Bernard-Henri Lévy

Wikip'edia

Bernard-Henri Lévy (French pronunciation: [b%C9%9B%CA%81na%CA%81d ɑ̃ʁi levi]; born November 5, 1948) is a French public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" (New Philosophy) movement in 1976.

Life and career

Early life

Lévy was born in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to a wealthy Sephardi Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the multi-millionaire founder and manager of a timber company, Becob.

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy enrolled in the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Some of his professors there included prominent French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1971, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent, and was in Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangla-Desh, Nationalism in the Revolution"), which was published in 1973.

New Philosophers

Returning to Paris, Lévy became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas. Throughout the 1970s, Lévy taught a course on epistemology at the Université de Strasbourg and he taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was in 1977, on the television show Apostrophes, that Lévy was presented, alongside André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

Intellectual involvement

In 1981 Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work, in which he offers a dark picture of French history. It was strongly criticized for its journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history by some of the most respected French academics — including Raymond Aron (see his Memoirs).

Lévy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and spoke out early about the alleged Serbian concentration camps. He referred to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other nations.

When his father died in 1995, Lévy became the manager of the Becob company, until it was sold in 1997 for 750 million francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.

At the end of the 1990s, he founded with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut an Institute on Levinassian Studies at Jerusalem.

He is member of nonprofit advocacy group JCall.

Political positions

In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been beheaded by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl’s death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy. He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won praise for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions but was condemned by the British historian of India and travel writer William Dalrymple (among others) for its lack of rigour and its caricatural depictions of Pakistani society, as well as his decision to fictionalize Pearl's thoughts in the closing moments of his life.

Although Levy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in the English language was with the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly. In the series, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville", Levy imitated his compatriot and predecessor in American critique, Alexis de Tocqueville, criss-crossing the United States, interviewing Americans and recording his observations first for magazine and then book publication. The book was met with derision in the United States, and was ridiculed by Garrison Keillor in a review on the front page of the New York Times.

In March 2006 a letter Lévy co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Muslim world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. When questioned about the Niqab face-veil worn by some Muslim women, during the United Kingdom debate over veils, Lévy told the Jewish Chronicle that "the veil is an invitation to rape".

With the aid of real Washington political advisers, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli, created two commercials for competing US presidential campaigns – pitting Sharon Stone against Bernard-Henri Lévy – in a project entitled Democrazy, shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Recent activities In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to promote his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.

On June 24, 2009, Lévy posted a video on Dailymotion in support of the Iranian protesters who were being repressed after the contested elections.

He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La Règle du Jeu ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur.

In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.

At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010) Lévy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy."

Lévy has reported from troubled zones during wartime, in order to attract the public opinion, in France and abroad, over those political changes. In August 2008, Lévy reported from South Ossetia (Georgia) during the 2008 South Ossetia war; in that occasion he interviewed the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.

In March 2011 he engaged in talks with Libyan insurgents in Benghazi, and publicly promoted the international acknowledgement of the recently formed National Transitional Council. Later that month, worried about the Libyan uprising, he prompted and then supported Nicolas Sarkozy's seeking to persuade Washington, and ultimately the United Nations, to intervene in Libya in order to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.

In May 2011 Levy defended IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn when Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in New York City. Levy suggested that the chambermaid had been sent as part of an anti-Kahn conspiracy, stating in The Daily Beast "It would be nice to know — and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.”

In May 2011 Levy argued for military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad after violence against civilians in response to the 2011 Syrian uprising.

Criticisms

Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals, from noted intellectuals such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile". Their most common accusation towards Lévy is of him being one-sided and, ultimately, shallow as a thinker. Vidal-Naquet went as far as saying: "BHL's intellectual dishonesty is properly unfathomable".

More recently, in the essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010), Lévy was embarrassed when he used, as a central point of his refutation of Kant, the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul. Botul's writings are actually well-known spoofs, and Botul himself is the fictional creation of a French living journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès, as is easily guessed from his thought-system being botulism.

Another round of criticisms addresses Lévy's reliance on his connections with the French literary and business circles to promote his works. Lévy had for years business ties with billionaire François Pinault, befriended Jean-Luc Lagardère, who owned Hachette Livre, the largest publisher in France, and Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the largest magazine publisher in the world. Lévy was even briefly related to Jean-Paul Enthoven, publisher of Grasset (a novel and essay division of Hachette Livre), when his daughter Justine Lévy was married to Enthoven's son Raphaël. Lévy has been chairman of the supervisory board for French-German cultural TV channel Arte, was for years a columnist for French newspaper Le Monde and is currently a columnist for both news magazine Le Point (owned by François Pinault) and national daily newspaper Libération, in addition to being a shareholder and member of the supervisory board. In the essay Une imposture française, journalists Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer claim that Lévy uses his unique position as an influential member of both the literary and business establishments in France to be the go-between between the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.

For instance, Beau and Toscer noted that most of the reviews published in France for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? didn't mention strong denials about the book given by experts and Pearl's own family including wife Marianne Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego".

In 2011 he commented in support of his friend of twenty years Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he was arrested on sexual allegations, referring to the allegations as, "absurd."

Personal life

Lévy is married to French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle. His eldest daughter by his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne, Justine Lévy, is a bestselling novelist. He also has a son, Antonin-Balthazar Lévy, by his second wife, Sylvie Bouscasse.

