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Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Henri Lévy
(/leɪˈviː/;

Lévy in 2017

5 November 1948 (age 71)


Born
Béni Saf, Oran, French Algeria

Alma mater École normale supérieure


Isabelle Doutreluigne
(divorced)
Spouse(s) Sylvie Bouscasse (divorced)
Arielle Dombasle (m. 1993)

20th- and 21st-century


Era
philosophy
Region Western philosophy
Continental philosophy
School Nouveaux Philosophes
Liberal internationalism[1]

Main
Political philosophy
interests

Notable Criticism of neo-progressivism


ideas / red fascism

Influences[show]
Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Primo
Levi, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Émile Zola,
Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser

French: [bɛʁnaʁ ɑ̃ʁi levi]; born 5 November 1948) is a


French public intellectual. Often referred to in his country
simply as BHL,[2] he was one of the leaders of the
"Nouveaux Philosophes" (New Philosophers) movement
in 1976. In 2015, The Boston Globe has said that he is
"perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France
today".[3] His opinions, political activism and publications
have also been the subject of several controversies over
the years.[4][5][6][7]

Contents
1 Life and career
1.1 Early life
1.2 New Philosophers
1.3 Intellectual involvement
1.4 Books
1.4.1 Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
1.4.2 In the Footsteps of Tocqueville
1.4.3 The Spirit of Judaism
2 Representation in other media
2.1 In film
2.2 Pie throwing
2.3 Recent activities
3 Criticisms
4 Personal life
5 Threats
6 Works
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links

Life and career


Early life

Lévy was born in 1948 in Béni Saf, French Algeria, to an


affluent Algerian Jewish family. His family moved to Paris
a few months after his birth. He is the son of Dina
(Siboni) and André Lévy, the founder and manager of a
timber company, Becob, and became a multimillionaire
from his business.[8][9] He is the brother of Philippe Levy
and Véronique Lévy [fr].

After attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Lévy


made his way into the elite and highly selective École
Normale Supérieure in 1968, from which he graduated
with a degree in philosophy. His professors there
included French intellectuals and philosophers Jacques
Derrida and Louis Althusser.
Lévy became a pre-eminent journalist, having started his
career as a war correspondent for Combat, the
newspaper founded underground by Albert Camus
during the German occupation of France. In 1971, Lévy
travelled to the Indian subcontinent, and was based in
Bangladesh covering the Bangladesh Liberation War
against Pakistan. He was inspired by a call for an
International Brigade[10] to aid Bangladeshi separatists
made by André Malraux.[11] He subsequently spent part
of 1972 working as a civil servant for the Bangladesh
Ministry of Economy and Planning.[12] This experience
was the source of his first book, Bangla-Desh,
Nationalisme dans la révolution ("Bangladesh,
Nationalism in the Revolution", 1973).[13] He visited
Bangladesh in 2014[14] to speak at the launch of the first
Bengali translation of this book and to open a memorial
garden for Malraux at Dhaka University.[15]

New Philosophers

Throughout the 1970s, Lévy taught a course on


epistemology at the University of Strasbourg and he also
taught philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. He
was a 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 developed an
uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist
dogmas.[16] In 1977, the television show Apostrophes[17]
featured Lévy together with André Glucksmann as a
nouveau philosophe. In that year, he published Barbarism
with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain, 1977),
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 criticised for its journalistic character and
unbalanced approach to French history by some of the
most respected French academics, including Marxism-
critic Raymond Aron (see his Memoirs).

