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Panegyric
Guy Debord, as founding member 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 silver-tongue-in-cheek autobiography, which mixes precision and pastiche in a whirlwind account of philosophy, exploit, and inebriation. From the stark professions of Volume I to the illustrated sequences of Volume 2, Panegyric confronts us with a figure who strategically, demonically tried to wrest life from the disabling modern “spectacle.” 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.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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723 people want to read
About the author
Guy Debord
88 books829 followersGuy Ernest Debord was a French theorist, writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International. In broad terms, Debord's theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernization of the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces during the post-WWII modernization of Europe. Alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the 'spectacle'—"a social relation between people that is mediated by images." Central to this school of thought was the claim that alienation is more than an emotive description or an aspect of individual psychology; rather, it is a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism. Debord committed suicide, shooting himself in the heart at his property on November 30, 1994.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
May 12, 2009
This is not a new version of Debord's Panegyric, but a newly designed edition of this great memoir (of sorts). Part of Verso's "Radical Thinkers" series, this book has a profound affect on me. For the past eight years I have been working on a memoir, and this is the book that I keep going back to for some odd reason.
One, I really like the voice of Debord that comes through the book, and two, it shows the shadows of one's life but not fully exposing it's subject matter. It's a small book that feels good in the hand, and has a really lasting aftertaste.
One, I really like the voice of Debord that comes through the book, and two, it shows the shadows of one's life but not fully exposing it's subject matter. It's a small book that feels good in the hand, and has a really lasting aftertaste.
June 26, 2017
Guy Debord's idiosyncratic memoir feels like a future classic. It's beautifully written and elegantly constructed. His provocative insights feel increasingly relevant in our unravelling world.
November 21, 2021
If you’re after a literary autobiography, situating it’s self-object historically and critically, you will be disappointed. Debord’s panegyric to himself maintains an ironic, self-critical distance from its author. In this lacuna, he nonetheless finds ample space to reflect on insights of a life lived against and outside of its time; an unseasonable nature brought further into focus by regular allusions to the words and thoughts of figures long gone. The second part consists entirely of quotations and graphic ephemera from the author’s life and travels. The work ends with explicit instructions for translation and publishing of future editions, as well as references to subsequent volumes which Debord requested be burned shortly before his suicide. A cryptic yet moving contemplation on the follies and seasons of a life like few others, which refuses elucidation of its subject, preferring instead to render him a far stranger creature than the one we presume to know.
October 28, 2008
One of my very favorite books. I've read it many times and will read it many more. A real and beautiful work of art. Much more elegant and personal than Society of the Spectacle. Volume 2 is perfectly mysterious and gorgeous, and it's great to have it available at long last...
May 7, 2017
¿Quién dijo que las autobiografías era un género para librerías generalistas y escritas a rebufo de una necesidad económica?
Experimental, reveladora, vanguardista... Es la obra más literaria de Debord. Quizás osaría decir la mejor escrita de todas, en el sentido de que es la más lírica de una bibliografía llena de manifiestos y ensayos políticos. Pero precisamente por jamás desligarse de esa estela habría que reivindicarla como tal, por ser una canción de ídolos y de vidas arrebatadas, un poema hallado en la sombra de un reloj de sol, un himno de métaforas mudas.
A los que no puedan o apetezca leerla, os dejo al menos otro título: las Mémoires del Cardinal de Retz. Para Debord son una de las autobiografías más hermosas de la historia.
Experimental, reveladora, vanguardista... Es la obra más literaria de Debord. Quizás osaría decir la mejor escrita de todas, en el sentido de que es la más lírica de una bibliografía llena de manifiestos y ensayos políticos. Pero precisamente por jamás desligarse de esa estela habría que reivindicarla como tal, por ser una canción de ídolos y de vidas arrebatadas, un poema hallado en la sombra de un reloj de sol, un himno de métaforas mudas.