Lévy is, with his third wife, a regular fixture in Paris Match magazine, wearing his trademark unbuttoned white shirts and designer suits. Some have attributed to Lévy a reputation for narcissism. One article about him coined the dictum, "God is dead but my hair is perfect." He once said that the discovery of a new shade of grey left him "ecstatic." He is a regular victim of the "pie thrower" Noël Godin, who describes Lévy as "a vain, pontificating dandy".

Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in world society and world politics.

Lévy has been friends with Nicholas Sarkozy since 1983. Relations between them deteriorated during Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential run in which Lévy backed the Socialist candidate and also described Sarkozy as "A man with a warrior vision of politics". However, they grew closer again after Sarkozy's victory.

Threats

Lévy was one of six prominent European public figures of Jewish ancestry targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group in 2008. The list included other Frenchmen such as Josy Eisenberg. That plot was reportedly foiled after the group's leader, Abdelkader Belliraj, was arrested based on unrelated murder charges from the 1980s.

Works

Lévy's works have been translated into many different languages; below is an offering of works available in either French or English.

Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution, 1973.

La barbarie à visage humain, 1977.

“Response to the Master Censors”. Telos 33 (Fall 1977). New York: Telos Press.

Le testament de Dieu, 1978.

Idéologie française, 1981.

Le diable en tête, 1984.

Eloge des intellectuels, 1987.

Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, 1988.

Les aventures de la liberté, 1991.

Le jugement dernier, 1992

Piero della Francesca, 1992

Les hommes et les femmes, 1994.

Bosna!,1994.

La pureté dangereuse, 1994.

Adventures on the Freedom Road, Harvill Press, 1995, hardcover, ISBN 1860460356

What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their Thoughts, Algora Publishing, 2000, paperback, 276 pages, ISBN 1892941104

Comédie, 1997.

Le siècle de Sartre, 2000.

Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, 2002.

Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, translated by Andrew Brown, Polity Press, July 2003, hardcover, 456 pages, ISBN 074563009X

Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, 2003, in English as Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, (Melville House Publishing), September 2003, hardcover, 454 pages, ISBN 0971865949

War, Evil and End of History, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd [UK], (Melville House Publishing) [US], October 2004, hardcover, 400 pages, ISBN 0715633368; paperback, ISBN 978-0-971865-95-2

Récidives, 2004.

American Vertigo : Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Random House, January 2006, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 1400064341

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, translated by Benjamin Moser, Random House Publishing Group, 2009, 256 pages, ISBN 0812974727; paperback, ISBN 9780812974720

Bernard-Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, Random House, 2011, paperback, 320 pages, ISBN 0812980786

Bernard-Henri Lévy (Béni-Saf, Argelia, 5 de noviembre de 1948), conocido en Francia como BHL, es un filósofo y escritor francés.

Contenido

   1 Biografía

   2 Referencias

   3 Enlaces externos

   4 Libros publicados

Biografía
Nació en la Argelia francesa en el seno de una familia judía sefardí, se trasladó a Francia en 1954. En 1968 entró en la prestigiosa Escuela Normal Superior parisina donde tuvo como profesores a Jacques Derrida y Louis Althusser. En 1971 inició una etapa como periodista de guerra, cubriendo la guerra de independencia de Bangladés.

De vuelta a París, se hizo popular en 1976 como joven fundador de la corriente de los llamados nuevos filósofos (nouveaux philosophes) franceses, como André Glucksmann y Alain Finkielkraut, críticos con los dogmas de la izquierda radical surgida de Mayo del 68. Se convirtió entonces en un filósofo discutido, acusado de «intelectual mediático» y narcisista por sus detractores, y valorado por su compromiso moral en favor de la libertad de pensamiento por sus defensores.

Se considera que la influencia de Lévy, que estuvo de visita en Bengasi, fue fundamental para que el presidente Nicolas Sarkozy se solidarizase con los rebeldes de Libia.1

Referencias

↑ France’s goals in Libya hit a little closer to home
Enlaces externos
Wikiquote alberga frases célebres de o sobre Bernard-Henri Lévy.

   Sitio oficial Bernard-Henri Lévy

   Facebook Bernard-Henri Lévy

   Entrevista uno a uno con Bernard-Henri Lévy @ Leadel.NET

   Entrevista con Bernard-Henri Lévy A November 2008 interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy in Guernica Magazine

   Biografía, bibliografía, noticias, y mas de 400 recortes periodisticos de o sobre Bernard-Henri Lévy

   Institute for Levinassian Studies, co-founded by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut

   Crisis Darfur: Bernard-Henri Lévy at PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature — as published in Guernica Magazine.

   "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville" — An article in the Atlantic Monthly.

   "On the Road Avec M. Lévy" — A review of American Vertigo in the New York Times Book Review by Garrison Keillor.

   "Mediocracy in America" — A review of American Vertigo in the literary magazine, n+1 by Sam Stark.

   "The Lies of Bernard Henri Lévy" Critical Doug Ireland article in In These Times.

   Profile: Bernard Henry Lévy

   Big Ideas @ TVO Lévy discusses his book "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_Levy

Bernard-Henri Lévy (French pronunciation: [b%C9%9B%CA%81na%CA%81d ɑ̃ʁi levi]; born November 5, 1948) is a French public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" (New Philosophy) movement in 1976.

Life and career

Early life

Lévy was born in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to a wealthy Sephardi Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the multi-millionaire founder and manager of a timber company, Becob.

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy enrolled in the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Some of his professors there included prominent French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1971, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent, and was in Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangla-Desh, Nationalism in the Revolution"), which was published in 1973.

