French the Manifesto against industrial society (1996) by Theodore Kaczynski (Unabomber), subsequently offering a prefaced and annotated edition by him.
Jack-of-all-trades, Jean-Marie Apostolidès was also very interested in the world of comics. A specialist of Hergé, he has devoted many essays to the illustrious little reporter with a powder puff, including, in 1984, Tintin’s MetamorphosesThen The Tintin Archipelago in collaboration with Benoît Peeters.
In 2012, with the Montreal designer Luc Giard, himself passionate about Tintin, Jean-Marie Apostolidès published a graphic novel with oriental accents: Konoshiko. Apostolidès had undertaken to make the work of this “underground” Montreal designer better known. At Duty, Luc Giard affirms that this death constitutes “a huge hole in his life”. Apostolidès had been one of the first to promote his unclassifiable work on the international scene.
Jean-Marie Apostolidès taught psychology in Montreal in the early 1970s, after having lived for a time in Toronto. He returned quite regularly thereafter to Montreal, while continuing to nurture a protean body of work. It was the publication, in 1981 by Éditions de Minuit, of his book on power, The Machine King who had made him the most famous, when he made the Sun King, Louis XIV, a well-established spectacle factory. He has also published plays as well as a study devoted to Cyrano, qwho was everything and who was nothingthe romantic character of Edmond Rostand.
“All existences are interdependent with each other”, wrote Apostolidès in 2001, in a novel entitled The Hearing.
In 2021, an international symposium was dedicated to him at the University of Strasbourg.
Jean-Marie Apostolidès was 79 years old. He died of a massive cancer.