A los que no puedan o apetezca leerla, os dejo al menos otro título: las Mémoires del Cardinal de Retz. Para Debord son una de las autobiografías más hermosas de la historia.
April 5, 2020
He speaks of drinking as his greatest passion, he brags of his connoisseurship. He'd started liking mild drunkenness but then pushed past violent drunkenness into what he calls "a terrible and magnificent peace, the true taste of the passage of time." He's certainly romanticizing it. His ability to drink a lot and still function or seem undrunk in his youth or later is a sign that he's bound to be a very stubborn sort of alcoholic. In the end he killed himself rather than having to stop drinking to cure the alcohol related disease he'd accrued.
He speaks of drinking as a way to great writing which is a rare act. But his theoretical work is cold and analytical, only playful if you too have been reading Marx and Hegel and know how he's turning their words on their heads.
Alcohol limits fear, anxiety, and agitation by lowering brain activity, but I think of any euphoria or peace felt in drunkenness as an escape from the real into the imaginary. How can we see anything is real under the effects? Feelings of good, bad, or the neutral all come under question—so alcoholics tend to make up whatever their emotions are when it's likely just whatever the alcohol is doing to them at the moment. Alcohol is like a parasite that attempts to take over the host. And in Debord, it succeeded to such an extent he celebrates his descent and self-destruction.
He led a charmed life, he got to be the dissident, romantic artist/theorist he wanted to be, with seemingly no need to actually ever take on a real job. He did romanticize the poor and working class, though mostly the criminal element, who also worked harder than him. At the height of Situationist International when all art was essentially banned from the organization and it became strictly political, Debord and Co. would have hated to have been called romantic artists. But this is what they were essentially, an updated form of romanticism represented in Symbolism and Decadence and then Dada and Surrealism. Why do you think Debord loves Lautréamont so much?
So when Debord gives the old I refused to work, it was easy, that's just who I am—almost implying others could too live his drunken artistic poverty without work if they so chose and still sleep indoors and eat well and travel, it is certainly narrow-minded and egotistical. It's almost the inverse of the rich person saying to the poor person: just pull yourself up by your bootstraps you dumb fool. Or are you not as great as I? Well that's your fault then.
Furthermore, bohemians even when they claim to be revolutionaries are essentially too selfish to kickstart by action any revolution, let alone maintain a utopia where one must work with everyone else for the common good. This sort of collectivist struggle is like water in their oil. Debord can romanticize revolution, speak of vague visionary activities (drift: ie slumming it drunkenly in bad neighborhoods looking for the marvelous and the decay of an older non-spectacle induced world) that will be the practices of a utopian society, but he already lived his drunken bohemian utopia. He didn't have to work, he got to always be drunk, his theories made him feel self-important, he slept with lots of women, he traveled a lot, he read a lot—he had a good life even though the spectacle got worse. His was almost an aristocratic life of the romanticized lower depths, that of the dandy flaneur who just dresses more working class.
He writes "to perform wonders with writing": by what yardstick? The depth of an imagination, the political effectiveness of a theory, the ability for empathy towards the reader and others, to inspire personal and societal change, to emotionally console the reader, to entertain?
That his first "great" artwork is a film "without images" that's just a black screen called Howls for Sade shows how much of a sucker he was and is for conceptual art that tends towards a celebration of certain defeat by authority, and a joy in abstaining from it all: work, society, responsibility, but not to abstain from: decadent sloth, self-righteousness, vague utopian sentiments, and intellectual masturbation.
He speaks of drinking as a way to great writing which is a rare act. But his theoretical work is cold and analytical, only playful if you too have been reading Marx and Hegel and know how he's turning their words on their heads.
Alcohol limits fear, anxiety, and agitation by lowering brain activity, but I think of any euphoria or peace felt in drunkenness as an escape from the real into the imaginary. How can we see anything is real under the effects? Feelings of good, bad, or the neutral all come under question—so alcoholics tend to make up whatever their emotions are when it's likely just whatever the alcohol is doing to them at the moment. Alcohol is like a parasite that attempts to take over the host. And in Debord, it succeeded to such an extent he celebrates his descent and self-destruction.