New Philosophers

Returning to Paris, Lévy became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas. Throughout the 1970s, Lévy taught a course on epistemology at the Université de Strasbourg and he taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was in 1977, on the television show Apostrophes, that Lévy was presented, alongside André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

Intellectual involvement

In 1981 Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work, in which he offers a dark picture of French history. It was strongly criticized for its journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history by some of the most respected French academics — including Raymond Aron (see his Memoirs).

Lévy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and spoke out early about the alleged Serbian concentration camps. He referred to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other nations.

When his father died in 1995, Lévy became the manager of the Becob company, until it was sold in 1997 for 750 million francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.

At the end of the 1990s, he founded with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut an Institute on Levinassian Studies at Jerusalem.

He is member of nonprofit advocacy group JCall.

Political positions

In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been beheaded by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl’s death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy. He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won praise for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions but was condemned by the British historian of India and travel writer William Dalrymple (among others) for its lack of rigour and its caricatural depictions of Pakistani society, as well as his decision to fictionalize Pearl's thoughts in the closing moments of his life.

Although Levy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in the English language was with the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly. In the series, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville", Levy imitated his compatriot and predecessor in American critique, Alexis de Tocqueville, criss-crossing the United States, interviewing Americans and recording his observations first for magazine and then book publication. The book was met with derision in the United States, and was ridiculed by Garrison Keillor in a review on the front page of the New York Times.

In March 2006 a letter Lévy co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Muslim world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. When questioned about the Niqab face-veil worn by some Muslim women, during the United Kingdom debate over veils, Lévy told the Jewish Chronicle that "the veil is an invitation to rape".

With the aid of real Washington political advisers, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli, created two commercials for competing US presidential campaigns – pitting Sharon Stone against Bernard-Henri Lévy – in a project entitled Democrazy, shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Recent activities

In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to promote his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.

On June 24, 2009, Lévy posted a video on Dailymotion in support of the Iranian protesters who were being repressed after the contested elections.

He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La Règle du Jeu ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur.

In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.

At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010) Lévy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy."

Lévy has reported from troubled zones during wartime, in order to attract the public opinion, in France and abroad, over those political changes. In August 2008, Lévy reported from South Ossetia (Georgia) during the 2008 South Ossetia war; in that occasion he interviewed the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.

In March 2011 he engaged in talks with Libyan insurgents in Benghazi, and publicly promoted the international acknowledgement of the recently formed National Transitional Council. Later that month, worried about the Libyan uprising, he prompted and then supported Nicolas Sarkozy's seeking to persuade Washington, and ultimately the United Nations, to intervene in Libya in order to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.

In May 2011 Levy defended IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn when Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in New York City. Levy suggested that the chambermaid had been sent as part of an anti-Kahn conspiracy, stating in The Daily Beast "It would be nice to know — and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.”

In May 2011 Levy argued for military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad after violence against civilians in response to the 2011 Syrian uprising.

Criticisms

Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals, from noted intellectuals such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile". Their most common accusation towards Lévy is of him being one-sided and, ultimately, shallow as a thinker. Vidal-Naquet went as far as saying: "BHL's intellectual dishonesty is properly unfathomable".

More recently, in the essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010), Lévy was embarrassed when he used, as a central point of his refutation of Kant, the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul. Botul's writings are actually well-known spoofs, and Botul himself is the fictional creation of a French living journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès, as is easily guessed from his thought-system being botulism.

Another round of criticisms addresses Lévy's reliance on his connections with the French literary and business circles to promote his works. Lévy had for years business ties with billionaire François Pinault, befriended Jean-Luc Lagardère, who owned Hachette Livre, the largest publisher in France, and Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the largest magazine publisher in the world. Lévy was even briefly related to Jean-Paul Enthoven, publisher of Grasset (a novel and essay division of Hachette Livre), when his daughter Justine Lévy was married to Enthoven's son Raphaël. Lévy has been chairman of the supervisory board for French-German cultural TV channel Arte, was for years a columnist for French newspaper Le Monde and is currently a columnist for both news magazine Le Point (owned by François Pinault) and national daily newspaper Libération, in addition to being a shareholder and member of the supervisory board. In the essay Une imposture française, journalists Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer claim that Lévy uses his unique position as an influential member of both the literary and business establishments in France to be the go-between between the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.

For instance, Beau and Toscer noted that most of the reviews published in France for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? didn't mention strong denials about the book given by experts and Pearl's own family including wife Marianne Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego".

In 2011 he commented in support of his friend of twenty years Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he was arrested on sexual allegations, referring to the allegations as, "absurd."

Personal life

Lévy is married to French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle. His eldest daughter by his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne, Justine Lévy, is a bestselling novelist. He also has a son, Antonin-Balthazar Lévy, by his second wife, Sylvie Bouscasse.

Lévy is, with his third wife, a regular fixture in Paris Match magazine, wearing his trademark unbuttoned white shirts and designer suits. Some have attributed to Lévy a reputation for narcissism. One article about him coined the dictum, "God is dead but my hair is perfect." He once said that the discovery of a new shade of grey left him "ecstatic." He is a regular victim of the "pie thrower" Noël Godin, who describes Lévy as "a vain, pontificating dandy".

Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in world society and world politics.

Lévy has been friends with Nicholas Sarkozy since 1983. Relations between them deteriorated during Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential run in which Lévy backed the Socialist candidate and also described Sarkozy as "A man with a warrior vision of politics". However, they grew closer again after Sarkozy's victory.

