Bernard-Henri Lévy a laughing stock for quoting fictional philosopher
When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.
There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank.
LOL
..čeprav niti ni smešno. Je pa fajn priložnost. Nauči se francosko in greva v Pariz predavat ljudem o filozofiji, da ne bojo zavedeni s strani takih bebčkov. 20. stoletje je melo svojega Slovana, Kojeva, ki je Francozom razložil Hegla; očitno tudi v 21. stoletju potrebujejo kakšno razsvetlitev.
It’s really difficult to understand how BHL is admired by (media?) in France. It used to be the French would come to USA and show how superior they are. Now they come and talk that BHL shit and you have to wonder what happened!
BHL is a media invention. It was interesting to see Zizek treat him kindly.
I think BHL’s reacted in a properly Zizekian way; even if the quoted book/philosopher was fictional it still can be true. But why go after BHL on such a cheap level, unless one senses that BHL’s political stance remains undamaged despite all of Zizek’s refined theoretical critique..
Rodman, I don’t think BHL is engaging in Hegelian dialectics here, which is precisely the point: it would be hilarious if he were. It goes against everything the nouveaux philosophes “tradition” stands for.
To further clarify my point, in the book (from what little I read) BHL was trying to dismiss Kant (and probably German Idealism by extension) wholesale by some fairly superfluous accusations (Kant was raving mad? As if philsophers are supposed to be sane ;). Zizek, on the other hand, has consistently been trying to rehabilitate Kant and other fairly “traditional”/”conservative” thinkers.
That is the crucial difference, I think; Zizek is arguing that instead of asking useless questions like “what is living / dead in great thinkers of past”, we should ask what can those thinkers tell us about our contemporary situation.
I cannot understand how Zizek wastes his time talking to this “millionaire phylosopher” as he is called in France. He just has the oral (and hair) style of a pretentious nothing-sayer, his mission was to distroy the French Communist party in 68, as all the liberal libertarians in France, who talk against nation because they are XXIst century nomades and have a loft in NY, two flats in Paris and Barcelona and a summer house in Tel Aviv. They don’t need a passport, they have two or three visas. Those atheistics who are openly antimuslim, those pacifists who prepare psychologicaly the war against Iran and Venezuela and would like to be eclectic as Badiou or Zizek, but are just ridiculous and illiterate.
BHL will participate in a new blog of Le Monde, how much has he paid to do so?
(sorry my demagogy but I think with that kind of people, Glucksman, BHL and company, we don’t even need concreet examples, their only high references are Auschwitz and Gulag, the rest of human history is just a waste of time)
What does ‘engaging’ Hegelian ‘dialectics’ even mean?
Joanes spared me the trouble of having to point out that this is all demagogy. Luckily Zizek, so far, has ignored people who would like to see him skullf#@k BHL.
Is Bernard-Henri Levy even technically a philosopher? I’ve never actually heard him engage in anything approaching critical analysis, it’s mostly just emotive rhetoric about America, Zionism etc.
@Daniel E.
BHL is ‘technically’ a philosopher, apparently he studied under Althusser and Derrida according to wiki. Peter Sloterdijk is also technically a philosopher, someone who Zizek characterizes as an ‘intelligent’ reac. The line between sophistry and philosophy is not that clear. I see little problem in classifying Derrida, Levinas, Arendt, etc. as sophists, but why stop there and not even include Lacan and eventually Zizek himself under this label?
I enjoy reading Peter Sloterdijk because of his beautiful writing,nothing to compare to the infatuated Bhl.
the description made by Joanes Apaolaza is the closest to the truth.
To be fair, Žižek had a similar complication. He attributed the phrase “Obama is just a dark skinned white” to Chomsky, but Chomsky appears to have never said something like this (it was actually Berlusconi, if I remember it correctly). Then Žižek blamed the Slovene media, said that he picked it up here. The only problem is, I haven’t been able to find that statement in any Slovene publication.
But Žižek made this mistake in an online article, so it was soon fixed. Lévy on the other hand printed his screw-up and made a joke out of himself. You just can’t afford stunts like these, especially when trying to discredit a historical figure like Kant.
@Rodman
Zizek focuses much of his work on the ideas of Hegel, in particular that of Aufhebung or “sublation” of the immediate-material reality, a particular process of symbolization that turns what we perceive in “reality” into conceptual structures. So that’s what I mean by Hegelian dialectics.
And I agree that the likes of BHL really don’t deserve the kind of attention that he’s getting. But he represents on a symbolic level the discourse of the predominant postmodern-liberal-cynical ideology, so I think any kind of ideological-critical work on him is doubly justified.
@Daniel E.
He, Glucksman, and the other nouveaux philosophes are philosophers so long as you can consider New Age-ish feel-good fairytales for the liberal elites as philosophy, on par with the likes of Zakaria and Huntington. Apparently if you quote Rousseau or Derrida etc while justifying military/economic adventures you’re doing philosophy.
What particular part of Zizek’s work would that be?
