Edgar Wind has observed that the reason why Plato’s statement is so surprising to us is that art does not exert the same influence on us as it did on him. Only because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting do we welcome it so warmly. In a draft of The Man Without Qualities that Robert Musil wrote at a time when the definitive design of his novel was not yet clear in his mind, Ulrich (who still appears with his earlier name, Anders) enters the room where Agathe is playing the piano and feels an obscure and irresistible impulse that drives him to fire some gun shots at the instrument that is diffusing through the house such a “desolatingly” beautiful harmony. […] Plato, and Greek classical antiquity in general, had a very different experience of art, an experience having little to do with disinterest and aesthetic enjoyment. The power of art over the soul seemed to him so great that he thought it could by itself destroy the very foundations of his city. […] The term he uses when he wants to define the effects of inspired imagination is “divine terror,” a term that we, benevolent spectators, no doubt find inappropriate to define our reactions, but that nevertheless is found with increasing frequency, after a certain time, in the notes in which modern artists attempt to capture their experiences of art.

—Agamben, Man Without Content

really starting to see the comparison with Musil’s Man Without Qualities which Kauffmann draws; this could well be Debord’s epitaph

While he was, naturally, as ready as the next person to take credit for his successes, his knack for being borne upward with such ease by every lucky chance had always troubled him as a terrifying sign that he was lightweight. As often as he moved on to new activities and new people, he did it not simply from instability but in great inner turmoil, driven by anxiety that he had to move on to safeguard his spiritual integrity before he took root where the ground was already threatening to give way under him. His life had been a series of convulsive experiences from which emerged the heroic struggle of a soul resisting all compromise, never suspecting that in this way it was only creating its own dividedness. For all the time he was suffering and struggling for his intellectual integrity, as befits a genius, and investing all he had in his talent, which was not quite a great talent, his fate had silently led him in an inward full circle back to nothing.

— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction

Childhood was a period of incubation. Debord soon learned to respect nothing, to free himself of all moral standards, to devote himself to transgression, but lightheartedly, almost good-naturedly. He disliked Proust but liked Robert Musil. Marcel verses Ulrich. The first is a child who refuses to lose himself, who will never give up his mother’s affection, or his fascination with evil. The second is the man without any distinguishing features, without qualities, in love with his singularity, oblivious to gossip, incapable of playing the smallest social role, of living up to an image. And he is also the amnesiac child, beyond good and evil. He remembers his father when he receives a telegram announcing the man’s death, which suddenly brings back memories of Agatha, the sister he discovered at the bedside of the now dead father, a woman who was dragged into one of the most notorious and incestuous love affairs of twentieth-century literature. It was a passion between two lost children and produced nothing, endlessly. From it neither Ulrich nor Agatha would recover – the impossible experience of pure freedom. Sisterly incest verses maternal incest, forbidden games in checked pajamas versus nights spent with Maman in her nightgown. Debord may have had other reasons for preferring Musil to Proust, but his preference underlines his need for the most absolute, the most transgressive freedom. It is certainly one of the most perfect images of what a lost child is or wants to become.