Chronicle of Higher Education - October 24, 2003
An Intellectual Superstar in France Gains an Audience in the U.S.
By SCOTT McLEMEE
COGITO ERGO ZOOM: In the late 1990s, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu published a scathing critique of public intellectuals who not only spoke in sound bites, but thought in them as well. It was such a noxious development that it could only be named in Franglais: Bourdieu called them "les fast-thinkers." He did not explicitly name Bernard-Henri Levy as an example; but then, he didn't have to. The man widely known as BHL has been a fixture of French life for the past quarter century, commenting in newspapers and on talk shows about Marxism, ethics, cultural history, and current affairs.
The intellectual substance of BHL's work may be open to debate, but his status as a celebrity is not. His wife is a movie star. He looks marvelous on television. His books are all best sellers, and his haircut is a national monument. But BHL has never had much of an audience in the United States, until now.
In August, Polity issued a translation of BHL's Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, first published in France in 2000, on the 20th anniversary of the existentialist's death. Things went much faster for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville House), which electrified readers in France last spring with its thesis that the Wall Street Journal reporter was executed for discovering links between Al Qaeda and Pakistan's intelligence agency. When it appeared in English in September, it quickly became one of the top 20 books sold on Amazon.com. (By early October, it was ranked 669th, while the Sartre volume hovered in 10,498th place.)
The ease with which BHL shifts from analyzing Sartre's relationship to theoretical antihumanism to doing investigative journalism among Pakistani jihadists makes American public intellectuals look rather timid. "My position is an atypical one," says Mr. Levy in a telephone interview from his estate in Marrakech, Morocco. "I am not a typical leftist or radical. I am not at all rightist, of course. I am not a typical philosopher or writer. I have a role that would seem strange to many. It would be very difficult to explain."
American reviewers have for the most part ignored BHL's study of Sartre. Those who have commented on it at all usually describe the work as a biography, which only proves that they have not read it. But Mr. Levy himself says that the newly translated volumes are closely linked. "The book about Sartre," he says, "draws the theoretical aspect of things: What is an intellectual, what is his task, what is his role in global history? Pearl is a concrete actualization of the model." He writes of Mr. Pearl as someone "standing in solidarity with the downtrodden, detached and engaged ... who made it his duty, if needed, to think counter to himself." It is a passage with distinctly Sartrean overtones -- including an allusion to the philosopher's remark that he tried to "think against himself."
The American audience for Mr. Levy's own cogitation expanded considerably during a media blitz in September, thanks to the efforts of Dennis Loy Johnson, who started Melville House in early 2002. He published Who Killed Daniel Pearl? in an edition of 50,000 copies -- seven times the print run of anything the small literary press had published before. "It was a big roll of the dice," he says. Next spring, Melville House will issue an English translation of Reflections on War, Evil, and the End of History, a book of essays inspired by BHL's sojourns in what he calls "the theaters of forgotten wars," such as Afghanistan and Somalia.
In the course of his recent book tour, Mr. Levy's English improved dramatically, says Mr. Johnson. "At the large media outlets," he says, "we found that there were a lot of people who already knew who he was, and just wanted to meet him." One prominent radio announcer flew to New York for an interview. "I thought, 'This is strange. Why doesn't he just do it by phone?'" recalls Mr. Johnson. "But I think that the reason is that his wife is French. He brought her along."
Besides his charisma, Mr. Levy offers the interesting spectacle of a French intellectual who considers anti-Americanism a serious political problem. "We had a lot of invitations from universities for him to appear on panels on whether Europe and America are drifting apart," says Mr. Johnson. The author spoke at such an event in Washington, D.C., that was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
At his hotel, says Mr. Johnson, Mr. Levy found himself in an elevator "surrounded by Pakistanis who were part of the contingent that had come over with Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali," who happened to be staying there. It was an uncomfortable ride down, since Mr. Levy's book has provoked much indignant discussion in Pakistan. "We changed hotels after that," says Mr. Johnson.
Now back home in Morocco, Mr. Levy has moved on to a new project. "The last two books were 'traveling' books," he says; he spent much of the past two years in Africa and East Asia. "I promised my wife that my next book would be a 'sitting' book," he says, "a book in a chair. So it will be a work of philosophy."