Every one of them? I’m sorry to be so direct, but Zizek has said again and again that his main theoretical thrust is the Lacanian reading of Hegel and vice versa.
I know that the typical liberal image of Zizek is a combination of cultural theorist/critic and agent provocateur, so I hope you’re not being intentionally obtuse, as even Zizek’s Wikipedia page showed his immersion in Hegel (and German Idealism in general).
I would just like to point out that his last book is on Hegel (among others):
Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek – Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism
If you’re looking into his books you find many chapters where he is explicitly refering to German idealism. i think he is especially interested in Hegel and Kant, a little bit less in Schelling and Fichte (Fichte might be interesting for him because of Zizeks engagement for the Cartesian cogito). And with the Lacanian and the Freudian theory he is trying to reinterpret these ideas. Okay, of course he is also interested in Marx, but this already leads to his political theory. But i think his pure philosophical interest is in German Idealism (nowadays a rather unpopular kind of philosophy, refused by both post structuralism and the so called nouvelle philosophie).
Zizek once mentioned the book of Catherine Malabou “l’avenir de Hegel” as one of the best book he had read.
I must admit I found it myself quite obscure and difficult,Hegel is easier to understand through the “lacanian”gaze.
@isi
If you’re talking about the Lacanian Gaze, be careful. As far as I know, the trick there is that it’s at the side of the object, not the subject. So the subject is the one being gazed at, not the one object (Hegel in this case).
From Looking Awry:
But thanks for pointing that book out. Is Malabou the one who is supposed to ‘convert’ Derrida about Hegel before he passed away?
“But thanks for pointing that book out. Is Malabou the one who is supposed to ‘convert’ Derrida about Hegel before he passed away?”
yes,definitely
she also wrote “les nouveaux blessés” another reference forZizek
While I am not BHL fan, I worry that one might be tempted to make much of this error and elide circumstanced in which the very scholar we champion in opposition to BHL may very well risk falling prey to the simple error of misattributing authorship.
Put simply, doesn’t Zizek do this all the time? That is–he has commented on numerous occasions that many of his analyses of various films or texts rely on only a small portion of the material being viewed/read.
He (kiddingly, of course) teases that he needs to watch only ten or twenty minutes of a film to generate a properly Hegelian analysis (since, in his words, he is really only concerned about “theory” and not the concrete content of the work).
For example: who would really suspect Z would have suffered through the entirety of, say, “Shrek” (heavily criticized in his text “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” for its postmodern standpoint)? Or who would suspect Z would sift through each line and motif of “The Land Before Time” to squeeze out all its potential theoretical pulp?
Zizek, it would seem, is just as guilty of an ‘interpassive reading’ (c.f. For They Know Not What They Do, Preface to the Second Edition) of various texts of interest as BHL’s selective sampling of a text.
I do not think this denotes anything not already demonstrable elsewhere about BHL’s questionable premises with regard to Kant. On the contrary, the risk of “not taking too seriously” the line of argumentation of BHL, through cheap political ‘jabs’ (however justified), may be a variant of the dogmatic, ideological distancing of which Zizek speaks.
At the very least, this should merely be a warning to those with poor editors. No doubt, Verso probably filters out various goop and misattributions laced throughout Zizek’s books as well—they simply do a better job. It’s more of a shame that the book either went through a rigorous review process in which nobody commented on the error prior to going to print, or that there was a rushed lack of basic editing and fact checking prior to the book’s publication.
To rephrase the Paulinian notion of universality here: “There are no idiots, or clowns, no sophists or philosophers…,” rather, there is a divide which cuts across all identities, rendering them meaningless, such that we might say, “There are only those who fight for emancipation and their reactionary opponents; the people and the enemies of the people.” (c.f. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, P. 75-76.)
Before our criticism of BHL attaches itself to petty character-flaws or irrelevant disputes over accurate citation and notation, and if we take seriously the imperative of reawakening the Left from its theoretico-political slumber, we must emphasize the only legitimate question in relation to BHL (or any other theorist). That real question is thus: In which of these two (Paulinian) positions can we locate the praxis of Bernard-Henri Lévy–for or against the emancipation of the people?
@isi
How does the fact that Zizek is engaged with, or if you will, interested and immersed in Hegel, say anything about anything?
@James
Apologies for the various typographical errors.
On another note: On the flip side of the “ideological distancing” I mentioned above, I think Lévy’s predicament here offers us an excellent example of why Zizek partly laments his own depiction within Western media*: either you are a real philosopher who engages fully, and therefore are smeared as a clown when you make a simple mistake, or you engage at the humorous-cultural level (e.g. his commentary on the ideological underpinnings of the European structure of toilets, c.f. YouTube) and are celebrated as a clown.
The media’s role within Capitalism is to portray anyone who seriously questions is most fundamental premises as a ‘clown,’ ‘jokester,’ or ‘bafoon’ who is not to be taken seriously (and thus risk undermining the people’s faith in the liberal-utopian dream of Capitalism with a friendly face). It is in this sense that I sympathize–without agreement–with Lévy.
