An audacious autobiography by the founding figure of the Situationist International
Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931 and committed suicide in 1994. A Marxist theorist, French writer, poet, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Letterist International and Situationist International, Debord is best known as the leading theoretician of the situationist movement. His works translated into English include The Society of the Spectacle, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, and Panegyric.
"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." London Review of Books
"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." London Review of Books
Through the 1960s, France's international situationist movement advanced an influential aesthetic critique of capitalist society and called for an anarchic, spontaneous counterculture. With Panegyric , the situationists' guru Debord has launched what may be either a more sophisticated attempt to disrupt and subvert contemporary culture or simply an elaborate French joke. The book appears to be a rough draft of Debord's memoirs, but even the most devoted reader will search in vain for any interesting revelation about situationism, about the events in which Debord has played an important role, or even about the author's own life, short of the information that he has spent much of it inebriated. Nor is there much pleasure in the reading itself, for the book has been translated with neither imagination nor elegance. Pity those who would pay for these meager pages.-- Timothy Christenfeld, Columbia Univ.
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