A French Intellectual Star Considers What's Right About the Left

The Chronicle of Higher Education The Chronicle Review

From the issue dated September 5, 2008
CRITIC AT LARGE
A French Intellectual Star Considers What's Right About the Left

By CARLIN ROMANO

Leave it to Bernard-Henri Lévy, a Sartre in billowy, unbuttoned white shirt, to anticipate the gusts of the geopolitical zeitgeist as we slip into a frigid autumn, chilled by more reminders of 20th-century totalitarianism than seem fair in an age of global warming.

By his own description a "philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker," France's No. 1 media intellectual (unlike Federer, BHL keeps the top spot year after year even as his pecs soften) often draws sneers from more circumspect intellectuals and philosophers. It's the flamboyance of his movie-star appearance and dress, the celebrity aspects of his life (beautiful actress wife, millions of inherited dollars, castle in Morocco), and their unexamined faith that leads them to conclude that beneath such distracting superficialities, Lévy must be superficial.

But isn't it time that snobs in French departments, who'll schedule 20 Bataille, Blanchot, or Deleuze seminars before permitting even an invited chat on Lévy, admit that his impact on French intellectual history will far outlast that of their heroes?

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism (Random House, September) — Lévy's blend of memoir, dissection of the 1970s New Philosophy movement that made him famous, and call for a leftism that's neither infantile nor robotic — demonstrates the acuity of his antennae, and his good fortune in reflecting current events.

Solzhenitsyn dies, unleashing a torrent of memorial journalism honoring his immense feat of baring the truth about Soviet brutality in The Gulag Archipelago, and Lévy offers a prescient section that salutes the Russian master's greatness, declaring that the "Communist dream dissolved in the furnace of a book." Vladimir Putin fulfills the prediction of close Kremlin watchers and moves toward re-Stalinizing Russia, and Lévy attributes to the Russian prime minister "the beastly scowl of the murderous KGB man he has always been." Nicolas Sarkozy takes center stage as the European Union's leader and chief negotiator between the United States and a resurgent Russia, and Lévy's new book functions as a sideways conversation with his new president, who enters and re-enters as prod, provocateur, and catalyst to rethinking.

Timeliness, however, is just one mark of Lévy's relevance as a global catalyst of ideological self-scrutiny. Another is his willingness, forged on a world stage where he interacts with both fellow thinkers and national leaders, to question commitments that other, wimpier but allegedly more rigorous intellectuals leave untouched.

In Barbarism With a Human Face (1977), the best seller that launched the young philosopher's career with its Solzhenitsyn-inspired attack on the French Left's indulgence toward the Soviet Union, Lévy displayed his signature independence. Now, 30 years on, Lévy, who turns 60 in November, muses on what it means to be a person "of the Left" (so he's always defined himself) after so much international rejection of Communism and Socialism over three decades. It's an especially pointed question for a writer whose country's parliamentary seating plan bequeathed us the blunt directional signals of right and left for political purposes.

Lévy's meditations arise from a predictable encounter at the heights of power. The concreteness with which Lévy tells the tale certifies him as an apt complement to the new leader French critics call "Sarkozy the American." Lévy is a kind of American Pragmatist in Paris whose philosophical urgencies arise from confrontation with conceptual problems in his chock-full activist life.

Left in Dark Times, BHL advises, grew out of a phone call he received from Sarkozy on January 23, 2007. The two men go back to Sarkozy's election in 1983 as mayor of Neuilly, the Parisian suburb in which Lévy votes. They'd lunched together many times over the years, developing, Lévy writes, "a kind of friendship." Lévy confesses himself alternately drawn to the brilliant, temperamental Sarkozy, a rightist eager to draw Socialists to his banner in last year's French presidential election, and put off at times by Sarkozy's "show-offy tone." (Lévy makes no mention of a primal underlying awkwardness — his novelist daughter, Justine Lévy, had her husband stolen a while back by none other than Sarkozy's new wife, Carla Bruni, a tale at the heart of Justine Lévy's novel, Nothing Serious.)

The immediate occasion of Sarkozy's call? André Glucksmann, Lévy's old "New Philosopher" peer, had just published a piece in Le Monde endorsing Sarkozy against his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal. Lévy puts Sarkozy's remarks between quotation marks: "Let's get to the point. What about you? When are you going to write your little article for me? Huh, when? Because Glucksmann is fine. But you, after all, are my friend."

