Bernard-Henri Lévy (born November 5, 1948 in
Béni-Saf, Algeria) is a French intellectual and businessman.
Biography
Often referred to today, in France, simply as B.H.L., Lévy was born in Béni-Saf, Algeria on 5
November 1948. His family moved to Paris a few
months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the multi-millionaire founder and manager of a timber company, Becob.
After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Levy enrolled in the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a
degree in philosophy. Some of his professors there included prominent French intellectuals
and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis
Althusser. Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war
reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by
Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. In
1971, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent, and was
in Bangladesh covering the war of independence against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution
("Bangla-Desh, Nationalism in the Revolution"), which was published in 1973.
Returning to Paris, Levy became famous as the young founder of the
New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of French
intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May
1968, which articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and
socialist dogmas years prior to the collapse of the Soviet
Union.[1] In contrast to the neo-conservatism of ex-leftist anti-Marxist American
intellectuals, however, neither Lévy nor the New Philosophers embraced capitalist
ideology on the rebound.[citation needed] Throughout the 1970s, he taught a course on
epistemology at the Université de
Strasbourg and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was in
1977, on the television show Apostrophes, that Lévy was presented, alongside
André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published
Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.
In 1981 Levy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most
influential work.
Levy is married to French actress Arielle Dombasle.
His eldest daughter by his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne, Justine Lévy, is a
bestselling novelist. He also has a son, Antonin-Balthazar
Lévy, by his second wife, Sylvie Bouscasse. 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
weekly a column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.
When his father André died in 1995, Levy became the manager of the Becob company, until it was
sold in 1997 for 750 million francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.
Philosophy, social criticism, and personality
Lévy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s, and spoke out early about Serbian concentration camps, the existence of which has never
been proved. At the end of the 1990s, he founded with Benny Lévy and André Glucksmann an Institute on Levinassian Studies at
Jerusalem.
In 2003, Levy wrote a compelling account of his efforts to track the murderers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been
executed by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the
time of Pearl’s death, he was visiting Afghanistan as French
President Jacques Chirac's special envoy.[2] 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 secret
service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won
praise for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions. The book also stirred
controversy stemming from some of the author's characterizations of Pakistan, as well as his decision to fictionalize Pearl's
thoughts in the closing moments of his life. [7] [8] [9] [10]. The book was
criticized, as many of BHL's work, for being neither journalism nor philosophy, but attempting to be both.
Lévy is, with his third wife, actress Arielle Dombasle, a regular fixture in
Paris Match magazine, wearing his trademark unbuttoned white shirts and designer suits.
Lévy's reputation for narcissism is legend.[3] One article about him coined the dictum, "God is dead but my hair is perfect."[4] He once said that the discovery of a new shade of grey left him "ecstatic."[3] He is a regular victim of Noël Godin,[5] who describes Lévy as a
vain, pontificating dandy.
In March 2006 a letter Lévy co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven
other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and
deadly protests in the Muslim world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. When questioned about the
Niqab face-veil worn by some Muslim women, during the
United Kingdom debate over veils, Lévy told the Jewish Chronicle that "the veil is an invitation to rape".[6]
Critics of Lévy are not limited to pie-throwers, however; French journalists Jade Lindgaard
and Xavier de la Porte, in a biography of the philosopher, claimed that "In all his works and
articles, there is not a single philosophical proposition." The book is contested, however, and Lévy sought legal action against
the authors.[7]
Other critics of Levy attack his support of the Mitterrand doctrine that allows
Italian terrorists members of Brigate Rosse to live in France as free men and women despite the fact that the Italian courts have sentenced them to long imprisonment or
Life sentence. Levy argues that during the late 1970s and 1980s basic human rights
were not respected in Italy.
Breaking into the English Language
Although Levy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie a visage humaine, he only "made
it" with the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for the Atlantic Magazine. In the series, "In
the Footsteps of Tocqueville", Levy imitated his compatriot and predecessor in American critique, Alexis de Tocqueville,
criss-crossing America, interviewing Americans and recording his observations firt for magazine and then book publication. The
publication coincided with the move of Atlantic Monthly editorial offices from Boston, MA to Washington, DC after
forty-eight years as a Boston institution.
Works
Lévy's works have been translated into many different languages; below is an offering of works available in either French or
English.
Available in French
- Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution, 1973.
- La barbarie à visage humain, 1977.
- 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.
- La pureté dangereuse, 1994.
- Le siècle de Sartre, 2000.
- Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, 2002.
- Qui a tué Daniel Pearl ?, 2003.
- Récidives, 2004.
- American Vertigo, 2006
Available in English
- Bernard Henri Lévy, Charlotte Mandell, American Vertigo : Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Random House, January 2006, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 1400064341
- Bernard Henri Lévy, Richard Veasey, Adventures on the Freedom Road Harvill Press (an imprint of Random House), 1995, hardcover, ISBN 1860460356
- Edited by Bernard-Henry Lévy, What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their Thoughts, Algora Publishing, 2000, paperback, 276 pages, ISBN
1892941104
- Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by Andrew Brown, Sartre: The Philosopher of the
Twentieth Century, Polity Press, July
2003, hardcover, 456 pages, ISBN 074563009X
- Bernard-Henri Lévy, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, Melville House Publishing, September 2003, hardcover, 454 pages, ISBN 0971865949
- Bernard-Henri Lévy, War, Evil and End of History, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, October 2004, hardcover, 400 pages, ISBN 0715633368
References
- 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.
Notes
- ^ "...a group who broke away from the Marxist ideology dominating late 1960s
France and the hard-line French left typified by Jean-Paul Sartre" Beth R. Alexander, "Commentary: Bernard Henri-Levy takes
heat", Washington Times, 10 November 2004 [1]
- ^ "THE ENVOY: At the request of French President Jacques Chirac, Lévy
traveled to Afghanistan in February 2002 to gauge the needs of the Afghan people..." James Graff, "The Engaged Intellect",
TIME Europe, Vol. 161, No. 19, 12 May 2003 [2]
- ^ a b Gaby Wood, "Je suis un superstar", The Observer, 15 June 2003
[3]
- ^ Michael O'Donnell, "Another Frenchman assesses our democracy", San
Francisco Chronicle, 29 January 2006 [4]
- ^ "On the one hand, he is such a po-faced laughing stock that the famed
anarchist pie-thrower Noël Godin has hit him a record five times." Gaby Wood, "Je suis un superstar", The Observer, 15
June 2003 [5]
- ^ The Jewish Chronicle,
14 October 2006 edition. Not available online, quote in
context: "Our time is almost up, but BHL becomes the most animated I have seen him when I ask him about Jack Straw's
intervention on Muslim women and the veil. ‘Jack Straw’, he says, leaning close to me, ‘made a great point. He did not say that
he was against the veil. He said it is much easier, much more comfortable, respectful, to speak with a woman with a naked face.
And without knowing, he quoted Levinas, who is the philosopher of the face. Levinas says that [having seen] the naked face of
your interlocutor, you cannot kill him or her, you cannot rape him, you cannot violate him. So when the Muslims say that the veil
is to protect women, it is the contrary. The veil is an invitation to rape’"
- ^ "The authors of the book entitled "Le B.A. BA du BHL" (The A to Z of BHL)
accuse the celebrated thinker and prolific writer of exploiting his media contacts for intellectual and material gain." Beth R.
Alexander, "Commentary: Bernard Henri-Levy takes heat", Washington Times, 10 November 2004 [6]
External links
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