He led a charmed life, he got to be the dissident, romantic artist/theorist he wanted to be, with seemingly no need to actually ever take on a real job. He did romanticize the poor and working class, though mostly the criminal element, who also worked harder than him. At the height of Situationist International when all art was essentially banned from the organization and it became strictly political, Debord and Co. would have hated to have been called romantic artists. But this is what they were essentially, an updated form of romanticism represented in Symbolism and Decadence and then Dada and Surrealism. Why do you think Debord loves Lautréamont so much?
So when Debord gives the old I refused to work, it was easy, that's just who I am—almost implying others could too live his drunken artistic poverty without work if they so chose and still sleep indoors and eat well and travel, it is certainly narrow-minded and egotistical. It's almost the inverse of the rich person saying to the poor person: just pull yourself up by your bootstraps you dumb fool. Or are you not as great as I? Well that's your fault then.
Furthermore, bohemians even when they claim to be revolutionaries are essentially too selfish to kickstart by action any revolution, let alone maintain a utopia where one must work with everyone else for the common good. This sort of collectivist struggle is like water in their oil. Debord can romanticize revolution, speak of vague visionary activities (drift: ie slumming it drunkenly in bad neighborhoods looking for the marvelous and the decay of an older non-spectacle induced world) that will be the practices of a utopian society, but he already lived his drunken bohemian utopia. He didn't have to work, he got to always be drunk, his theories made him feel self-important, he slept with lots of women, he traveled a lot, he read a lot—he had a good life even though the spectacle got worse. His was almost an aristocratic life of the romanticized lower depths, that of the dandy flaneur who just dresses more working class.
He writes "to perform wonders with writing": by what yardstick? The depth of an imagination, the political effectiveness of a theory, the ability for empathy towards the reader and others, to inspire personal and societal change, to emotionally console the reader, to entertain?
That his first "great" artwork is a film "without images" that's just a black screen called Howls for Sade shows how much of a sucker he was and is for conceptual art that tends towards a celebration of certain defeat by authority, and a joy in abstaining from it all: work, society, responsibility, but not to abstain from: decadent sloth, self-righteousness, vague utopian sentiments, and intellectual masturbation.
May 21, 2010
Guy Debord writes:
Never to have given more than very slight attention to questions of money, and absolutely none to the ambition of holding some brilliant post in society, is a trait so rare among my contemporaries that some will no doubt consider it incredible, even in my case. It is, however, true, and it has been so constantly and abidingly verifiable that the public will just have to get used to it.
Our only public activities, which remained rare and brief in the early years, were meant to be completely unacceptable: at first, primarily due to their form; later, as they acquired depth, primarily due to their content. They were not accepted.
This time, what was an absolutely new phenomenon, which naturally left few traces, was that the sole principle accepted by all was precisely that there could be no more poetry or art – and that something better had to be found.
Never to have given more than very slight attention to questions of money, and absolutely none to the ambition of holding some brilliant post in society, is a trait so rare among my contemporaries that some will no doubt consider it incredible, even in my case. It is, however, true, and it has been so constantly and abidingly verifiable that the public will just have to get used to it.
Our only public activities, which remained rare and brief in the early years, were meant to be completely unacceptable: at first, primarily due to their form; later, as they acquired depth, primarily due to their content. They were not accepted.
This time, what was an absolutely new phenomenon, which naturally left few traces, was that the sole principle accepted by all was precisely that there could be no more poetry or art – and that something better had to be found.