Threats

Lévy was one of six prominent European public figures of Jewish ancestry targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group in 2008. The list included other Frenchmen such as Josy Eisenberg. That plot was reportedly foiled after the group's leader, Abdelkader Belliraj, was arrested based on unrelated murder charges from the 1980s.

Works

Lévy's works have been translated into many different languages; below is an offering of works available in either French or English.

Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution, 1973.

La barbarie à visage humain, 1977.

“Response to the Master Censors”. Telos 33 (Fall 1977). New York: Telos Press.

Le testament de Dieu, 1978.

Idéologie française, 1981.

Le diable en tête, 1984.

Eloge des intellectuels, 1987.

Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, 1988.

Les aventures de la liberté, 1991.

Le jugement dernier, 1992

Piero della Francesca, 1992

Les hommes et les femmes, 1994.

Bosna!,1994.

La pureté dangereuse, 1994.

Adventures on the Freedom Road, Harvill Press, 1995, hardcover, ISBN 1860460356

What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their Thoughts, Algora Publishing, 2000, paperback, 276 pages, ISBN 1892941104

Comédie, 1997.

Le siècle de Sartre, 2000.

Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, 2002.

Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, translated by Andrew Brown, Polity Press, July 2003, hardcover, 456 pages, ISBN 074563009X

Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, 2003, in English as Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, (Melville House Publishing), September 2003, hardcover, 454 pages, ISBN 0971865949

War, Evil and End of History, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd [UK], (Melville House Publishing) [US], October 2004, hardcover, 400 pages, ISBN 0715633368; paperback, ISBN 978-0-971865-95-2

Récidives, 2004.

American Vertigo : Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Random House, January 2006, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 1400064341

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, translated by Benjamin Moser, Random House Publishing Group, 2009, 256 pages, ISBN 0812974727; paperback, ISBN 9780812974720

Bernard-Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, Random House, 2011, paperback, 320 pages, ISBN 0812980786

Bernard-Henri Lévy, souvent désigné par ses initiales BHL, né le 5 novembre 1948 à Béni Saf (Algérie), est un écrivain, philosophe, cinéaste, romancier, essayiste, dramaturge, homme d’affaires, intellectuel et chroniqueur français.

Depuis la parution de son premier essai La Barbarie à visage humain en 1977, il est une figure influente de la scène politique, philosophique, médiatique et littéraire française, à travers son implication dans de nombreux sujets politiques, diplomatiques et de société. Initiateur du mouvement des nouveaux philosophes dans les années 1970, dont il demeure la figure emblématique, son action, ses opinions et ses publications font l'objet de nombreuses controverses.

Lecteur de Sartre et de Husserl, il est l'auteur de nombreux ouvrages sur la judaïté, l'identité, le sionisme, les intégrismes religieux, l'art, l'antisémitisme, l'esprit baudelairien, dont il se réclame, les États-Unis et la guerre en Libye lors de laquelle il est apparu comme une figure active prééminente sur la scène internationale, tout comme lors des guerres de Yougoslavie et l'intervention russe en Ukraine.

Auteur de pièces de théâtre et de deux romans pour lesquels il a reçu le prix Médicis en 1984 et le prix Interallié 1988, chroniqueur et cinéaste, il est fondateur de l'Institut d'études lévinassiennes en 2000 avec Benny Levy et Alain Finkielkraut, et dirige depuis 1990 la revue qu'il a fondée, La Règle du jeu.

Biographie

Famille

Ascendance

Bernard-Henri Lévy est issu d'une famille juive d'Algérie.

L'un de ses arrière-grands-pères maternels était le rabbin de Tlemcen qui se situe à l'ouest du pays. Son père, André Lévy, est originaire de Mascara et, à 18 ans, s'engage pour la défense de l'Espagne républicaine avant de combattre au sein du 2e bataillon de marche, sous les ordres du général Diego Brosset. Sa mère est née Dina Siboni. Il a un frère, Philippe, et une sœur, Véronique, convertie au catholicisme, baptisée le 7 avril 2012 et auteur du livre Montre-moi ton visage. Après avoir passé plusieurs années au Maroc, alors protectorat français, sa famille s'installe en France, à Neuilly-sur-Seine, en 1954.

En 1946, son père s'installe à Casablanca dans le quartier d'Anfa et fonde au Maroc la Becob, une société d’importation de bois précieux africains et de résineux (de Finlande, d'URSS ou de Roumanie), rachetée par le groupe Pinault-Printemps-Redoute en 1997. Après la vente de l'entreprise, Bernard-Henri Lévy est resté actionnaire et administrateur de plusieurs sociétés. Il est à la tête de la société civile immobilière Finatrois. Ancien actionnaire de la société de production de cinéma Les films du lendemain, il a cédé ses parts dans cette société pour un euro symbolique, au début de l'année 2013, à sa présidente, Kristina Larsen. Il garde de cette époque une amitié avec Claude Berda.

En 1996, le magazine économique Challenges classe la famille Lévy comme 187e plus grosse fortune française avec 455 millions de francs.

Vie privée

En septembre 1974, il a une fille de sa première union avec le mannequin Isabelle Doutreluigne (décédée en 2003) : Justine Lévy. Ils divorcent en 1974. Après une suite de cambriolages et une incarcération, Isabelle Doutreluigne ne reprend pas la garde de sa fille.

