(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
With the translation of Lévy's latest book into English, "Who killed Daniel Pearl?", "The BHL phenomenon will soon be global," the Financial Times wrote last week.
In France, the philosopher and poser is so well-known that he only goes by the brand name BHL. Had the French superstar not existed, it would have been impossible to find him, wrote The Guardian this spring.
Nice navel
Despite being controversial and dismissive as a professional philosopher: When the BHL speaks, the French listen. When he shows up on TV wearing a black designer suit and a white shirt that is open down to his belt, the girl's heart still melts. Other philosophers study his navel, Lévy shows off his.
Bernard-Henri Lévy and the young beauty Arielle Dombasle, his third wife, are France's most glamorous couple (in the spirit of Marilyn Monroe and Henry Miller). She is a singer and actress – her latest album consists of techno versions of Fauré and Handel – but is best known for having France's narrowest waist. Paris Match magazine has regularly named her one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. Lévy is good at chasing women – and noble things.
Guilty
French-Algerian Jew Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948-) broke through in the French public 25 years ago with his harsh criticism of the left-wing lefts with totalitarian regimes. Then he took to the right, and then the position of France's independent voice and the country's foremost new philosopher was secured. Since then he has published more than one book a year, 29 in all.
He has also made documentaries from the Balkans and helped establish institutions such as Radio Free Kabul and SOS racism. He calls himself a philosopher, but more closely resembles a constant instigator of bad conscience. And should we believe some American media: This bad conscience is now ahead of its international breakthrough.
Ask for more cake
You really want to dislike Lévy intensely. The anarchist Noal Godin, the Belgian who has made himself world-famous because of celebrity soft cake tossing, puts it this way: "The type of person who becomes ecstatic when he discovers a shade in gray is a constant provocation". Lévy has so far only been hit six times by Godin, the author of the book "Cream and Punishment".
But how is it possible to dislike a guy, no matter how tanned and muscular and hairy he is, when the man has made a living seeking out conflicts that no one else cares about? His book from 2001, for example, deals with the wars in Sudan, Angola, Sri Lanka and Colombia – did he not deserve a new sports car then? Three properties, a butler, a driver and a dozen other servants?
A philosopher in the war
Vanity Fair devoted eight pages to the BHL this spring, where he was compared to Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo and André Malraux. (The Guardian prefers a combination of JK Rowling and David Beckham. BBC: "A mix of Rimbaud and Rambo"). The positive comparisons have not been completely taken off the air. On the one hand, he sells buckets of books – 200.000 copies. of the last book – and is annoyingly successful, on the other hand he is at least not an office philosopher who spends his life exploring the similarities between "being" and "weather". Lévy is where it happens.
For example, he was sent to Afghanistan in February 2002 as Jacques Chirac's special envoy. The job was to find out France's cultural role in the new Afghan everyday life. The result was an 100 page report delivered April 2002, where Lévy suggested, among other things, that Afghan officers be trained at the French military academy, that France open a cultural center in the country and that a dedicated team travel around cities and homes and promote the ideals of 1789.
The United States sent the entire cavalry, France sent a philosopher.
Academic criticism
The objection to Lévy is usually that he is so smooth. It may be due to envy. On the other hand, far more serious objections have been raised to the superstar's work over the course of 25 years. It became disastrous for 20 years ago, not least because Lévy himself is a Jew, when the Frenchman was taken into writing that Heinrich Himmler was convicted during the Nurnberg trials while the man had long ago committed suicide.
At the same time, The New York Review of Books wrote that "little can be said about Lévy's project, because it consists of so little." In his latest book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?", Lévy calls the shoe bomber on the plane between Paris and Miami Charles Reid instead of Richard Reid, as he is called. And sociologist Anthony Giddens is being renamed Chistopher Giddens. And, something that is almost unforgivable in the American academic context, Lévy – like so many French "intellectuals" – does not use an index! Trivia, perhaps, but critics read it into a pattern of carelessness, inaccuracies and gross generalizations.
More women
So what's "Who killed Daniel Pearl?" about? It's not really that interesting. In 1997, Bernard-Henri Lévy made a fictional film about an elderly writer who falls in love with a young actress, played by his own wife. It was called "Night and Day" and apparently contained some scenes where Dombasle wore clothes. "Besides politics, there are two things I am interested in: Literature and women," says Lévy herself. And sometimes it is difficult to separate the three ad.
"Who Killed Daniel Pearl?", A 400-page book about the American journalist who was killed in Pakistan after a lengthy kidnapping in February 2002, is a mixture of novel and "investigation", according to Lévy, which means he takes liberties where facts do not suffice. The book also contains, now well-known, theories that the killing was committed in collaboration between Pakistani intelligence and fundamentalist groups, and that the 38-year-old Wall Street journalist was killed "because he knew too much".
But it is the man Pearl who is at the center. Or Lévy himself, as critics like to point out. Lévy thinks about what goes through Daniel Pearl's head just before he is about to be beheaded by his worst enemies:
“He thinks of Mariane, the last night, so desirable, so beautiful – what do women really want, deep down there. Passion? Eternity? ”
Is it literature? Policy? Women?
The good news for Americans is that Levy's Sartre biography is also being translated into English these days. It's probably not too bad.
