Abdication
It is true that, of the books that he loves best, the critic also prefers not to speak. —Blanchot1
I have stopped myself often from trying to write anything about Guy Debord’s short autobiographical work, Panegyric, which, when I first read it, meant so much to me but out of which I could nevertheless remember almost nothing except the contours of a few names (Chateaubriand, Cravan, Clausewitz) and a few indistinct but powerful affects—flickers of temperament, traces of hatred, evidence of love and loves. These resonated with me so strongly as to efface any imagistic memory of the text, like an earthquake demolishing the sand castles and smoothing out the messages left on a beach, leaving something of an invisible seismic tremor, as if such a thing were possible, in the air.2
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