En 1980, il épouse Sylvie Bouscasse, éditrice. François Mitterrand est témoin de mariage. De leur union naît la même année un fils prénommé Antonin-Balthazar-Solal,. Ils divorcent quelques années plus tard.

Le 19 juin 1993, il épouse l'actrice Arielle Dombasle à Saint-Paul-de-Vence, un an après qu'elle a joué au théâtre de l'Atelier sa pièce Le Jugement dernier.

En février 2011, dans le magazine Harper’s Bazaar, l'artiste millionnaire Daphne Guinness, riche héritière du fabricant de bière irlandais, révèle une relation de cinq ans avec Bernard-Henri Lévy, après qu'ils ont été surpris à Nice en juin 2010 par des paparazzi. Il écrit pour elle le dialogue du personnage qu'elle joue dans le film The Legend of Lady White Snake. La liaison prend fin en 2013

suite

ברנאר אנרי לוי

(צרפתית: Bernard-Henri Lévy או BHL; נולד ב-5 בנובמבר 1948) הוא אינטלקטואל, פילוסוף, סופר, קולנוען ואיש עסקים צרפתי-יהודי יליד אלג'יריה.

תוכן עניינים
1 קורות חיים
2 מעורבות פוליטית 3 הגותו הפילוסופית 4 הכרה אקדמית בישראל 5 עבודותיו 5.1 ספרים שתורגמו לעברית 5.2 מאמרים מתורגמים לעברית 5.3 ספרים מתורגמים לאנגלית 6 קישורים חיצוניים 7 הערות שוליים

קורות חיים לוי נולד בבני-סף, אלג'יריה למשפחה יהודית-ספרדית, והם התגוררו מספר שנים גם במרוקו. ב-1954 היגרו לצרפת והתיישבו בניי-סיר-סן ליד פריז. אביו, אנדרה לוי, היה בעל חברת יבוא עצים, אותה הוריש לבנו כאשר נפטר בשנת 1995. לוי מכר את החברה בשנת 1997 במחיר של 750 מיליון פרנק צרפתי.

לוי למד במכינה במסגרת בית הספר היוקרתי "ליסה לואי-לה-גאראן", התקבל לאקול נורמל סופרייר ב-1968 וסיים שם תואר בפילוסופיה. כמה מהמורים שלו היו פילוסופים בולטים כמו ז'אק דרידה ולואי אלתוסר. לאחר מכן החל לעבוד ככתב צבאי עבור העיתון Combat, עיתון שייסד אלבר קאמי בתקופת הכיבוש הנאצי במלחמת העולם השנייה. ב-1971 הוא ביקר בתת היבשת ההודית, וסיקר את מלחמת העצמאות של בנגלדש מפקיסטן. בעקבות חוויה זו כתב את ספרו הראשון "Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution" (בנגלדש, לאומיות במהפכה), שהתפרסם ב-1973.

כשחזר לפריז התפרסם אגב השתייכותו למייסדי חבורת "הפילוסופים החדשים". חבורה אינטלקטואלית-צרפתית זו, שמרבית חבריה היו יהודים, הפנתה עורף לאידאולוגיה המרקסיסטית והנאו-מרקסיסטית שבאה לידי ביטוי באירועי מאי 1968, וביקרה את השלכות תאוריות אלה על החברה והתרבות בצרפת. במהלך שנות ה-70 לימד לוי קורס באפיסטמולוגיה באוניברסיטת שטרסבורג ופילוסופיה באקול נורמל סופרייר. בשנת 1977 פרסם את הספר Barbarism with a Human Face, בו הוקיע את האינטלקטואלים המרקסיסטים כשותפים לפשעים של הקומוניסטים. ב-1981 פרסם את The French Ideology, שהוא ספרו המשפיע ביותר.

לצד הכתבים הפילוסופיים, לוי כותב גם סיפורת ואף עסק בקולנוע. ב-1997 ביים את סרט הקולנוע "יום ולילה" בכיכובו של אלן דלון. הסרט נחשב אחד הסרטים הגרועים בכל הזמנים. כאינטלקטואל מעורב, לוי מרבה לדבר ולכתוב באמצעי התקשורת על ענייני השעה והוא בין האנשים המסוקרים ביותר בצרפת. בשנים 2005–2006 נכתבו עליו יותר מעשרה ספרים, כולם ללא שיתוף פעולה או הסכמה מצידו.

לוי נשוי לשחקנית-זמרת אריאל דומבאל, ולהם ילד משותף. בתו הבכורה מנישואיו הראשונים, ז'יסטין לוי, היא סופרת מצליחה שפרסמה כמה רבי-מכר.

מעורבות פוליטית

ברנרד אנרי לוי באוניברסיטת תל אביב לוי היה האינטלקטואל הצרפתי הראשון שקרא להתערב במלחמה בבוסניה בשנות ה-90, בעקבות הטיהור האתני שביצעו הסרבים והקמת מחנות הריכוז. בסוף שנות ה-90 ייסד עם בני לוי ואנדרה גליקסמן מכון לחקר משנתו של עמנואל לוינס בירושלים.

