Andy Merrifield

Though well-known for his founding of the avant-garde Situationist International movement and his prominent political and cultural activism, Guy Debord was nonetheless a surprisingly elusive and enigmatic figure, spending his last years in an isolated farmhouse in Champot, France. Andy Merrifield's Guy Debord pushes back the farmhouse shutters and opens a window onto Debord's life, theory, and art.

Merrifield explores the dynamics of Debord's ideas and works, including the groundbreaking Howls for Sade and his 1967 classic, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord understood life as art, Merrifield argues, and through that lens he chronicles Debord's stint as a revolutionary leader in the 1950s and 1960s, his time in Spain and Italy during the 1970s and the reclusive years leading up to his death in 1994.

Dada and Surrealism's legacy and punk rock's god, Guy Debord spun theories on democracy, people, and political power that still resonate today, making Merrifield's concise yet comprehensive study an invaluable resource on one of the foremost intellectual revolutionaries of the twentieth century.… (meer)

There's something nice and something missing about this book. Being a book about amateurism, I do like of it the free "wandering" of the author through different topics and fields - in particular literature. What I'm missing is a more cohesive structure and, especially, a final chapter - the one devoted to an explicit political discourse - more focused on real, proactive actions and not so dangerously close to the drift of populism. I'm sure I'm writing this because I'm looking at the current (2018) Italian political situation, but I can't help but still having more faith in professional politics rather than in bottom-up "movements" which - at least in Italy - are giving voice and power to people lacking any kind of amateur attitude (in the sense of this book). I keep on loving the idea of being an amateur (I definitely am), so I *have to* like this book but I do really find difficult to think about this approach out of the arts-culture realm and extended to politics. Which is my fault and a pity, but this book doesn't help from this point of view.… (meer)