In the 1990s, Lévy called for European and American


intervention in the Bosnian War during the breakup of
Yugoslavia. He spoke about the Serb POW camps which
were holding Muslims. He referred to the Jewish
experience in the Holocaust as providing a lesson that
mass murder cannot be ignored by those in other
nations.[18]

At the end of the 1990s, with Benny Lévy and Alain


Finkielkraut, Lévy founded an Institute on Levinassian
Studies at Jerusalem, in honor of Emmanuel Levinas.[19]

He is member of nonprofit advocacy group JCall. In


March 2006, Lévy was one of twelve signatories of a
letter entitled, "MANIFESTO: Together facing the new
totalitarianism."' addressing concerns for free speech and
thought in response to violent and deadly protests in the
Muslim world related to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad
cartoons controversy that arose in Denmark.

Books

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?

In 2003, Lévy wrote an account of his efforts to track the


murderer of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter
who was taken captive and 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.[20] 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 Inter-Services Intelligence and al-
Qaeda. The book was strongly criticized by both experts
and Pearl's own family, including wife Mariane Pearl who
called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed by his
own ego".[21][22]

The book was condemned by William Dalrymple, a British


historian of India and travel writer, and others, for its lack
of rigour and its caricatured depictions of Pakistani
society. Dalrymple also criticized Lévy's fictionalised
account of Pearl's thoughts in the last moments of his
life.[23][24][25][26]

In the Footsteps of Tocqueville

Although Lévy's books have been translated into the


English language since La Barbarie à visage humain, his
breakthrough in gaining a wider US audience was the
publication of a series of essays between May and
November 2005 for The Atlantic Monthly, later collected
as a book.[27] In preparation for the series, In the
Footsteps of Tocqueville, Lévy criss-crossed the United
States, interviewing Americans, and recording his
observations, with direct reference to his claimed
predecessor, Alexis de Tocqueville. His work was
published in serial form in the magazine and collected as
a book by the same title. The book was widely criticized
in the United States, with Garrison Keillor publishing a
damning review on the front page of the New York Times
Book Review.[27]

The Spirit of Judaism

In February 2016, Lévy published a new book entitled


L'Esprit du Judaisme. An English version, The Genius of
Judaism, was published by Random House in January
2017. In his foreword he describes this work as "a sequel,
40 years later" to Testament de Dieu, his earlier, widely
considered seminal, opus. The book explores the reasons
why the State of Israel is considered to be a litmus test
for Jews and non-Jews alike; as well as the roots and
causes of anti-Semitism where it existed, still exists, or is
newly nascent. But, most of all, the book is devoted to
Levy's ″defense of a certain idea of man and God, of
history and time, of power, voice, light, sovereignty,
revolt, memory, and nature—an idea that contains what I
call, in homage to one of the few really great French
writers to have understood some of its mystery, the
genius of Judaism.″ [28]

Representation in other media


In film

Lévy directed the widely panned 1997 romance film Day


and Night.[29] It is considered by critics the worst film of
1997 along with Batman & Robin. The movie received a
3.5 million francs public subsidy through the Commission
des avances sur recettes, which at the time was chaired
by Lévy.[30]

In 2007, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli,


created two commercials for an imaginary U.S.
presidential campaign, in which he had actress Sharon
Stone running against Bernard-Henri Lévy. His project
entitled Democrazy, was shown at the 2007 Venice
Biennale.

Pie throwing
Bernard Henri Lévy is a favorite victim of pie thrower Noël
Godin.[31]

Recent activities

In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to


promote his book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the
New Barbarism.

In 2006, Lévy joined the British debate over Muslim


women's veils by suggesting to The Jewish Chronicle
that wearing a veil had the effect of dehumanizing the
wearer by hiding her face – and said, alluding to a
passage by Emmanuel Levinas, that "the veil is an
invitation to rape".[32]

On 24 June 2009, Lévy posted a video on Dailymotion in


support of the Iranian protesters who were being
repressed after the contested elections.[33]

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.[18] In Left in Dark
Times, he argued that the Darfur genocide was not a
palatable issue for modern leftists because it did not
provide a platform for the anti-American views with which
he says leftist thought has become suffused.

