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“... isn’t perfunctory. Does the victim have any enemies? Sollers and Kristeva – flanked by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has also showed up, as he does throughout the novel – indicate that he does. Who? ‘The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! … Um, Hélène Cixous!’ Bayard writes ...”

“... her warm friendship with the Hebrew University’. One of the people honoured alongside her was Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher and critic of ‘Islamic extremism’, who in an interview in 2006 distilled his objection to the wearing of the hijab: ‘The veil,’ because it conceals the all-important face, ‘is an invitation to rape.’ In ...”

“... potent contempt than in Houellebecq’s letter on his mother in Public Enemies, an exchange with Bernard-Henri Lévy? He never felt greater disgust for this ‘absolutely self-centred creature’, he says, than when she told him, on one of perhaps 15 encounters between mother and son, that his former nanny had asked after him: ‘She thought it was ...”

“... to the European spectator. Powell’s slide-shows in the Security Council are no substitute for Bernard-Henri Lévy or Michael Ignatieff vibrating at the microphone. For lack of visual aids, the deliverance of Baghdad leaves European imagination cold. Third, and perhaps most important, there is fear. Aerial retribution could be wreaked on Yugoslavia in ...”

“... language barriers. In the 1970s it circulated among Left Bank intellectuals, including Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy, as an aid to productive writing. In 1981 it was listed as a controlled substance in the US and in 1986, after it was scheduled under the WHO Convention on Psychotropic Substances, it was removed from prescription sale. After 1989 its ...”

“... in France in 1980. This was the moment of the New Philosophers – led by André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy – and the French were too busy discovering the Gulag to consider the rhizome’s revolutionary potential. In 1972 Deleuze and Guattari were rebels: now they were embarrassing reminders of 1960s burn-out. ...”

“... aspects of a community we like to think peaceable, to the clout behind the consensus. Asked by Bernard-Henri Lévy if he rejects power, Barthes says he is sensitive to its ubiquity and its endurance. ‘It never gets tired, it goes on and on, like a calendar.’ Is power itself fascist? No but ‘fascism is the constant temptation of power, its ...”

“... distance from politics in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. When the Nouveaux Philosophes, led by Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, began to preen themselves on television, accusing philosophers of Derrida’s generation of failing to join the great struggle against Soviet totalitarianism, Deleuze retaliated in a withering interview. Derrida ...”

“... the West, once more into the breach, led by fantastic figures like the action intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, who rode into Libya from the Egyptian border on a vegetable truck. Clinton describes this ubiquitous poseur as ‘a dramatic and stylish figure, with long wavy hair and his shirt open practically down to his navel’. Here was a man who ...”

“... and suffering like we see in Gaza’. Meanwhile, Israel’s supporters abroad claim that, as Bernard-Henri Lévy put it on X, ‘Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.’ Such rhetoric is hardly new. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was advertised as ‘Operation Peace for the Galilee’. It not only failed to destroy the Palestinian ...”

“... the new totalitarianism’ – i.e. radical Islamism – signed by Bernard Henri-Lévy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Val himself and nine others, including the left libertarian communications whizz Caroline Fourest, one of Charlie’s trophy writers, a celebrity feminist and lesbian, author of Eloge du blasphème and, during her time at the paper, an ...”

“... Paris where he was introduced as the ‘conscience of the Jewish people’, Lanzmann, flanked by Bernard-Henri Lévy, gave a robust defence of the blockade of Gaza. Once again, Israel was being scapegoated, ‘charged with every crime, above all with the original sin of existing’. He ridiculed the humanitarian concerns of ‘so-called peace ...”

“... associated with passionate causes and dashing hair made drop-ins – ‘Bernard Henri-Lévy, known in France as BHL, became known in Bosnia as DHS: ‘Deux Heures à Sarajevo’ – but Sontag returned and stayed, risking her life, dodging sniper fire, refusing to wear a flak jacket in solidarity with the citizens, distributing ...”

“... be produced, the general condition of intellectual life is suggested by the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lévy, far the best-known ‘thinker’ under 60 in the country. It would be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France’s public ...”

“... that the anti-totalitarian front fell apart. The first skirmish occurred in the early 1980s, when Bernard-Henri Lévy announced that there was a generic French ideology, stretching from left to right across the 20th century, saturating the nation with anti-semitism and cryptofascism. This was too much for Le Débat, which demolished ...”