Guy Debord has been dead twenty-seven years today. In Panegyric, his elegiac autobiography, the author of The Society of the Spectacle famously said that more than anything else his life had been marked by the habit of drinking, by consuming alcohol. “Among the small number of things I have liked and known how to do well,” he said, “what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Even though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”

Yale University’s Beinecke Library houses many black and white photos of Debord, taken in Italy during the 1970s. These comprise part of the archive of the Italian Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, Debord’s close friend and political confidant. The images are tremendously evocative of the times, when radical…