Lévy resists. "Personal relationships are one thing," he replies. "Ideas are another. And no matter how much I like and respect you, the Left is my family."

Sarkozy interrupted him, Lévy recalls, in rough language. "These people who've spent 30 years telling you to go [expletive] yourself? … Do you really believe what you're saying, that these people are your family?"

Lévy stands his ground, replying, "I've always voted for the Left, and I'm voting for the Left this time, too."

Sarkozy eventually hangs up on him. Though not without, Lévy writes, a slightly "sleazy" insinuation that it's all "an unfortunate misunderstanding" they'll clear up down the line.

The phone call shook Lévy. It's that openness to being shaken in his beliefs — as when he ventured as a young man to Bangladesh, and later through the hellholes of Pakistan in search of Daniel Pearl's killers — that makes Lévy more appealing than many of his detractors.

"Had my thinking really become so Pavlovian," he writes, "that, as I'd just said to him, the Left was my family and you don't betray your family?" A week later, Lévy finds himself mouthing something similar to a French weekly embarked "on its umpteenth report" on the rightward drift of French intellectuals. He realizes afterward that his argument from the "family" metaphor is "frankly pathetic — and even goes against some of my basic convictions."

Thus he decided to speak in Left in Dark Times, with its many incisive observations on what it should mean to be "Left" in the 21st century. For Lévy "nothing good can come for the Left" without breaking with much of its history, especially softness on totalitarianism. He takes the widespread abandonment of revolutionary aspirations by most leftists — in the American context, he's talking about "liberals" or "progressives" — as one happy example of that. As he painstakingly explains, remaining on the Left involves a combination of impulses.

In part it's a commitment to images, from his father's engagement with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War to the 60s achievements of Americans such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Joan Baez. In part it's a mind-set that emerges out of epochal historical events — for him, the disgraces of Vichy France and the Algerian war, the consciousness-changing power of France's 1968, and the never-ending influence of the Dreyfus Affair. The last revealed the latent poisons of the French Republic and forever taught lessons about standing up for the individual targeted by powerful state interests.

In part it's also a combination of what he deems "reflexes," such as keeping freedom and equality united as aims, and never allowing another party's criminality or immorality to justify one's own.

Lévy convinces himself, and his reader, that his identification with the Left is no mere family loyalty, but a deep form of adherence to the freedom and dignity of the individual, antifascism, anticolonialism, and "the antitotalitarianism that is the legacy of May 68." All of that, he believes, should coalesce into "the Left we have to rebuild." In reaching that conclusion, Lévy also addresses many present and departed grand figures of French thought, such as Foucault and Deleuze, whom, foolish disparagers of Lévy should remember, he's known and debated personally. Lévy's engagement with the entire firmament of French thought, his focused attention on such conundrums as atheism and moral universalism, and his battles against knee-jerk anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism make Left in Dark Times the most accessible introduction to who he is today.

Without question, Lévy's style irritates philosophers fond of tight, impersonal sentences, and it always will. Not since William James has any philosopher of Lévy's prominence insisted on stream of consciousness as, well, a normal form of thinking. Almost every halting consideration, and twist in thought, is tucked in, leading to multiclaused sentences that at times seem translated into French (from Lévyese) by Nabokov, then translated back into American English by Tom Wolfe.

No matter. One doesn't become a world-class intellectual by exhibiting a tin ear in the face of history, or a pedestrian style that leaves one in the communal prose pot with everyone else. The press and Lévy's peers, if not academics, take Lévy seriously because he continues to pursue ideas and events that matter — morally, politically, philosophically.

Early on he mentions a well-known French formulation of the dividing line between Left and Right, Françoise Sagan's observation that "in the case of any given injustice, the man or woman of the Right will say it's inevitable. The man or woman of the Left will say it's intolerable." Lévy doesn't comment, possibly because Sagan's vision of the crusading leftist fits him too well, and he prefers, like most writers, to shape his own self-portrait.

But it is exactly that bent toward justice that Sagan sees as emblematic of the Left, that commitment to it throughout his work and across racial, class, and other borders, that makes Lévy not a "celebrity" to be mocked by more timorous types, but an admirable warrior of ideas who continues to take personal risks for truth as he sees it. He's never suffered like a Solzhenitsyn, but, then, Sarkozy is no Stalin.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 2, Page B6
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education