*I believe the phrase he used was “a distanced melancholia.”
@Rodman
A vague statement if ever there were one–to what “way” do you refer; his Lacanian reading of Hegel avec Kant, or his general ‘personality’? This would explain isi’s resistance to your remark–it is in the very reference to Zizek’s ‘way’ of reacting to leftist-media smears that one must feel puzzled by your drawn ‘connection’ between his and Lévy’s ‘way’ method.
However, I do think you are right, Rodman, if you are referring to Zizek’s tone in his response to the ridiculous assertions by, for example, Mr. Adam Kirsch (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-who-are-you-calling-anti-semitic).
@James
You make very good points. As regarding to Žižek’s statement that “half of the movies he writes about, he hasn’t seen them”:
I think it’s crucial here to see that Žižek uses cinema as a way to do ideology critique (with exceptions like Hitchcock). I think he talked about the way his work on cinema is divided in Slavoj Žižek talks with Peter Sellars. I read that statement of his as saying “It’s not the movies that I really care about, it’s the theory.” So he doesn’t care if he misrepresents a film, because it’s not the film he’s trying to represent.
On the other hand, we’re dealing here with philosophy, with Kant, a major philosophical figure. And it doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with Kant, love or hate him, or even if you would classify yourself as an Analytic Philosopher or a Continental one. In either case, when one is in the position of a philosopher, even a public intellectual like Lévy, this kind of ’slip’ has to be taken at another level. The ‘mistake’ in question is then not simply a reflection of a bad publisher, but a reflection of Lévy’s dismissal of Kant to the extent that he doesn’t even seriously look at the sources he’s citing. And I think that it’s important to point this out, so that anyone reading Lévy on Kant can take the appropriate distance to what he’s saying about him.
Of course the fact that I put this article on this blog is a whole different story, basically a cheap shot at Lévy, a way to discredit him like he discredits Kant. But I don’t see the big problem in this.
@Rodman
What exactly are you looking for?
@isi
Damn, that means I’ll actually have to learn French (some day…). Btw. his reading of ‘les nouveaux blessés’ can be found in his article Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject
@Rodman
I am not sure if I understand properly your question, and my english is too modest to engage in a philosophical discussion.
If you are asking what is Hegelian in Zizek, then my answer is: psychoanalysis. From the Hegelian triad to the Lacanian borromeen knot, I think that psychoanalysts is properly Hegelian. Even Freud who referred more to Schelling is considered today as being a true Hegelian when he discovers the death drive.
Did I answer your question or did I miss the point ?
@James
BHL’s response (in the article) reminded me of Zizek’s point that even if someone subjectively thinks he is joking (the author who started the hoax in the BHL case), objectively the content of his words are true. There could be several other related points; les non-dupes-erres, truth appears in the guise of fiction, etc.
@isi
Sorry, my question was not adressed to you specifically, but what I try to look for is the meaning behind all these concepts and names. Of course if you are a sophist, you could say that the meaning is what you put there yourself, so each of us is free to invent what Zizek’s Lacanian reading of Hegel is about.
The difference to me is that BHL misses the joke, the context of what he read. Zizek seems to look beyond the overt narrative and see the joke that lies underneath it. It’s not enough to say that they do the same thing. Zizek plays the buffoon while being a scholar…
@Mariborchan
Thank you for pointing out the crucial difference between Zizek’s use of Hollywood movies and BHL’s smear of Kant (as ever much more eloquent than my tumbling into discursive oblivion).
Zizek takes full theoretical responsibility for his use of the movies in his critique of ideology, he openly admits that he hasn’t seen all of them and that it would actually be crazy to do so, instead it is the ideological implications of the symbolic substance of the movies that he’s interested in.
BHL, on the other hand, quotes from a fictional book as \proof\ for the wholesale smear and dismissal of Kant, and when he’s caught red-handed he plays this cynical postmodern game of pseudo-dialectics, \oh but it’s the Idea that’s important!\. For a man who’s been claiming that Hegel and Marx are the founding fathers of totalitarianism, this makes me want to puke. So yes I also don’t see any problem in calling out his BS when it is due.
Another excellent article on l’affaire BHL from Inside Higher Ed.
What I was wondering about anyhow is why BHL is using some stupid secondary literature – never mind if this “Botul” would have exist or not – to argue on Kant. Is he afraid of dealing with the actual Kantian thoughts because then even the last one would recognize that he isn’t a good philosopher (anymore), or was it just because he was too busy to going in detail into Kantian philosophy while being expected to visit a charity gala of the Parisian liberal political correct scene of intellectuals? i think really because of both …
@Tony K
Thanks for the link, I’ll add it to the post.
@absinth1987
Good point.. And I’m still waiting for an answer! -> http://tinyurl.com/yzafnca
my answer to absinth1987would be:
Zizek stands on the side of ethics
BHL stands on the side of moral
@Mariborchan
Ah, that’s the Hegel book that he said he was working on. Good. I was starting to worry. Did anyone read it already, thoughts?