In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and


Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against
them from within the Jewish community.[34]

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."[35]

Lévy has reported from troubled zones during wartime, to


attract 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; on that occasion he interviewed the President of
Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.[36]

In March 2011, he engaged in talks with Libyan rebels in


Benghazi, and publicly promoted the international
acknowledgement of the recently formed National
Transitional Council.[37][38] Later that month, worried
about the 2011 Libyan civil war, he prompted and then
supported Nicolas Sarkozy's seeking to persuade
Washington, and ultimately the United Nations, to
intervene in Libya to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.[39]

In May 2011, Lévy defended IMF Chief Dominique


Strauss-Kahn when Kahn was accused of sexually
assaulting a chambermaid in New York City. Lévy
questioned the credibility of the charges against Strauss-
Kahn, asking The Daily Beast, "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."[40][41]

In May 2011, Lévy argued for military intervention in Syria


against Bashar al-Assad after violence against civilians in
response to the 2011 Syrian uprising.[42] He repeated his
position in a letter to the Weekly Standard in August
2013.[43]

On 9 November 2011, his book, La guerre sans l'aimer,


which tells the story of his Libyan spring, was published.
[44][45][46][47]

In April 2013, he was convicted by a French court for


libelling journalist Bernard Cassen.[48]

Lévy curated a major art exhibition in 2013 entitled


Adventures of truth – Painting and philosophy: a narrative
at the Maeght Foundation.

In 2013, Lévy criticized the international community for


their acts during the Bosnia genocide.[49]

Levy was in Kiev, Ukraine during the Maidan Revolution in


February 2014, actively promoting the events.[50] In
February 2015, he performed his play Hotel Europa at the
Kiev opera house on the first anniversary of the
Euromaidan's toppling of the pro-Russian government of
Victor Yanukovich.[51]

In April 2014, he visited Bangladesh for the first time


since 1972 to speak at the launch of the first Bengali
translation of his first book Bangla-Desh, Nationalisme
dans la révolution ("Bangladesh, Nationalism in the
Revolution", 1973), and to open a memorial garden for
Malraux at Dhaka University.[11]

On 5 June 2018 he performed his one-man play Last Exit


before Brexit at the Cadogan Hall in London. The play is a
revised version of Hotel Europa and argues passionately
that Brexit should be abandoned.[52]

Lévy has also been regularly contributing to Project


Syndicate since 2015.

Lévy's involvement with the Kurdish cause goes back to


the early 1990s.[53] On May 16, 2016, Bernard-Henri
Lévy's new documentary film, Peshmerga, was chosen by
the Cannes film festival as a special screening to its
official selection.[54] The movie itself is, as stated in its
official Cannes presentation: "The third part of a trilogy,
opus three of a documentary made and lived in real time,
the missing piece of the puzzle of a lifetime, the
desperate search for enlightened Islam. Where is that
other Islam strong enough to defeat the Islam of the
fundamentalists? Who embodies it? Who sustains it?
Where are the men and women who in word and deed
strive for that enlightened Islam, the Islam of law and
human rights, an Islam that stands for women and their
rights, that is faithful to the lofty thinking of Averroes,
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Ibn Tufail, and Rumi?... Here, with
this third film, this hymn to Kurdistan and the exception
that it embodies, I have the feeling of possibly reaching
my goal. Kurdistan is Sunnis and Shiites, Chaldeans,
Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Syrians living freely with
Muslims, the memory of the Jews of Aqrah, secularism,
freedom of conscience and belief. It is where one can run
into a Jewish Barzani on the forward line of a front held,
50 kilometers from Erbil, by his distant cousin, a Muslim,
Sirwan Barazi… Better than the Arab Spring. The Bosnian
dream achieved. My dream. There is no longer really any
doubt. Enlightened Islam exists: I found it in Erbil."[55][56]
A year later, Lévy said that "Jews have a special
obligation to support the Kurds," and that he hopes "they
will come say to the Peshmerga: 'For years now you have
spilled your blood to defend the values of our shared
civilization. Now it is our turn to defend your right to live
freely and independently.'"[53]