בעקבות חטיפתו ורציחתו של כתב ה"וול סטריט ג'ורנל" דניאל פרל בידי קיצונים אסלמיים בסוף שנת 2002, יצא לוי לחקור את הפרשה. הוא ביקר באפגניסטן כשליחו המיוחד של נשיא צרפת ז'אק שיראק. הוא סייר במשך כשנה בפקיסטן, הודו, ארצות הברית וברחבי אירופה במטרה לגלות מדוע פרל נשבה ונרצח. בעקבות מסע זה כתב את הספר "מי הרג את דניאל פרל?", שם טען כי פרל נשבה ונרצח מכיוון שידע יותר מדי על הקשר בין השירות החשאי של פקיסטן לבין מדעני אטום ולארגון אל-קאעידה. לטענתו, השלטון האמיתי בפקיסטן נמצא בידי השירותים החשאיים, ואלה האחרונים קשורים לאל-קאעידה, ומשום כך לוי מגדיר את רציחתו של פרל כ"פשע של השלטון". לוי זכה לשבחים על אומץ לבו על שחקר באחד האזורים המסוכנים בעולם. ועם זאת, נמתחה ביקורת על תיאוריו את פקיסטן ועל התיאור הבדיוני של מחשבותיו האחרונות של פרל. ביקורת נוספת שנמתחה על הספר היא שהוא אינו יצירה עיתונאית וגם לא יצירה פילוסופית, למרות שהוא מתיימר להיות שניהם גם יחד. ביקורת דומה נמתחה על כמה מכתביו.

לוי מחשיב עצמו לציוני והוא מרבה לבקר את יחס האירופאים בכלל, והצרפתים בפרט, למדינת ישראל. ביקורתו גברה מאז האינתיפאדה השנייה. לטענתו, הדמוניזציה שעושים האירופאים לישראל נובעת מרגש האשמה שלהם על שואת יהודי אירופה, והפיכת היהודים לעם רצחני מקלה על תחושת האשם.

עניין נוסף הנובע מהיותו מעורב פוליטית וחברתית בצרפת הוא היותו קרבן להשלכת עוגות קצפת[1] בידי פעילי שמאל צרפתים. פעולה זו נחשבת להבעת מחאה לא אלימה, והיא נובעת, לדברי מבצעיה, מכך שלוי הוא "גאוותן בלתי נסבל, הוא מלא יהירות, ובעת ובעונה אחת הפילוסופיה שלו שטוחה וריקנית, אך הוא מחזיק בכיסו הקטן את כל מנהלי הטלוויזיה, הרדיו והעיתונים".

הגותו הפילוסופית על עבודותו הפילוסופית אומר לוי - במענה לביקורת על חוסר העומק שלו - "אני הייתי, אך איני עוד, פילוסוף מקצועי. לא כתבתי ספר מלומד על שפינוזה. באופן שבו אני פילוסוף אני קרוב יותר לקאמי או לסארטר מאשר לברגסון. אי אפשר לעשות הכל: אני כותב מאמרים, רומנים, עושה סרטים, עיתונאי. יש לזה מחיר. כך, העבודה הפילוסופית שלי פחות דורשנית ממה שיכלה להיות".[2]

הכרה אקדמית בישראל לוי קיבל תוארי דוקטור לשם כבוד מאוניברסיטת תל אביב (2002),[3][4] מהאוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים (2008)[5] ומאוניברסיטת בר-אילן (ב-16 במאי 2017), על "יותר מ-40 שנות השתתפות משפיעה לעם ישראל והאומה".[6][7]

עבודותיו ספרים שתורגמו לעברית צוואת האלוהים, מצרפתית: תהילה ואיתי דור-סנד. תל אביב: הקיבוץ המאוחד, 1983 ‫מי הרג את דניאל פרל?, תרגם מצרפתית: מיכה פרנקל. ‫ תל אביב: בבל, תשס"ד 2004 (לפתח דבר )
אויבי הציבור, מאת מישל וולבק וברנאר-אנרי לוי, בבל, תרגמה מצרפתית: רמה איילון, 2015. מאמרים מתורגמים לעברית 250 מילים על מידתיות , באתר הארץ, 29.07.2006 - היחס של האירופאים כלפי תגובת ישראל במלחמת לבנון השנייה. צבא של יחפנים , באתר הארץ, 17.03.2007 - דארפור. מלחמת העולמות , באתר הארץ, 10.02.2006 - התגובה האסלאמית לקריקטורות שפורסמו בדנמרק. עזה וישראל - הקץ לדיסאינפורמציה ולדמוניזציה של ישראל , באתר הארץ, 9.06.2010. ברנאר אנרי לוי משוטט בין מהפכנים במצרים , באתר הארץ, 4 במרץ 2011 איך לעזור למהפכני לוב? , באתר הארץ, 12 במרץ 2011 בחזרה לבנגאזי , באתר הארץ, 17 באפריל 2011 תשובה נרגזת לקלוד לנצמן , באתר הארץ, 24 באפריל 2011 ישראל ואביב העמים הערבי , באתר הארץ, 29 באפריל 2011 "איזה מטומטמים" , באתר הארץ, 13 במאי 2011 האפיפיור הצעיר , באתר הארץ - האפיפיור יוחנן פאולוס השני. ספרים מתורגמים לאנגלית Bernard Henri Lévy, Richard Veasey, Adventures on the Freedom Road Harvill Press, 1995 Edited by Bernard-Henry Lévy, What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their Thoughts, Algora Publishing, 2000 Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by Andrew Brown, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Polity Press, July 2003 Bernard-Henri Lévy, War, Evil and End of History, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, October 2004 Bernard Henri Lévy, Charlotte Mandell, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Random House, January 2006 Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism by Random House, 2017 קישורים חיצוניים ויקישיתוף מדיה וקבצים בנושא ברנאר-אנרי לוי בוויקישיתוף Green globe.svg אתר האינטרנט הרשמי

