CRASS BOOBY ALERT! France’s most ridiculous poseur is posing again
Recently, with Slavoj Žižek’s foolish attempt to take on the vastly superior Noam Chomsky, third-rate pseudo-intellectuals have been in the news again. With the death of Christopher Hitchens, and the relative inactivity of P.J. O’Rourke and Martin Amis, stylish frauds had not been so prominent lately. But it looks like they’re unfortunately coming back into fashion, if this Financial Times article is anything to go by. Yes, friends, prepare for the unwelcome re-emergence of Bernard-Henri Lévy. While he has been irrefutably exposed as a fraud and a plagiarist of Dershowitzian proportions, it seems that news has not yet reached the editors of the Financial Times—otherwise they surely would not have commissioned such a shameless piece of PR puffery as the following embarrassment. Surely they have more integrity than that. Surely?
I have selected only the most outstandingly pretentious and ridiculous bits of this travesty of an article. Read the whole thing if you can bear it. As I prepared this for the reading pleasure of my fellow Standardistas, I encountered something even more sinister and worrying than if BHL and his late mentor Christopher Hitchens had appeared in your living room with Martin Amis, drunkenly looking for prostitutes: it appears that the Financial Times has software that can detect if you are cutting and pasting its articles.
I urge readers to look at the highlighted message from the FT that I have placed at the end of this item….
Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘I don’t care much about my image’ by JOHN McDERMOTT, Financial Times, June 14, 2003
France’s philosopher dandy and most public of public intellectuals talks about saving Europe, toppling tyrants and his new ‘rendezvous with the question of art’
Bernard-Henri Lévy, philosopher, film-maker, action man, saviour of Libya, scourge of pithiness, peripatetic paramour and shirt-button revisionist, is afraid of paintings. “They look at me more than I look at them,” he tells me one warm June evening on the botanical terrace of Paris’s Hotel Raphael. “I live under their shadow, their glory, their light and their spell.” I know the feeling. A few hours with France’s most public of public intellectuals can feel like staring at a work of art. But what is it trying to say? […. ]
His last venture saw him drop into Benghazi, meet the rebels and call his “buddy” Nicolas Sarkozy to request intervention. An art exhibition seems a dull choice.
“Why did I choose? Did I choose?” he asks, moulding and sculpting the question. I wait, keen not to peer too intently at his bespoke get-up of dark suit and white shirt. His right hand flits from crotch, to silver hair, to a partially exposed chest, the brown of thwacked leather. When a thought is located, perhaps near the nipple, the fingers emerge. “It was an old, old, old dream,” he says, gesticulating. [….]
Few people doubt his smarts or his bravery. […] He has been an unremitting supporter of military action against totalitarian regimes in Bosnia, Darfur, Libya and, most recently, Syria. This is no flâneur.
Nevertheless, Lévy has been criticised for vanity and a lack of rigour. There is the dandyism, the playboy lifestyle and the third wife [….] And then there is the charge that his work is just not very good. In a review of American Vertigo (2006) in the New York Times Book Review, Garrison Keillor wrote for many when he said it was a “sort of book” that had the “grandiosity of a college sophomore”, and that it was “short on facts” but “long on conclusions”. [….]
Perry Anderson, the British historian, has written that Lévy is a “crass booby” and a “grotesque” indictment of the French intellectual. Even his allies suggest that he puts style before substance [….]
Christopher Hitchens, the late journalist and author, defended his friend against “nativist bloviation” from the likes of Keillor [….]
So does Lévy still think of himself as a philosopher? A sigh and a sniff later: “A philosopher? I do philosophy? I read philosophy. I spend time with philosophy. Am I a philosopher? I don’t know.” [….] Lévy speaks excellent English but the vowels are all French, giving his voice a bouncy stochastic sound. ….
France’s most ridiculous poseur is posing again
by JOHN McDERMOTT, Financial Times, June 14, 2003