Udith Dematagoda’s recent fun piece on Dean Kissick (or playing with the idea of Dean Kissick—about whom I have no opinion myself), comparing him to BHL, put me in mind of an essay I wrote on the French ‘intellectual’ a few years ago for Foreign Policy
I thought this was excellent, just very good. (1) I'd have to reread, but I'm not quite (yet?) convinced that BHL is or was as influential as you say, but history/cause is always a mess. (2) I quite agree with your assessment of the inadequacy of a politics that sees everything as a threat to negatively defined human rights, all roads leading back to Berlin as it were. (3) I'm not sure BHL shouldn't be read as something like Oscar Wilde, engaged in a process of self-fashioning, whose greatest work was himself. Hence all the sex. "Philosophy" works, or worked for a while , in France, as the basis for such public fashioning. One could be a philosopher and a public figure, like Sartre, in a way that never made sense in the US. I make a little fun of this, below. (4) You might recall the Atlantic brought BHL over as a kind of Tocqueville reprise. The second time as farce, as it were. My response is here:
"America the Comfortable," FIRST THINGS, no.161: pp. 13-16 (March 2006).
“Rassurante Amérique: Tocqueville revue par Bernard-Henri Lévy,” ESPRIT (November
2005) 6 (trans. Alice Béja; written as “America the Comfortable”).
One note (Idk if this directed at you, at BHL, or at no one in particular):
In the comparison of state entities worthy of enmity to Revanchist Germany, the lesson would have to be something else entirely. Germany was not neutralized by "fighting authoritarianism, in the name of the Bavarian people and human rights". Germany itself was the enemy and it was shattered and then put back together in an entirely new form, with much smaller borders and an entirely new human geography.
If Gaddafi's Libya were to be dealt with in a similar fashion, it would require the redrawing of the lines in the Maghreb, probably annexation of the Northern half of Libya by the government of "Tunisia", which would do the same to the northeastern part of "Algeria".
BHL and Bouteldja share an essentially colonial view of the world, wherein "Libya" is a thing bc some Italian said so, and you have to choose between sending your daughters overseas to the revolutionary harem or "toppling Gaddafi" while leaving "Libya" intact. In the European case, we didn't say "Silesia deserves human rights", even though the average Volksdeutsche in Silesia was probably a very nice grandma - instead we deported them from Poznan and made a new country which didn't have the same problems.
"Leaving Algeria" means that "Algeria" is intact. Rather than recognizing "Algeria" as the colonial entity, we decided that we must preserve Algeria at all costs, even if it means handing over the reigns of the colony's middle management to angry Moslems. Algérie post-Francaise is even worse than Algérie Française from the perspective of the 1848 revolution, bc it freezes "Algeria" in time and makes it impossible for us to ever outgrow it, the way we once outgrew the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneberg, Cisleithenia, "Bosnia" (resurrected with a vengeance by the Germans in the 90s, with the help of BHL and probably Houria too, if she were alive), etcetera.
Blake,
I thought this was excellent, just very good. (1) I'd have to reread, but I'm not quite (yet?) convinced that BHL is or was as influential as you say, but history/cause is always a mess. (2) I quite agree with your assessment of the inadequacy of a politics that sees everything as a threat to negatively defined human rights, all roads leading back to Berlin as it were. (3) I'm not sure BHL shouldn't be read as something like Oscar Wilde, engaged in a process of self-fashioning, whose greatest work was himself. Hence all the sex. "Philosophy" works, or worked for a while , in France, as the basis for such public fashioning. One could be a philosopher and a public figure, like Sartre, in a way that never made sense in the US. I make a little fun of this, below. (4) You might recall the Atlantic brought BHL over as a kind of Tocqueville reprise. The second time as farce, as it were. My response is here:
"America the Comfortable," FIRST THINGS, no.161: pp. 13-16 (March 2006).
“Rassurante Amérique: Tocqueville revue par Bernard-Henri Lévy,” ESPRIT (November
2005) 6 (trans. Alice Béja; written as “America the Comfortable”).
As always, keep up the good work!
Remember reading thiis when it came out.
One note (Idk if this directed at you, at BHL, or at no one in particular):
In the comparison of state entities worthy of enmity to Revanchist Germany, the lesson would have to be something else entirely. Germany was not neutralized by "fighting authoritarianism, in the name of the Bavarian people and human rights". Germany itself was the enemy and it was shattered and then put back together in an entirely new form, with much smaller borders and an entirely new human geography.
If Gaddafi's Libya were to be dealt with in a similar fashion, it would require the redrawing of the lines in the Maghreb, probably annexation of the Northern half of Libya by the government of "Tunisia", which would do the same to the northeastern part of "Algeria".
BHL and Bouteldja share an essentially colonial view of the world, wherein "Libya" is a thing bc some Italian said so, and you have to choose between sending your daughters overseas to the revolutionary harem or "toppling Gaddafi" while leaving "Libya" intact. In the European case, we didn't say "Silesia deserves human rights", even though the average Volksdeutsche in Silesia was probably a very nice grandma - instead we deported them from Poznan and made a new country which didn't have the same problems.
"Leaving Algeria" means that "Algeria" is intact. Rather than recognizing "Algeria" as the colonial entity, we decided that we must preserve Algeria at all costs, even if it means handing over the reigns of the colony's middle management to angry Moslems. Algérie post-Francaise is even worse than Algérie Française from the perspective of the 1848 revolution, bc it freezes "Algeria" in time and makes it impossible for us to ever outgrow it, the way we once outgrew the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneberg, Cisleithenia, "Bosnia" (resurrected with a vengeance by the Germans in the 90s, with the help of BHL and probably Houria too, if she were alive), etcetera.