Product Description

""My method will be very simple. I will tell of what I have loved; and, in this light, everything else will become evident...??"" ??Guy Debord, as founding and pivotal figure of the Situationist International, pursued one of the twentieth century's most arch and exciting assaults on modern life. His 1967 Society of the Spectacle (followed, twenty years later, by Comments on the Society of the Spectacle) was a fierce critique of late-capitalist culture and became the signal text for those involved in the political events of May 1968 and beyond. Panegyric is Debord's audacious autobiography, and here for the first time in English is the second, beautifully illustrated volume published together with the spare and classical text of the first. A rare combination of poetry and precision, it tells of something even rarer: a life that refused to adjust to the dominant malignancies of its time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #476822 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 180 pages

Review
"These concise but extremely rich and provocative memoirs are the product of ... a philosopher whose scathing pen has never been so sharp." -- John Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle "A brief and elegiac memoir of a life lived in its shadows and cracks." - Artforum "As cryptic and self-effacing a self-portrait as can be found anywhere ... Panegyric is almost purely literary, in the sense that one need know or care nothing of the author to be captured by it: Debord is seeking to hijack his era into timelessness." -- Greil Marcus, London Review of Books

About the Author
Guy Debord was born in 1931, in Paris. From 1954 to 1957 he was a member of the Letterist International and the editor of Potlatch. He edited the journal Internationale situationniste from 1958 to 1969. In addition to his written works, he made six films between 1952 and 1978 whose scripts have been translated in English. He committed suicide on the 30 November 1994.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating glimpse into the psyche of Debord
If you are looking for a hard and fast chronology of the life and times of the leader of the situationists, then look elsewhere.

Touted as a "auto-biography" this short volume (79 pages) in fact contains little or no detail about the activities of the Letterists or Situationists, only mentioning these movements in passing.

Instead "Panegyric" finds Debord musing languidly in poetic prose on the subject of "what I have loved", "in this light" he states "everything else will become self-evident". Employing much use of quotations from his literary heroes such as Clausewitz, Villion, De Quincey and Saint-Simon, Debord "derives" through fragmentary chapters covering his love of alcohol, Paris, women, abhorrence of work, admiration for the historical strategies of war and men of battle, evoking neither "blame nor criticism".

A volume that tells us only as much as Debord wanted us to know, but that is much more than any of the other voluminous "unofficial" biographies of this complex and fascinating man.