Panegyric

Guy Debord’s silver-tongue-in-cheek autobiography 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 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.”—London Review of Books

“These concise but extremely rich and provocative memoirs are the product of ... a philosopher whose scathing pen has never been so sharp.”—San Francisco ChronicleGuy 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.