November 17, 2022
must say but for a few passages i was disappointed. this couldve been a cool little zine maybe, but as a book its like 20 pages of text , 20 blank, and 20 pics. debord's chief talent and flaw at same time is supression. "writing should be a rare thing" he says, "since one must have drunk for a long time before finding excellence". a fine maxim but one that leaves one with memoir that is a mere skeleton. for someone who claims to go months in a constant state of drunkenness he sure keeps his mouth shut pretty tight. i don't doubt in person he was interesting though. bad out of the way here is the good ; bravado "Has even one other person dared to behave like me, in this era?", referencing Villon and extolling slang/secret language "There I staggered a few kiddies the switcher was waiting for: prigs and millers. They were mobs you could trust, for they stood no repairs when it came to ramping. They were often limed by the reelers, but they were good at slanging innocent and tipping them rum gammon. That's where I learned how to chaff cross-kidders, so that long after, and even now, I'd rather keep dubber-mummed about such lays. Our hustling and our rigs are past. And yet I vividly remember my schoolmen down on the knuckle who piped so rummy this cracked world, when all of us met up in our regular patter-cribs, at Paris in darkness", on drinking "Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink." also very much appreciate him listing what he would drink and where, poetry is better the simpler it is.
September 30, 2015
My quick capsule review? I hate his guts (but still regrettably use a few ideas in my own work that he had a hand in pushing/promoting or writing about)
Debord is very haughty and self congratulatory in a way that is worse than someone who is prepared to show off their intellectual/spiritual or revolutionary cred. He was someone who told people he was great but that he simply chose to hide this greatness from people, on the notion that his generation was not good enough to have a figure like him. In this tedious volume, Debord attempts to tell his life story, but it ends up a comical pseudo-Marxist version of Tristram Shandy (A literary work he actually quotes in the book no less). Was he self-aware of his own dogmatic pointlessness?
There are moments of note (all in the first book, the second is like Walter Benjamin collecting trash and just showing you the trash instead of writing about it) He mentions his admiration of Lautreamont, a Parisian author who died at the age of 24. One of the most important contributions that Lautreamont made to the young Debord was the notion of pure plagiarism. The notion was that in reproducing old texts, you take an old idea and transform it into a new idea within a new context. The idea is somehow that you erase a false idea and replace it with the right one. At the end of his life Lautreamont had a manuscript where he was plagiarizing...
"Blaise Pascal's Pensées and La Rochefoucauld's Maximes, as well as the work of Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers, Dante, Kant and La Fontaine. It even included an improvement of his own Les Chants de Maldoror" (From Wikipedia)
The notion that directly reproducing an author's creative work in a brand new context somehow erases a false idea and replaces it with the right one is not only ridiculous, it is self serving to people who do not have the talent, creativity or skill to produce their own new ideas. If something is a false idea, why reproduce it on the premise that you are rejecting it. The new Parisian surrealists of the Debordian era were a bunch of losers who had to try and seem reactionary and new to the game. They were coming from decades of powerful filmmaking, poetry, literature and art, into a period where realism and poverty and travelling on the cheap were beginning to emerge as new and powerful. People were tired of reading anachronistic, incongruous pieces of writing that rejected the self. Debord had a problem, not only was he an awful writer, he also didn't have the ambition, talent or depth of reading to actually say anything. The embracing of plagiarism is not radical and it immediately is discrediting. Bauman when he was caught plagiarizing by a doctoral student was basically of the opinion that sometimes we are too strident on it, Debord represents the absolute worst type of scholarship and academic imaginable and his influence in this regard is utterly stupid and destructive. The way to cover up his lack of creativity was to either leap onto the creative endeavours of others, or to coin/conjoin inane ideas that would please the Parisian surrealists at the time, who frankly would have thought anything was interesting as long as you could read into it a rejection of materialism (in the common usage), capitalism, or society.
