Guy Debord, Panegyric

"My method will be very simple. I will tell what I have loved; and, in this light, everything else will become evident and make itself well enough understood." (p. 5)

"At a critical moment in the troubles of the Fronde, Gondi, who had given such sterling proofs of his capacities in the handling of human affairs, notable in his favourite role of disturber of the public peace, improvised successfully before the Parlement de Paris a fine quotation attributed to a classical author, for whose name everyone vainly seached, but which could best be applied to his own panegyric: 'In difficillimis Reipublicae temporibus, urbem non deserui; in prosperis nihil de publico delibavi; in desperatis, nihil timui.' He himself translated it like this: 'In bad times I did not forsake the city; in prosperous times I had no private interests; in desperate times I feared nothing.'" (p. 17-18)

Guy Debord, Panegyric. Translated by James Brook and John McHale. London: Verso, 2004.

Debord Films Available

The sectors of a city are, at a certain level, legible. But the meaning they have had for us, personally, is incommunicable, like the clandestinity of private life, of which we possess nothing but pitiful documents. ... And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life that has not really been found.

- Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation (1961); translation from Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 433.

UBUWEB has a brilliant collection of Debord's films available.