Criticisms
Early essays, such as Le Testament de Dieu or L'Idéologie
française faced strong rebuttals from noted intellectuals
on all sides of the ideological spectrum, such as historian
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and philosophers Cornelius
Castoriadis, Raymond Aron, and Gilles Deleuze, who
called Lévy's methods "vile".[57]

More recently, Lévy was publicly embarrassed when his


essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010) cited the
writings of French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul.[58]
Botul's writings are actually well-known spoofs, and Botul
himself is the purely fictional creation of a living French
journalist and philosopher, Frédéric Pagès. The
obviousness of the hoax, with Botul's philosophy being
botulism, led to suspicions that Levy had not read Botul,
and that he consequently might have used a ghostwriter
for his book. Responding in an opinion piece, Levy wrote:
"It was a truly brilliant and very believable hoax from the
mind of a Canard Enchaîné journalist who remains a good
philosopher all the same. So I was caught, as were the
critics who reviewed the book when it came out. The only
thing left to say, with no hard feelings, is kudos to the
artist."[59]

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
of the two worlds, which helps him to get positive reviews
as marks of gratitude, while silencing dissenters.[60] 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 by Pearl's own family including wife Mariane Pearl,
who called Lévy "a man whose intelligence is destroyed
by his own ego".[21][61]

Personal life
Lévy has been married three times. His eldest daughter
by his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne, Justine
Lévy, is a best-selling novelist. He has a son, Antonin-
Balthazar Lévy, by his second wife, Sylvie Bouscasse. He
is currently married to French actress and singer Arielle
Dombasle. The affair between Lévy and socialite Daphne
Guinness was an open secret known amongst US society
columnists since 2008. On 13 July 2010, Daphne
Guinness confirmed the whole story in the UK press.[62]

Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought


to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in society and
politics.[18]

Lévy has been friends with Nicolas 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.[63] Much of his book, Left in
Dark Times, is devoted to explaining his refusal to
support Sarkozy despite agreeing with him on many
points, and his insistence on continuing to identify
himself as a leftist despite rejecting much of modern
leftist thought.
In 2004, his fortune amounts to 150 million euros. The
owner of seven companies, this fortune comes
essentially from inheritance from his parents, then
complemented by stock exchange investments (in 2000
he was suspected of insider trading by the Commission
des opérations de bourse).[64]

Lévy does not listen to music, even though he claims to


have played the piano in his youth, before he became a
writer. In a 2019 podcast interview while in Mexico
City[65], he stated that once he started writing books,
"something strange happened, a strange chemistry in my
mind, I stopped all of a sudden, overnight, to play (sic)
and listen (sic) to music. My love of music has been
replaced by something else, probably my love and my
practice of words. But it is a fact, I cannot lie. I lived with
music until I was 27, 28, maybe 30 years old, I played
music everyday, and all of a sudden, overnight, I definitely
and radically stopped."

Threats
Lévy was one of six Jewish public figures in Europe
targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist
militant group in 2008. The list included others in France
such as Josy Eisenberg. That plot was foiled after the
group's leader, Abdelkader Belliraj, was arrested on
unrelated murder charges from the 1980s.[66]