For example, Psychogeography although not directly his coining, was promoted and helped along the way by Debord who saw use in it. The use was more fragmented and bizarre than he is given credit for, but nonetheless there is merit to be said here. The notion of the Derive, too is interesting, the aimless walking, the concentric circles around the city, the flaneur, the wanderer taking part in the urban metropolis as a spectator, surveying futurism engulfing everything. These ideas came about as a group, as part of the Situationists, of which became even more absurd in its Letterist form. Debord was the kingpin, the lead culture jammer. Again credit is due here in this microcosm. Psychogeography is fantastic but fantastic due to people more talented than Debord taking the idea, tweaking it and making it useable. Here is where it gets even more outrageous:
Debord was part of a politically tumultuous and culturally damaged period. Young activists today herald the poignancy of 68 as a cult like mantra but Debord was someone who saw it merely as a way to culture jam. He is someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and literally did nothing but harm to the struggles he supposedly took part in. For example, he refers to himself on page 12 as a "doctor of nothing". He tries to justify his lack of university study, but then concludes by noting, "My merit in this respect was well tempered by my great laziness, as well as by my very meagre capabilities for confronting the work of such careers". He also states he had no ambition, no care for money and that he did not give any purpose to having any significant standing in life. These attributes are admirable to Debord to such an extent that he assumes it as incredible and something that is rare within a society such as our own. These are not admirable qualities, especially in someone who is meant to be accredited with being part of a group of people who are considered important in the Marxist left in the 1960s. Read this quote
"Although I am a remarkable example of what this era did not want, knowing what it has wanted seems to me perhaps not enough to establish my excellence."
Doesn't this make you want to punch him in his face? That is what reading his work is like, you turn into an imaginary pugilist who only fights- pretentious, unread, left wing, Marxist, French "surrealists" who sing poetry in what is literally incomprehensible gaggle. What madness this all is and yet we somehow take it seriously. People actually sit and read his nonsense on use and exchange value. Has he even read Marx properly? Jesus Christ. Down with this horse shit.
Debord is very haughty and self congratulatory in a way that is worse than someone who is prepared to show off their intellectual/spiritual or revolutionary cred. He was someone who told people he was great but that he simply chose to hide this greatness from people, on the notion that his generation was not good enough to have a figure like him. In this tedious volume, Debord attempts to tell his life story, but it ends up a comical pseudo-Marxist version of Tristram Shandy (A literary work he actually quotes in the book no less). Was he self-aware of his own dogmatic pointlessness?
There are moments of note (all in the first book, the second is like Walter Benjamin collecting trash and just showing you the trash instead of writing about it) He mentions his admiration of Lautreamont, a Parisian author who died at the age of 24. One of the most important contributions that Lautreamont made to the young Debord was the notion of pure plagiarism. The notion was that in reproducing old texts, you take an old idea and transform it into a new idea within a new context. The idea is somehow that you erase a false idea and replace it with the right one. At the end of his life Lautreamont had a manuscript where he was plagiarizing...
"Blaise Pascal's Pensées and La Rochefoucauld's Maximes, as well as the work of Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers, Dante, Kant and La Fontaine. It even included an improvement of his own Les Chants de Maldoror" (From Wikipedia)
The notion that directly reproducing an author's creative work in a brand new context somehow erases a false idea and replaces it with the right one is not only ridiculous, it is self serving to people who do not have the talent, creativity or skill to produce their own new ideas. If something is a false idea, why reproduce it on the premise that you are rejecting it. The new Parisian surrealists of the Debordian era were a bunch of losers who had to try and seem reactionary and new to the game. They were coming from decades of powerful filmmaking, poetry, literature and art, into a period where realism and poverty and travelling on the cheap were beginning to emerge as new and powerful. People were tired of reading anachronistic, incongruous pieces of writing that rejected the self. Debord had a problem, not only was he an awful writer, he also didn't have the ambition, talent or depth of reading to actually say anything. The embracing of plagiarism is not radical and it immediately is discrediting. Bauman when he was caught plagiarizing by a doctoral student was basically of the opinion that sometimes we are too strident on it, Debord represents the absolute worst type of scholarship and academic imaginable and his influence in this regard is utterly stupid and destructive. The way to cover up his lack of creativity was to either leap onto the creative endeavours of others, or to coin/conjoin inane ideas that would please the Parisian surrealists at the time, who frankly would have thought anything was interesting as long as you could read into it a rejection of materialism (in the common usage), capitalism, or society.
