From Library Journal
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.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
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 Chronicle )
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.