[Marxism] The playboy philosopher

[Louis Proyect]

http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/01/mclemee.
The Playboy Philosopher
By Scott McLemee

When introduced to American audiences from the podium or by TV 
interviewers, Bernard-Henri Lévy is always called a philosopher — a 
label that says less about the substance of his work than the efficiency 
of modern public-relations techniques. Like Sartre, he is a graduate of 
the École Normale Supérieure. Unlike Sartre, he was formidably 
good-looking in his prime, and is aging gracefully. His haircuts are as 
thoughtful as his books are stylish. And in the spirit of Andy Warhol 
and Paris Hilton, Lévy has always grasped — more profoundly, or at least 
more profitably, than any mere philosopher could — an important truth: 
the media must constantly be fed.

Ten years ago, Pierre Bourdieu coined a term for certain French 
intellectuals whose writings counted for less than their TV appearances. 
He called them “les fast-thinkers.” Everyone knew who the sociologist 
had in mind as the prototype of this phenomenon. Long before the 
American public got used to hearing references to J-Lo and K-Fed, the 
French press had dubbed him BHL. His books, movies, TV appearances, 
political interventions, and romances have been a staple of the French 
media for more than three decades. But only in the past five years has 
he become as much a fixture in the U.S. media as the French.

His latest opuscule — called in translation Left in Dark Times — has 
just appeared from Random House. Writing about it elsewhere, I failed to 
note something peculiar about this development. How it is that a volume 
of afterthoughts on last year’s French presidential election should 
appear — in such short order, no less — from a major commercial 
publisher in the United States?

It seems counterintuitive, and a matter for concern. Clearly it is time 
to reinvest in America’s fast-thinking infrastructure. Dependence on 
foreign sources of ideological methane is just too risky. Besides, as a 
couple of my far-flung correspondents have recently pointed out, the 
recent embrace of BHL by the American media is raising questions about 
just how gullible we really are.

Lauren Elkin, a Ph.D. candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center and 
the Université de Paris VII, says that the very occasional links to BHL 
items on her blog tend to bring out the worst in her readers. One 
mention can be reliably predicted to yield 10 gripes.

“In Paris, it’s just the done thing to bash BHL,” she tells me. 
“Recently I featured an awesome graphic that went along with a BHL piece 
on Sarah Palin in New York magazine — an image of Palin getting bopped 
on the head with a baguette — and I included a link to the NY mag 
article, because hey, I re-used their graphic, I owed them a link. The 
comments that followed amounted to taking the baguette and turning it on 
BHL!” (Well, at least it wasn’t a cream pie.)

Usually the expressions of exasperation are “all in good fun,” says 
Elkin. But one item at her blog — linking to a BHL piece on Simone de 
Beauvoir — provoked an exceptionally pompous display of aggravation from 
a French journalist.

“You and your fellow Americans,” he wrote, “should realize that BHL is 
not a philosopher but a clown and a buffoon. You want real French 
philosophy, read Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Baudrillard, if you are a 
right winger, read Aron, but please forget about this pompous arrogant 
shmuck BHL and his unending and shameless self-promotion. As a 
Frenchman, I am ashamed of BHL.”

The notion that silly Americans are somehow responsible for Lévy’s 
prominence is a bit rich. By my estimate, his career has spanned more 
than a third of a century — yet BHL, Inc., has had a fully staffed U.S. 
office for barely half a decade. (Note to Wikipedians: This is a figure 
of speech. No actual office exists, so far as I know.) And it is the 
work of a long, ill-spent day at the library to try to track down any 
discussion of his work by American intellectuals who take Lévy seriously 
as a philosopher. Our culture has its faults. This is not one of them.

“What really got me, as you can probably guess,” says Elkin, “was the 
‘you Americans’ bit and the implication that as such we could not 
possibly tell Derrida from Aron, much less evaluate BHL for ourselves.” 
All the more galling, perhaps, given that Elkin has never concerned 
herself with BHL’s books. “I’ve been too busy reading Derrida and 
Foucault, so pat me on the head,” she told her blog’s interlocutor.

Given her own neglect of the playboy’s philosophy, Elkin says she 
“really can’t comment on whether the bashing is appropriate.” But she 
suspects the strong feelings Lévy’s work provokes is a cultural 
phenomenon. “The French disdain for BHL is reflective of an inherent 
distaste for blatant self-promotion; as for the non-French who read my 
blog and write in with these comments, hating on BHL is as good a way as 
any to fit in.”

In an incisive review published a couple of years ago, Doug Ireland 
cited a critical analysis of BHL’s oeuvre, characterizing him as “a 
philosopher who’s never taught the subject in any university, a 
journalist who creates a cocktail mingling the true, the possible, and 
the totally false, a patch-work filmmaker, a writer without a real 
literary oeuvre....”

Yet Lévy swims in the main currents of European culture, and does not 
sink. If anything, he belongs on the short list of the world’s 
best-known intellectuals. How is that possible?