For example, Psychogeography although not directly his coining, was promoted and helped along the way by Debord who saw use in it. The use was more fragmented and bizarre than he is given credit for, but nonetheless there is merit to be said here. The notion of the Derive, too is interesting, the aimless walking, the concentric circles around the city, the flaneur, the wanderer taking part in the urban metropolis as a spectator, surveying futurism engulfing everything. These ideas came about as a group, as part of the Situationists, of which became even more absurd in its Letterist form. Debord was the kingpin, the lead culture jammer. Again credit is due here in this microcosm. Psychogeography is fantastic but fantastic due to people more talented than Debord taking the idea, tweaking it and making it useable. Here is where it gets even more outrageous:
Debord was part of a politically tumultuous and culturally damaged period. Young activists today herald the poignancy of 68 as a cult like mantra but Debord was someone who saw it merely as a way to culture jam. He is someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and literally did nothing but harm to the struggles he supposedly took part in. For example, he refers to himself on page 12 as a "doctor of nothing". He tries to justify his lack of university study, but then concludes by noting, "My merit in this respect was well tempered by my great laziness, as well as by my very meagre capabilities for confronting the work of such careers". He also states he had no ambition, no care for money and that he did not give any purpose to having any significant standing in life. These attributes are admirable to Debord to such an extent that he assumes it as incredible and something that is rare within a society such as our own. These are not admirable qualities, especially in someone who is meant to be accredited with being part of a group of people who are considered important in the Marxist left in the 1960s. Read this quote
"Although I am a remarkable example of what this era did not want, knowing what it has wanted seems to me perhaps not enough to establish my excellence."
Doesn't this make you want to punch him in his face? That is what reading his work is like, you turn into an imaginary pugilist who only fights- pretentious, unread, left wing, Marxist, French "surrealists" who sing poetry in what is literally incomprehensible gaggle. What madness this all is and yet we somehow take it seriously. People actually sit and read his nonsense on use and exchange value. Has he even read Marx properly? Jesus Christ. Down with this horse shit.
April 28, 2021
strano esempio di autobiografia: se la pima parte gira intorno a vari concetti e a tantissime citazioni, la seconda è un susseguirsi di foto (di luoghi, persone, scritte e dello stesso autore) associate talvolta ad altre citazioni come didascalie.
se si cerca qualcosa su debord forse non è la lettura giusta. o no? o forse in queste poche pagine scritte ed altrettante istoriate d'immagini c'è il vero debord?
chissà, e la nota del traduttore lascia capire come altro ci sia tra le righe, oltre a far capire come il lavoro di traduzione sia stato decisamente arduo.
di certo sembra più un oggetto d'arte che un libro vero e proprio, e la cosa lo rende decisamente unico.
comunque lettura divertente, e la passionaccia dell'autore per il bere mi ha fatto venir voglia a libro ultimato di stapparmi una birra: per brindare all'autore, o per seguire il suo esempio, o per dimenticare la lettura o per ricordarla meglio.
se si cerca qualcosa su debord forse non è la lettura giusta. o no? o forse in queste poche pagine scritte ed altrettante istoriate d'immagini c'è il vero debord?
chissà, e la nota del traduttore lascia capire come altro ci sia tra le righe, oltre a far capire come il lavoro di traduzione sia stato decisamente arduo.
di certo sembra più un oggetto d'arte che un libro vero e proprio, e la cosa lo rende decisamente unico.
comunque lettura divertente, e la passionaccia dell'autore per il bere mi ha fatto venir voglia a libro ultimato di stapparmi una birra: per brindare all'autore, o per seguire il suo esempio, o per dimenticare la lettura o per ricordarla meglio.
February 20, 2023
He thought very highly of himself, but what he wrote here did not mean much to me at all. I would have wanted to know more specifics, with fewer haughty allusions. What did he really do? What did he really feel?
