Guy Debord: Panegyric
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Product information "Guy Debord: Panegyric"
Guy Debord: Panegyric, Verso 1991, ISBN 0-86091-559-X
“I have written less than most writers. But I have drunk far more than most drinkers.”
“All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have joined in these troubles.”
“My method will be very simple. I will tell of what I have loved; and, in this light, everything else will become evident … ” “Over the years, more than half the people I knew well had sojourned one or several times in the prisons of various countries; many, no doubt, for political reasons, but all the same a greater number for common law offenses or crimes. So I met mainly rebels or the poor.” 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.”
“These concise but extremely rich and provocative memoirs are the product of … philosopher whose scathing pen has never been so sharp.” —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.” — London Review of Books
Guy Debord was born in 1931 was born in 1931. A founding member of the Letterist International and the Situationist International, he was the editor of their key journals, Potlach and Internationale Situationiste. He committed suicide in 1994. His written and film works include The Society of the Spectacle.
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Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the leading light in the Situationist International. He and the group were the first to criticize and comment on the role of the consumer in Western society. If Dada was an artistic movement that somehow pushed its artistic values into the political arena, then the Situationists were political and urban theorists who transformed politics into an art form. Debord’s masterpiece "Society of the Spectacle" is a stunning and witty critique on contemporary society where the workweek and consumerism alienate the individual. "Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici" is a book-length rant and a confrontational stance against the French media with regards to the murder of his good friend and financial supporter Gerard Lebovici. In 1984 Lebovici was called away from an appointment and three days later the police found his body behind the steering wheel of his Renault with four bullet wounds to the back of his head, in a vacant parking lot in Paris. Lebovici was an inventive businessman, movie producer, publisher, and a major financial supporter of Situationist activity -including ownership of a movie theater that screened the films of Debord and other Situationists. It's suspected that gangsters killed Lebovici, although to this day the murderer(s) have never been found. That didn't stop certain groups in the media connecting Lebovici's death with the Situationists. In this passionate rebuttal, Debord lashes out with great humor and intensity against the media and defends his good friend Gerard Lebovici. This book should not be seen as an account of an isolated, almost forgotten murder case, but as a general call-to-arms with respect to how the media controls and rewrites its ‘facts’.