Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy (French: [bɛʁnaʁ ɑ̃ʁi levi]; born 5 November 1948) is a French public intellectual, media personality, and author. Often referred to in France simply as BHL,^[1] he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement in 1976. In 2010, The Jerusalem Post named Lévy 45th on a list of the world's 50 most influential Jews.^[2] The Boston Globe has said that he is "perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France today".^[3] He frequently writes on the subject of anti-Semitism.

Life and career

Early life

Lévy was born in 1948 in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to a wealthy Algerian Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the founder and manager of a timber company, Becob, and became a multimillionaire from his business.

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy enrolled in the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy. His professors there included prominent French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser.

Lévy became a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the newspaper founded underground by Albert Camus during the German occupation of France. In 1971, Lévy travelled to the Indian subcontinent, and was based in Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangladesh, Nationalism in the Revolution", 1973).^[4]

New Philosophers

Returning to Paris, Lévy became known as a founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who developed an uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas.^[5] In 1977, the television show Apostrophes^[6] featured Lévy together with André Glucksmann as a nouveau philosophe. In that year, he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain, 1977), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt. Throughout the 1970s, Lévy taught a course on epistemology at the University of Strasbourg and he also taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure.

Intellectual involvement

In 1981, Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work, in which he offers a dark picture of French history. It was strongly criticised for its journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history by some of the most respected French academics, including Marxism-critic Raymond Aron (see his Memoirs).

In the 1990s, Lévy called for European and American intervention in the Bosnian War during the break-up of Yugoslavia after the fall of the Soviet Union. He spoke about the Serb POW camps which were holding Muslims. He referred to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other nations.^[7]

When his father died in 1995, Lévy briefly became the manager of the Becob company. He sold it in 1997 for 750 million francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.

At the end of the 1990s, with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, Lévy founded an Institute on Levinassian Studies at Jerusalem, in honor of Emmanuel Levinas.

He is member of nonprofit advocacy group JCall. In March 2006, Lévy was one of twelve signatories of a letter entitled, "MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism."' addressing concerns for free speech and thought in response to violent and deadly protests in the Muslim world related to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy that arose in Denmark.

Books

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?

In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the murderer of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was taken captive and beheaded by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl's death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy.^[8] He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and al-Qaeda. The book was strongly criticized by both experts and Pearl's own family, including wife Marianne Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego".^[9][10]

The book won praise for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions. But, it was condemned by William Dalrymple, a British historian of India and travel writer, and others, for its lack of rigour and its caricatured depictions of Pakistani society. Dalrymple also criticized Lévy's fictionalised account of Pearl's thoughts in the last moments of his life.^{[11][12][13][14]}

In the Footsteps of Tocqueville

Although Lévy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in gaining a wider US audience was the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly, later collected as a book.^[15] In preparation for the series, In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Lévy criss-crossed the United States, interviewing Americans, and recording his observations, with direct reference to his predecessor, Alexis de Tocqueville. His work was published in serial form in the magazine and collected as a book by the same title. The book was widely criticized in the United States, with Garrison Keillor publishing a damning review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.^[15]

Representation in other media

In film

Lévy directed the widely panned 1997 romance film Day and Night.^[16] It is considered by critics the worst film of 1997 along with Batman & Robin. The movie received a 3.5 million francs public subsidy through the Commission des avances sur recettes, which at the time was chaired by Lévy.^[17]

In 2007, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli, created two commercials for an imaginary U.S. presidential campaign, in which he had actress Sharon Stone running against Bernard-Henri Lévy. His project entitled Democrazy, was shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Pie throwing

Bernard Henri Lévy is a favorite victim of pie thrower Noël Godin.^[18]

Recent activities

Bernard-Henri Lévy at Tel Aviv University

In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to promote his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.

In 2006, Lévy joined the British debate over Muslim women's veils by suggesting to The Jewish Chronicle that wearing a veil had the effect of dehumanizing the wearer by hiding her face – and said, alluding to a passage by Emmanuel Levinas, that "the veil is an invitation to rape".^[19]

On 24 June 2009, Lévy posted a video on Dailymotion in support of the Iranian protesters who were being repressed after the contested elections.^[20]

He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La Règle du Jeu ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur.^[7] In Left in Dark Times, he argued that the Darfur genocide was not a palatable issue for modern leftists because it did not provide a platform for the anti-American views with which he says leftist thought has become suffused.

In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.^[21]

At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010) Lévy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy."^[22]

Lévy has reported from troubled zones during wartime, to attract public opinion, in France and abroad, over those political changes. In August 2008, Lévy reported from South Ossetia, Georgia, during the 2008 South Ossetia war; on that occasion he interviewed the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.^[23]

In March 2011, he engaged in talks with Libyan rebels in Benghazi, and publicly promoted the international acknowledgement of the recently formed National Transitional Council.^[24][25] Later that month, worried about the 2011 Libyan civil war, he prompted and then supported Nicolas Sarkozy's seeking to persuade Washington, and ultimately the United Nations, to intervene in Libya to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.^[26]

In May 2011, Lévy defended IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn when Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in New York City. Lévy questioned the credibility of the charges against Strauss-Kahn, asking The Daily Beast, "how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York's grand hotels of sending a 'cleaning brigade' of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet."^[27][28]

In May 2011, Lévy argued for military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad after violence against civilians in response to the 2011 Syrian uprising.^[29] He repeated his position in a letter to the Weekly Standard in August 2013.^[30]

On 9 November 2011, his book, La guerre sans l'aimer, which tells the story of his Libyan spring, was published.^{[31][32][33][34]}

In April 2013, he was convicted by a French court for libelling journalist Bernard Cassen.^[35]

Lévy curated a major art exhibition in 2013 entitled Adventures of truth – Painting and philosophy: a narrative at the Maeght Foundation.