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


(reissued in 1985 under the title Les Indes Rouges).
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; translated as
Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French
Intellectuals in the 20th Century, 1995, Harvill Press,
ISBN 1-86046-035-6
Le jugement dernier, 1992
Piero della Francesca, 1992
Les hommes et les femmes, 1994.
Bosna!, 1994.
La pureté dangereuse, 1994.
What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their
Thoughts, 2000, Algora Publishing, ISBN 1-892941-
10-4
Comédie, 1997.
Le siècle de Sartre, 2000; translated by Andrew
Brown as Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth
Century, 2003, Polity Press, ISBN 0-7456-3009-X
Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l'Histoire,
2002; translated by Charlotte Mandell as War, Evil
and End of History, 2004, Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Ltd [UK], ISBN 0-7156-3336-8
Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, 2003; translated by James
X. Mitchell as Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, 2003,
Melville House Publishing, ISBN 0-9718659-4-9
Récidives, 2004.
American Vertigo: Traveling America in the
Footsteps of Tocqueville, 2006, ISBN 1-4000-6434-
1
Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, 2007, Grasset,
ISBN 2246688213; translated by Benjamin Moser as
Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New
Barbarism, 2008, Random House Publishing Group,
ISBN 1-5883-6757-6
Ennemis publics, 2008, with Michel Houellebecq;
translated by Miriam Frendo and Frank Wynne as
Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other
and the World, 2011, Atlantic Books (UK), Random
House (US), ISBN 0-8129-8078-6
L'esprit du judaïsme, 2016, Grasset; translated as
The Genius of Judaism, 2017, Random House,
ISBN 978-0-679-64379-1
The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication
and the Fate of the World, 2019, Henry Holt & Co,
ISBN 9781250203014.
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w. Knud Erik Jørgensen; Åsne Kalland Aarstad; Edith
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z. "Rousselet et BHL entrent au capital de Libération".
Le nouvel Observateur. 4 January 2007. Archived
from the original on 26 January 2007. Retrieved 29
June 2009.
{. "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New
Barbarism". www.amazon.com. Random House
Trade Paperbacks. Retrieved 25 April 2015.
|. Willsher, Kim. "Libya: Bernard-Henri Lévy dismisses
criticism for leading France to conflict". The
Guardian. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
}. "Bernard-Henri Lévy: A very political pin-up". The
Independent. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
~. Samuel, Henry. "Bernard-Henri Lévy caught out by
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•. Brody, Richard. "Did Bernard-Henri Lévy Take NATO
to War?". The New Yorker. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
€. Kirsch, Jonathan. "Bernard-Henri Lévy bares his
Jewish soul." Jewish Journal. 11 January 2017. 17
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•. http://www.eveil-delaconscience.com/la-verite-sur-
bernard-henri-levy-a-la-loupe/
w‚. Lévy, Bernard-Henri (28 April 2014). "Bernard-Henri
Levy: Andre Malraux's Bangladesh, Before the
Radicals". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
ww. ^ a b "BHL in Dhaka". Dhaka Tribune. 27 May 2014.
Retrieved 25 May 2018.
wz. ""BHL in Dhaka", interview de Bernard-Henri Lévy
par Niaz Alam (Dhaka Tribune, le 28 mai 2014) :
Bernard-Henri Lévy". www.bernard-henri-levy.com
(in French). Retrieved 25 May 2018.
w{. Davidzon, Vladislav (26 June 2014). "On the Road
With Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Planet's Last Superstar
French Intellectual". Tablet.
w|. Lévy, Bernard-Henri (24 April 2014). "An Emotional
Return to Bangladesh -- After 43 Years". Huffington
