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Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy (born November 5, 1948 in Béni-Saf, Algeria) is a French philosopher, intellectual, and writer.


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Biography

Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, 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 Louis-le Grand lycée in Paris, he enrolled in the elite and highly-selective Ecole 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, he 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 Ecole 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 he published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work.

He 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, Bernard-Henri 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. In 2003, he 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, Lévy 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. Here are two examples of this kind of criticism [7] [8] and two examples of the author's response [9] [10].

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 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]

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

Available in English

References

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

Notes

  1. ^ "...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]
  2. ^ "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]
  3. ^ a b Gaby Wood, "Je suis un superstar", The Observer, 15 June 2003 [3]
  4. ^ Michael O'Donnell, "Another Frenchman assesses our democracy", San Francisco Chronicle, 29 January 2006 [4]
  5. ^ "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]
  6. ^ 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’"
  7. ^ "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]

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