It reminded my of the worst, least interesting moments of inherent_itgirl's (formerly The Thembo, formerly catboy_deleuze) instagram career. They are truly a post-Situationist thinker!
I still definitely want to read Society of the Spectacle though, and am still fairly open to Situationism.
It reminded my of the worst, least interesting moments of inherent_itgirl's (formerly The Thembo, formerly catboy_deleuze) instagram career. They are truly a post-Situationist thinker!
I still definitely want to read Society of the Spectacle though, and am still fairly open to Situationism.
October 5, 2017
Difficile valutare Debord. Biografia che, necessariamente non è tale. Frasi famose quasi scritte a uso di citazione (e Debord a un certo punto parla dell'uso della citazione in tempi di decadenza). E poi il tomo II, con immagini che dovrebbero avere il ruolo di raccontare meglio delle parole. Certo, nella società dello spettacolo.
June 8, 2025
This is an interesting book that you can turn back to on a whim when lacking inspiration; a very quick read as most of it is images and the formatting takes up a lot of space. An autobiography but is written vaguely enough where you can distance yourself from the author and the events; one can ensnare the contents of this book to conceptualize one's own life
February 28, 2021
Never has anything resembling an autobiography said so little is so many words (and images). Startling, delightful and bizarre.
May 12, 2023
Part autobiography and part art book. Was a neat snapshot of him.
Read
May 10, 2024How could I ever rate this book??
One day I’ll read it in French, maybe then I can better rate it.
But for now the only thing I’m certain of is that: I 🖤 Debord
One day I’ll read it in French, maybe then I can better rate it.
But for now the only thing I’m certain of is that: I 🖤 Debord
December 7, 2022
pretty great
February 14, 2014
A true anti-memoir and the last significant published work of a unique and extraordinary figure, Panegyric occupies a strange category all its own and not easily definable. Certainly it is the purest example of Debord the prose stylist, and the writing is elegant, and even lyrical, throughout. The broader implications of the text would require more space to fully investigate, but in the simplest sense Panegyric is a book about Life, from a man who always held that word to a much higher standard than most.
February 15, 2009
I read this in its entirety while drinking in Laurelhurst park one afternoon. Basically, it's Marx meets Bukowski in an incredibly revealing account of a leftist iconoclast, and his reasons for political dissent. I think that this is an essential read for anyone who is interested in reading Society of the Spectacle because it offers some indispensable insight into the mind of a political idealist. Apparently, this autobiography was the inspiration for Bob Dylan's own.
January 12, 2017
Something of a wistful book. You get a picture of a famous yet obscure French guy born in the Depression who drank himself through the 50s, the 60s, and beyond until he ended things - along the way doing some things of note, meeting some people he liked. I like how he takes apart the format of the memoir and structures it on his own terms.
December 24, 2009
I definitely did not take all that I could from this book, so it must be read again. I mean, the man uses words like "pleonastic." Not a surprise, really. The form is helpful, but didn't really click until the Afterword following the second volume. Worth reading.
May 23, 2008
Guy Debord has never been an easy guy to figure out, and the autobiographical letters he left behind, if anything, just make it harder to suss out his life. But they're certainly worth reading.
May 28, 2008
Guy Debord is in my top 10 favorite thinkers of the 20th century. Just for psychogeography alone his work is a revelation. I'm enjoying this book and should be done by this weekend.
October 7, 2014
Feels a bit slight. Or perhaps in the years since I studied this stuff, I've lost the context.
Quite enjoyed the chapter on drinking, though.
Quite enjoyed the chapter on drinking, though.
August 17, 2009
Absolutely recommended.
December 4, 2021
11 years later. Still elusive.
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Definitely not fully absorbed this excellent book... need to revisit in the future.
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Definitely not fully absorbed this excellent book... need to revisit in the future.
July 30, 2011
relatively enjoyable and surprisingly readable for a debord piece.
August 14, 2007
I laughed, I cried, I drank four bourbons.
February 16, 2016
This man is better at self-hop than even Kanye.
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