Post. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
w}. "Opening of the Malraux Garden at the University of
Dhaka". La France au Bangladesh - Ambassade de
France à Dacca. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
w~. Alexander, Beth R. (10 November 2004).
"Commentary: Bernard Henri-Lévy takes heat". UPI
Perspectives. UPI. "... a group who broke away from
the Marxist ideology dominating late 1960s France
and the hard-line French left typified by Jean-Paul
Sartre."
w•. Apostrophes was a French TV program hosted by
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w€. ^ a b c environment-science | Leading Jewish
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w•. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 7
July 2017. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
z‚. Graff, James (4 May 2003). "The Engaged Intellect".
TIME. 161 (19). "The Envoy: At the request of French
President Jacques Chirac, Lévy traveled to
Afghanistan in February 2002 to gauge the needs of
the Afghan people..."
zw. ^ a b Nicolas Beau and Olivier Toscer, Une imposture
française, Éditions des Arènes, 2006.
zz. Levy, Justine. "Justine Levy, Daughter of French
Public Intellectual BHL, Writes What She Knows:
Life". Jewishbusinessnews. Retrieved 19 August
2015.
z{. Escobar, Pepe, "Who killed Daniel Pearl?" (review),
Asia Times (28 June 2003). Retrieved 19 May 2011.
z|. Dalrymple, William, "Murder in Karachi", The New
York Review of Books, 4 December 2003. Retrieved
19 May 2011.
z}. "'Murder in Karachi': An Exchange" (Bernard-Henri
Levy and William Dalrymple), The New York Review
of Books, 12 February 2004. Retrieved 19 May 2011.
z~. "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?". BBC News. 23 October
2003. Retrieved 26 April 2010.
z•. ^ a b Keillor, Garrison (29 January 2006). "On the
Road Avec M. Lévy". The New York Times. p. 1.
z€. "Bernard-Henri Lévy". 4 November 2015.
z•. Lévy, Bernard-Henri (12 February 1997). Le jour et la
nuit. France.
{‚. François-Xavier Ajavon, "Symbolisme et temporalité
bergsonnienne dans Le Jour et la Nuit de Bernard-
Henri Levy", Nanarland.
{w. Bernard-Henry Lévy à nouveau "entarté" en
Belgique, [1].
{z. The Jewish Chronicle, 14 October 2006. Not
available online, quote in context: "Our time is almost
up, but BHL becomes the most animated I have seen
him when I ask him about Jack Straw's intervention
on Muslim women and the veil. 'Jack Straw', he says,
leaning close to me, 'made a great point. He did not
say that he was against the veil. He said it is much
easier, much more comfortable, respectful, to speak
with a woman with a naked face. And without
knowing, he quoted Levinas, who is the philosopher
of the face. Levinas says that [having seen] the
naked face of your interlocutor, you cannot kill him or
her, you cannot rape him, you cannot violate him. So
when the Muslims say that the veil is to protect
women, it is the contrary. The veil is an invitation to
rape.'"
{{. Message to the Young People of Iran by Bernard-
Henri Lévy – une vidéo Nieuws & Politiek.
Dailymotion. Retrieved 19 May 2011.
{|. "Bernard-Henri Lévy défend Benoît XVI et Pie XII".
7sur7.be, 20 January 2010. Retrieved 19 May 2011.
{}. Or Kashti (30 May 2010). "Bernard Henri Levy: I
have never seen an army as democratic as the IDF".
Haaretz. Retrieved 1 June 2010.
{~. Bernard-Henri Lévy, "Georgia at War: What I Saw",
The Huffington Post, 20 August 2008.
{•. L'appel de BHL depuis Benghazi (Libye) en direct
sur TF1 au – une vidéo Nieuws & Politiek.
Dailymotion. Retrieved 19 May 2011.
{€. Robert Marquand, "How a philosopher swayed
France's response on Libya". The Christian Science
Monitor, 28 March 2011. Retrieved 19 May 2011.
{•. Steven Erlanger, "By His Own Reckoning, One Man
Made Libya a French Cause", The New York Times, 1
April 2011.
|‚. "Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Bernard-Henri Lévy
Defends IMF Director". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 19