He criticized international community for their acts during the Bosnia genocide.^[36]

In February 2015, he performed his play Hotel Europa at the Kiev opera house on the one-year anniversary of the Euromaidan's toppling of the pro-Russian government of Victor Yanukovich.^[37]

Criticisms

Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals from noted intellectuals on all sides of the ideological spectrum, such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile".^[38]

More recently, Lévy was publicly embarrassed when his essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010) cited the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul.^[39] Botul's writings are actually well-known spoofs, and Botul himself is the purely fictional creation of a living French journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès. Responding in an opinion piece, Levy wrote: "It was a truly brilliant and very believable hoax from the mind of a Canard Enchaîné journalist who remains a good philosopher all the same. So I was caught, as were the critics who reviewed the book when it came out. The only thing left to say, with no hard feelings, is kudos to the artist."^[40]

In the essay Une imposture française, journalists Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer claim that Lévy uses his unique position as an influential member of both the literary and business establishments in France to be the go-between between the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.^[41]

For instance, Beau and Toscer noted that most of the reviews published in France for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? didn't mention strong denials about the book given by experts and Pearl's own family including wife Marianne Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego".^[9][42]

Personal life

Lévy has been married three times. His eldest daughter by his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne, Justine Lévy, is a best-selling novelist. He has a son, Antonin-Balthazar Lévy, by his second wife, Sylvie Bouscasse. He is currently married to French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle.

The close relationship between married French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy and socialite Daphne Guinness has become something of an open secret known and acknowledged by most US society columnists since 2008. On 13 July 2010, Daphne Guinness confirmed the whole story in the UK press.^[43]

Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in society and politics.^[7]

Lévy has been friends with Nicolas Sarkozy since 1983. Relations between them deteriorated during Sarkozy's 2007 presidential run in which Lévy backed the Socialist candidate and also described Sarkozy as "A man with a warrior vision of politics". However, they grew closer again after Sarkozy's victory.^[44] Much of his recent book, Left in Dark Times, is devoted to explaining his refusal to support Sarkozy despite agreeing with him on many points, and his insistence on continuing to identify himself as a leftist despite rejecting much of modern leftist thought.

Threats

Lévy was one of six prominent Jewish public figures in Europe targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group in 2008. The list included others in France such as Josy Eisenberg. That plot was reportedly foiled after the group's leader, Abdelkader Belliraj, was arrested based on unrelated murder charges from the 1980s.^[45]

Works

Lévy's works have been translated into many different languages; below is an offering of works available in either French or English.

• Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution, 1973.
• La barbarie à visage humain, 1977.
• "Response to the Master Censors". Telos 33 (Fall 1977). New York: Telos Press.
• Le testament de Dieu, 1978.
• Idéologie française, 1981.
• Le diable en tête, 1984.
• Eloge des intellectuels, 1987.
• Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, 1988.
• Les aventures de la liberté, 1991.
• Le jugement dernier, 1992
• Piero della Francesca, 1992
• Les hommes et les femmes, 1994.
• Bosna!,1994.
• La pureté dangereuse, 1994.
• Adventures on the Freedom Road, Harvill Press, 1995, hardcover, ISBN 1-86046-035-6
• What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their Thoughts, Algora Publishing, 2000, paperback, 276 pages, ISBN 1-892941-10-4
• Comédie, 1997.
• Le siècle de Sartre, 2000.
• Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l'Histoire, 2002.
• Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, translated by Andrew Brown, Polity Press, July 2003, hardcover, 456 pages, ISBN 0-7456-3009-X
• Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, 2003, in English as Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, (Melville House Publishing), September 2003, hardcover, 454 pages, ISBN 0-9718659-4-9
• War, Evil and End of History, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd [UK], (Melville House Publishing) [US], October 2004, hardcover, 400 pages, ISBN 0-7156-3336-8; paperback, ISBN 978-0-9718659-5-2
• Récidives, 2004.
• American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Random House, January 2006, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 1-4000-6434-1
• Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, translated by Benjamin Moser, Random House Publishing Group, 2009, 256 pages, ISBN 0-8129-7472-7; paperback, ISBN 978-0-8129-7472-0
• Bernard-Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Ennemis publics, 2008, translated by Miriam Frendo and Frank Wynne as Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, London: Atlantic Books; New York: Random House, 2011, paperback, 320 pages, ISBN 0-8129-8078-6

References

Further reading

Note: Some of the content of this article comes from the equivalent French-language wikipedia article.

• Dominique Lecourt, Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970s (2001), new ed. Verso, London, 2002.
• Craig Owens, "Sects and Language," in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, Scott Bryson, et al., eds. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992), 243–52.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bernard-Henri Lévy.

• Official website (English) (French)
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Bernard-Henri Lévy at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Bernard-Henri Lévy in libraries (WorldCat catalog)* Institute for Levinassian Studies, co-founded by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut (German)
• Putin’s Crime, Europe’s Cowardice