של ברנאר-אנרי לוי F icon.svg ברנאר-אנרי לוי , ברשת החברתית פייסבוק Twitter logo initial.svg ברנאר-אנרי לוי , ברשת החברתית טוויטר Instagram logo 2016.svg ברנאר-אנרי לוי , ברשת החברתית אינסטגרם ענת ציגלמן, השמאל הישראלי? הוא בתרדמת עמוקה, חסר דמיון, מבולבל , באתר הארץ, 26 במאי 2003 ז'וזט אליה, ביקור בביתו של השטן , באתר הארץ, 1 במאי 2003 ספי הנדלר, ברנאר אנרי לוי מעריץ את הדמוקרטיה הישראלית אך לא את הפוליטיקאים , באתר הארץ, 28/05/10 בנג'מין קרשטיין, הכופר והפילוסוף - ביקורת על הספר "אויבי הציבור" , מגזין "תכלת", אביב 2011 טים אדמס, הכי נבזים בצרפת: מישל וולבק ברנאר אנרי לוי מתכתבים , באתר nrg‏, 23 בדצמבר 2011 ספי הנדלר, התערוכה שאצר הפילוסוף ברנאר אנרי לוי , באתר הארץ, 16 באוקטובר 2013 ספי הנדלר, ברנאר אנרי לוי: "מבצעי הפיגועים אינם עלובי החיים" , באתר הארץ, 20 בנובמבר 2015 אריק גלסנר, על "אויבי הציבור", מאת מישל וולבק וברנאר-אנרי לוי , המוסף לספרות של "7 לילות" של "ידיעות אחרונות", 29 בינואר 2016 ראיון עם ברנאר אנרי לי על ספרו "הגאונות ביהדות" ‘The Genius of Judaism’: An Interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy

בעיתון The Tower Magazine, מתאריך 9 בדצמבר 2016. דרור אידר, ‏"היהודים הם אוצר האנושות, בלי לדעת זאת" , באתר ישראל היום, 15 ביוני 2017 גבי לוין, יש איסלאם נאור וברנאר־אנרי לוי בטוח שהוא מצא אותו , באתר הארץ, 23 במאי 2018 סרטונים ברנאר-אנרי לוי מקבל תואר דוקטור לשם כבוד מאוניברסיטת בר-אילן , סרטון באתר יוטיוב https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%A0%D7%90%D7%A8-%D7%90...

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Wikip'edia

Bernard-Henri Lévy (French pronunciation: [b%C9%9B%CA%81na%CA%81d ɑ̃ʁi levi]; born November 5, 1948) is a French public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" (New Philosophy) movement in 1976.

Life and career

Early life

Lévy was born in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to a wealthy Sephardi Jewish family. His family moved to Paris a few months after his birth. His father, André Lévy, was the multi-millionaire founder and manager of a timber company, Becob.

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy enrolled in the elite and highly selective École Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Some of his professors there included prominent French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1971, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent, and was in Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan. This experience was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangla-Desh, Nationalism in the Revolution"), which was published in 1973.

New Philosophers

Returning to Paris, Lévy became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas. Throughout the 1970s, Lévy taught a course on epistemology at the Université de Strasbourg and he taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was in 1977, on the television show Apostrophes, that Lévy was presented, alongside André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

Intellectual involvement

In 1981 Lévy published L'Idéologie française ("The French Ideology"), arguably his most influential work, in which he offers a dark picture of French history. It was strongly criticized for its journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history by some of the most respected French academics — including Raymond Aron (see his Memoirs).

Lévy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and spoke out early about the alleged Serbian concentration camps. He referred to the Jewish experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other nations.

When his father died in 1995, Lévy became the manager of the Becob company, until it was sold in 1997 for 750 million francs to the French entrepreneur François Pinault.

At the end of the 1990s, he founded with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut an Institute on Levinassian Studies at Jerusalem.

He is member of nonprofit advocacy group JCall.

Political positions

In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been beheaded by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl’s death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy. He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won praise for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world's most dangerous regions but was condemned by the British historian of India and travel writer William Dalrymple (among others) for its lack of rigour and its caricatural depictions of Pakistani society, as well as his decision to fictionalize Pearl's thoughts in the closing moments of his life.

Although Levy's books have been translated into the English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his breakthrough in the English language was with the publication of a series of essays between May and November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly. In the series, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville", Levy imitated his compatriot and predecessor in American critique, Alexis de Tocqueville, criss-crossing the United States, interviewing Americans and recording his observations first for magazine and then book publication. The book was met with derision in the United States, and was ridiculed by Garrison Keillor in a review on the front page of the New York Times.

In March 2006 a letter Lévy co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly protests in the Muslim world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. When questioned about the Niqab face-veil worn by some Muslim women, during the United Kingdom debate over veils, Lévy told the Jewish Chronicle that "the veil is an invitation to rape".

With the aid of real Washington political advisers, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli, created two commercials for competing US presidential campaigns – pitting Sharon Stone against Bernard-Henri Lévy – in a project entitled Democrazy, shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Recent activities In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to promote his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.

On June 24, 2009, Lévy posted a video on Dailymotion in support of the Iranian protesters who were being repressed after the contested elections.

He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La Règle du Jeu ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine Le Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur.

In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community.

At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010) Lévy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy."

