Few characters from the last decades have had such a marked impact on the collective imagination as David Bowie. Androgynous, a brilliant musician, professional provocateur, fashion icon ... It is almost a topic to refer to his inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, to metamorphose into another always different, a trait that kept intact until the end of his days. In this book, the philosopher Simon Critchley indulges in the rather easy task of trying to decipher the Bowie enigma in an effort to understand how it "made life somewhat less trivial over a tremendously long period of time." Through a lucid, agile and entertaining review of David Bowie's scenic and recording career, Critchley transcends his hypnotic appearance to get to the very heart of it: the very original vision of the world that inspired his music, his appearance, his strategies for communicating with the public . It reveals to us an extremely sophisticated, complex, cultured, tormented artist who sublimated his perpetual sense of inauthenticity to revolutionize the world of pop. In the process, we find an artist in a constant pursuit of creative material, always encouraged by a self-centered impulse that neither music, fame, transgressor sex, or even drugs could ever satisfy, since "what Really defines Bowie's music is the experience of yearning. "