It seemed like a good question to pose to Arthur Goldhammer, a canny 
observer of French politics and culture who chairs the seminar for 
visiting scholars at the Center for European Studies at Harvard 
University. He responded to my inquiry with an e-mail note — albeit one 
that amounted to a judicious essay on the mystery of BHL.

“How does he pull it off?” wrote Goldhammer. “First, it must be 
recognized that he’s not a total fraud. Though a wretched scholar, he is 
neither stupid nor uneducated. His rhetoric, at least in French, has 
some of the old Normalien brilliance and flair. He had the wit to 
recognize before anyone else that a classic French role, that of the 
universal intellectual as moral conscience of the age, had become a 
media staple, creating a demand that a clever entrepreneur could 
exploit. He understood that it was no longer necessary first to prove 
one’s mettle in some field of literature, art, or thought. I think that 
someone once said of Zsa Zsa Gabor that she was ‘famous for being 
famous.’ Lévy realized that one could be famous for being righteous, and 
that celebrity itself could establish a prima facie claim to righteousness.”

Righteous or not, BHL is certainly timely. His denunciations of 
Communism in the late 1970s were hardly original. But they appeared as 
the radical spirit of May ‘68 was exhausting itself — and just before 
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chinese party’s own 
denunciations of late-period Maoism. BHL developed a knack for showing 
up in war zones and sending out urgent dispatches. Last month he did a 
toe-touch in Georgia following the Russian invasion — filing an article 
that was impassioned, if, it seems, imaginative.

“He chooses his causes shrewdly,” continues Goldhammer. “He may not have 
been the first to divine the waning of revolutionary radicalism, but he 
made himself revisionism’s publicist. He has a knack for placing himself 
at the center of any scene and for depicting his presence as if it were 
what rendered the scene important.... His critics keep him constantly in 
the limelight and actually amplify his voice, and why should a 
‘philosopher’ of universal range stoop to respond to ‘pedants’ who 
trouble the clarity of his vision with murky points of detail?”

And so he has acquired a sort of power that survives all debunking. If 
the topic of BHL comes up at “a typical dinner party of Parisian 
intellectuals,” says Goldhammer, seven of the guests will be sarcastic. 
“But the eighth, enticed by the allure of making a brilliant defense of 
a lost cause, a venerable French oratorical tradition, will launch into 
an elaborate defense beginning, ‘Say what you will about the man, and I 
wouldn’t contradict a word of it, but still you must admit that for the 
Chechens (or Bosnians or Georgians or boat people or insert your 
favorite cause here), he has not been without effect.’

“The French love their litotes,” Goldhammer continues (rhetoric lesson 
here), “and of course no one can say that BHL has been without effect, 
that he has probably done more good for someone somewhere than most of 
us, so the revilers are reduced to sheepish silence for fear of 
appearing heartless.”

The role of the intellectual as famous, full-time spokesman for the 
Universal is well-established in France. It began with Voltaire and 
culminated in Sartre, its last great exemplar. (Not that other 
philosophers have not emerged in the meantime, of course, but none has 
occupied quite the same position.) From time to time, Lévy has mourned 
the passing of this grand tradition, while hinting, not too subtly, that 
it lives on in him. Clearly there is a steady French market for his line 
in historical reenactments of intellectual engagement.

It seems surprising, though, to find the BHL brand suddenly being 
imported to these shores after years of neglect — particularly during a 
decade when Francophobia has become a national sport.

But like the song says, there’s a thin line between love and hate. Lévy 
has capitalized on American ambivalence towards France — the potential 
of fascination to move from “-phobia” to “-philia” — by performing a 
certain role. He is, in effect, the simulacrum of Sartre, minus the 
anti-imperialism and neo-Marxism.

“Lévy plays on both registers,” explains Goldhammer. “At the height of 
anti-French feeling in the U.S., in the period just before the Iraq War, 
he positioned himself as a philo-American. He made himself the avenger 
of Daniel Pearl. Arrogant he might be, airily infuriating in just the 
right way to confirm the philistine’s loathing of the abstract and 
abstruse that philosophy is taken to embody, and yet there he was, 
pouring scorn on “Islamofascism” and touring the country with the New 
Yorker reader’s nonpareil Francophile, Adam Gopnik.... Lévy chose his 
moment well. He insinuated himself into the American subconscious by 
playing against type.”

This is savvy. Also, convenient for journalists. BHL has now become “the 
respectable media’s go-to guy whenever a French opinion is needed.” 
Goldhammer cites a recent article in The New York Times in which Lévy, 
like the presidents of Pakistan and Chile, was quoted as “as an exemplar 
of what ‘the world’ wants to know from the next American president.” Get 
in the right Rolodex, it seems, and you are the embodiment of 
cosmopolitanism itself.

“To those familiar with the sad nullity of Lévy’s work,” says 
Goldhammer, “this is infuriating, but to protest is only to perpetuate 
the folly. His celebrity is a bubble that must be allowed to burst, but 
we can be sure that when it does, no crisis will ensue.”

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. He also blogs at 
Quick Study.