Lévy has reported from troubled zones during wartime, in order to attract the public opinion, in France and abroad, over those political changes. In August 2008, Lévy reported from South Ossetia (Georgia) during the 2008 South Ossetia war; in that occasion he interviewed the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.

In March 2011 he engaged in talks with Libyan insurgents in Benghazi, and publicly promoted the international acknowledgement of the recently formed National Transitional Council. Later that month, worried about the Libyan uprising, he prompted and then supported Nicolas Sarkozy's seeking to persuade Washington, and ultimately the United Nations, to intervene in Libya in order to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.

In May 2011 Levy defended IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn when Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in New York City. Levy suggested that the chambermaid had been sent as part of an anti-Kahn conspiracy, stating in The Daily Beast "It would be nice to know — and without delay — how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.”

In May 2011 Levy argued for military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad after violence against civilians in response to the 2011 Syrian uprising.

Criticisms

Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie française faced strong rebuttals, from noted intellectuals such as historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Aron and Gilles Deleuze, who called Lévy's methods "vile". Their most common accusation towards Lévy is of him being one-sided and, ultimately, shallow as a thinker. Vidal-Naquet went as far as saying: "BHL's intellectual dishonesty is properly unfathomable".

More recently, in the essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010), Lévy was embarrassed when he used, as a central point of his refutation of Kant, the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul. Botul's writings are actually well-known spoofs, and Botul himself is the fictional creation of a French living journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès, as is easily guessed from his thought-system being botulism.

Another round of criticisms addresses Lévy's reliance on his connections with the French literary and business circles to promote his works. Lévy had for years business ties with billionaire François Pinault, befriended Jean-Luc Lagardère, who owned Hachette Livre, the largest publisher in France, and Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the largest magazine publisher in the world. Lévy was even briefly related to Jean-Paul Enthoven, publisher of Grasset (a novel and essay division of Hachette Livre), when his daughter Justine Lévy was married to Enthoven's son Raphaël. Lévy has been chairman of the supervisory board for French-German cultural TV channel Arte, was for years a columnist for French newspaper Le Monde and is currently a columnist for both news magazine Le Point (owned by François Pinault) and national daily newspaper Libération, in addition to being a shareholder and member of the supervisory board. In the essay Une imposture française, journalists Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer claim that Lévy uses his unique position as an influential member of both the literary and business establishments in France to be the go-between between the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.

For instance, Beau and Toscer noted that most of the reviews published in France for Who Killed Daniel Pearl? didn't mention strong denials about the book given by experts and Pearl's own family including wife Marianne Pearl who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his own ego".

In 2011 he commented in support of his friend of twenty years Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he was arrested on sexual allegations, referring to the allegations as, "absurd."

Personal life

Lévy is married to French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle. His eldest daughter by his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne, Justine Lévy, is a bestselling novelist. He also has a son, Antonin-Balthazar Lévy, by his second wife, Sylvie Bouscasse.

Lévy is, with his third wife, a regular fixture in Paris Match magazine, wearing his trademark unbuttoned white shirts and designer suits. Some have attributed to Lévy a reputation for narcissism. One article about him coined the dictum, "God is dead but my hair is perfect." He once said that the discovery of a new shade of grey left him "ecstatic." He is a regular victim of the "pie thrower" Noël Godin, who describes Lévy as "a vain, pontificating dandy".

Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in world society and world politics.

Lévy has been friends with Nicholas Sarkozy since 1983. Relations between them deteriorated during Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential run in which Lévy backed the Socialist candidate and also described Sarkozy as "A man with a warrior vision of politics". However, they grew closer again after Sarkozy's victory.

Threats

Lévy was one of six prominent European public figures of Jewish ancestry targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group in 2008. The list included other Frenchmen such as Josy Eisenberg. That plot was reportedly foiled after the group's leader, Abdelkader Belliraj, was arrested based on unrelated murder charges from the 1980s.

Works

Lévy's works have been translated into many different languages; below is an offering of works available in either French or English.

Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme dans la révolution, 1973.

La barbarie à visage humain, 1977.

“Response to the Master Censors”. Telos 33 (Fall 1977). New York: Telos Press.

Le testament de Dieu, 1978.

Idéologie française, 1981.

Le diable en tête, 1984.

Eloge des intellectuels, 1987.

Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, 1988.

Les aventures de la liberté, 1991.

Le jugement dernier, 1992

Piero della Francesca, 1992

Les hommes et les femmes, 1994.

Bosna!,1994.

La pureté dangereuse, 1994.

Adventures on the Freedom Road, Harvill Press, 1995, hardcover, ISBN 1860460356

What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their Thoughts, Algora Publishing, 2000, paperback, 276 pages, ISBN 1892941104

Comédie, 1997.

Le siècle de Sartre, 2000.

Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, 2002.

Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, translated by Andrew Brown, Polity Press, July 2003, hardcover, 456 pages, ISBN 074563009X

Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, 2003, in English as Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, (Melville House Publishing), September 2003, hardcover, 454 pages, ISBN 0971865949

War, Evil and End of History, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd [UK], (Melville House Publishing) [US], October 2004, hardcover, 400 pages, ISBN 0715633368; paperback, ISBN 978-0-971865-95-2

Récidives, 2004.

American Vertigo : Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Random House, January 2006, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 1400064341

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, translated by Benjamin Moser, Random House Publishing Group, 2009, 256 pages, ISBN 0812974727; paperback, ISBN 9780812974720

Bernard-Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, Random House, 2011, paperback, 320 pages, ISBN 0812980786