May 2011.
|w. Dowd, Maureen (18 May 2011). "Powerful and
Primitive". The New York Times.
|z. Bernard-Henri Levy (19 May 2011). "After Qaddafi,
Assad". The New Republic. Retrieved 24 May 2011.
|{. Daniel Halper, "Experts to Obama: Here Is What to
Do in Syria", The Weekly Standard, 27 August 2013.
||. "Cinq bonnes raisons de dévorer le dernier BHL",
Atlantico, 8 November 2011, MRY
|}. "La légende dorée de BHL en Libye", Le Monde. 7
November 2011}
|~. "BHL en Libye, sur les traces de Lawrence d'Arabie",
Rue89, 7 November 2011, Pierre Haski
|•. Sébastien Le Fol, "Bernard-Henri Lévy en Libye, la
guerre intime", Le Figaro, 8 November 2011.
|€. "Même la justice française condamne BHL...", Le
Monde Diplomatique, 26 April 2013.
|•. Lévy, Bernard-Henri (23 October 2013). "The
Significance of Sarajevo". Huffington Post.
}‚. Levy, Bernard-Henri (4 April 2015). "Bernard-Henri
Levy: Remembering the Maidan". Kyiv Post.
}w. "Bernard-Henri Levy will perform his 'Hotel Europe'
play in Kyiv's opera house on Feb. 21". Kyiv Post. 18
February 2015. Archived from the original on 22
December 2015. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
}z. "'Please, please remain': Bernard-Henri Lévy
performs one-man Brexit play". theguardian.com. 5
June 2018. Retrieved 6 June 2018.
}{. ^ a b Cohen, Ben (25 September 2017). "Bernard-
Henri Lévy: Jews Have 'Special Obligation' to
Support Kurdish Independence". Algemeiner.com.
Retrieved 3 April 2018.
}|. "Cannes Adds Bernard-Henri Levy's 'Peshmerga' to
Official Selection".
}}. "Festival de Cannes - Site Officiel / Institutionnel".
Festival de Cannes. Archived from the original on 14
March 2017. Retrieved 17 May 2016.
}~. Lévy, Bernard-Henri (2 September 2015). "Islamic
State Will Be Defeated" – via www.wsj.com.
}•. Gilles Deleuze, A propos des nouveaux philosophes
et d'un problème plus général, first published in May
1977
}€. Bremner, Charles (9 February 2010). "BernardHenri
Lvy a laughing stock for quoting fictional
philosopher". The Times. London. Retrieved 26 April
2010.
}•. Carvajal, Doreen (10 February 2010). "Philosopher
Left to Muse on Ridicule Over a Hoax". The New
York Times. p. 4.
~‚. "BHL: les dessous d'un système". L'EXPRESS.
Retrieved 19 August 2015.
~w. Lévy, Justine. "Justine Levy, Daughter of French
Public Intellectual BHL, Writes What She Knows:
Life". Jewishbusinessnews. Retrieved 19 August
2015.
~z. Derek Blasberg, "Daphne Guinness: Bernard-Henri
Levy ‘Is Quite Obviously The Love Of My Lifeʼ",
Huffington Post, 12 February 2011.
~{. Christopher Dickey, "Why Sarkozy Went to War".
Newsweek (3 April 2011). Retrieved 19 May 2011.
~|. "Un héritier devenu milliardaire". 26 October 2004.
~}. Sesión Abierta, November 1, 2019 (reference
appears at 20‹45 mark)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=tGAtUs7qn5s&feature=emb_title
~~. "Bernard Henri Levy among 6 Jews said targeted by
Islamist group", Haaretz (1 January 2009). Retrieved
19 May 2011.

Further reading
Dominique Lecourt, Mediocracy: French Philosophy
Since the Mid-1970s (2001), new edition. Verso,
London, 2002.
Craig Owens, "Sects and Language," in Beyond
Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture,
Scott Bryson, et al., eds (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London: University of California Press, 1992), 243–
52.

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bernard-
Henri Lévy.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Bernard-Henri


Lévy

Official website (in English and French)


Appearances on C-SPAN
Bernard-Henri Lévy on Charlie Rose
Bernard-Henri Lévy on IMDb
Works by or about Bernard-Henri Lévy in libraries
(WorldCat catalog)* Institute for Levinassian Studies,
co-founded by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Benny Lévy and
Alain Finkielkraut (in German)
Franceʼs Most Famous Intellectual Urges Jews Not
To Leave

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