Better To Be A Contrarian than Vapid

Nothing like the recent election in the United States to give me a reason to discuss Slavoj Zizek and Bernard-Henri Levy in the same post. 

The contrarian weighs in, arguing that Obama is more than Bush with a human face:

 So should we write Obama off? Is he nothing more than Bush with a human face? There are signs which point beyond this pessimistic vision. Although his healthcare reforms were mired in so many compromises they amounted to almost nothing, the debate triggered was of huge importance. A great art of politics is to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly realist, feasible and legitimate, disturbs the core of the hegemonic ideology. The healthcare reforms were a step in this direction – how else to explain the panic and fury they triggered in the Republican camp? They touched a nerve at the core of America's ideological edifice: freedom of choice.

So today, it's ideology critique. Maybe tomorrow it will be the hyperbolic Leninism, and he'll remind us that nobody is quite as revolutionary as himself.

Sure, that's a cynical reading of Zizek, which I think is a product of reading far too much of his work. But Zizek is also far more engaging than our vapid French "intellectual". BHL declares the election--the outcome of which he so foresightedly "predicted"--a great day for America. Why?

It is a victory for a moderate man, whose charisma remains intact.

That's the first reason: a man's got to have him his charisma. That's so important that it overshadows whatever else makes the election great.

Perhaps we can get more specific:

It is a victory for his strategy of government intervention that has allowed the United States to weather the storm for four years.

The the second aspect of this victory strikes me as ambiguous. It seems to be commending Obama's mild commitment to using government to blunt the effects of the economic downturn. But when I hear "intervention" from BHL, I think Libya, meaning that he could also be commending Obama's continued commitment to the "war on terror" or whatever it's called now.

This is followed with a bit of non-self-reflexive pundit scolding, so that BHL can reinforce  his view of what makes the election such an event. I know you're waiting for it:

It is a historic victory.

It is a great day for America and for the world.

Sometimes great nations have a rendezvous with greatness, and such is the case today.

So bold! So declarative! So historic that it can be encapsulated, if we leave out the blathering about pundits, in the most profound 262 words you'll ever read.

Or, perhaps, BHL dashed it off while nursing a wicked hangover.

BHL Loves DSK 4ever

Never a man to let ethical experience get in the way of media presence, Bernard-Henri Lévy has published a defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

I understand the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' part of law, but BHL uses the innuendo of opportunism to impeach the accusations of sexual assault against his old buddy and IMF director DSK. Instead of my usual habit of sardonic and mocking commentary, I'll let him dig his own hole.

This is a convoluted way of blaming the victim:

I do not know—but, on the other hand, 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.

And this is a red herring:

I hold it against all those who complacently accept the account of this other young woman, this one French, who pretends to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape, who has shut up for eight years but, sensing the golden opportunity, whips out her old dossier and comes to flog it on television.

Apparently these techniques are worth it, because BHL is worried about the political fallout:

The French left that, if Strauss-Kahn were really out of the arena, would lose its champion.

If this is true, and DSK is the champion of the left, I'd hate to see its enemies.

"Monsieur Lévy, are you satisfied with your war?"

Just when you thought that Bernard-Henri Lévy couldn't get more ridiculous, he claims responsibility for the French military intervention in Libya's uprising (hence the title of this post). That might be true, but it certainly doesn't ameliorate our sense that he's a raving narcissist. Nor will his recent interview with Der Spiegel, in which he largely responds to unwelcome questions with the answers to his preferred questions. I don't know how, but sometime between quoting Jean-Baptiste Botul in his work on Kant, freestyling on Eyjafjallajökull, or dissimulating about the siege of Gaza, he's become a psychiatrist. I'm taking over for Der Spiegel, and the rest is pure BHL.

BHL, with your new training could you please diagnose, from a distance, Gadhafi's mental state? Is he playing with a full deck of cards?  

Lévy: No. Everything was tried, but Gadhafi is a madman, autistic -- he refused to listen. In the night before the summit in Paris, I spent hours on the phone with friends in Benghazi. I tried to allay their fears. They were torn between the fear of Gadhafi's troops and the hope that coalition aircraft would arrive in time. It was a race against time.

I don't know, calling him autistic doesn't seem very sympathetic to others who might live with it. Perhaps you can get around this by suggesting that there is some kind of connection between National Socialism and the government of Angela Merkel:

Lévy: We lost a great deal of time because of the Germans, which is a disaster, mainly for the Libyans, but also for the Germans, who will pay bitterly for abstaining. What happened here will leave a lasting impression in Europe. [...] Angela Merkel jettisoned all principles of German foreign policy since the end of World War II: There was the principle that something like National Socialism should never happen again. Never again crimes against humanity. Merkel and (German Foreign Minister Guido) Westerwelle violated this pact. This is a serious incident, not a minor detail.

Interesting, I'm sure that there is some kind of fallacy concerning these kinds of connections, but please: a moment of wild and universalizing historical speculation:

Lévy: When the Arab League requested that we intervene in Libya, it was a decisive moment in the history of the modern age. The obligation to intervene in the affairs of other countries became universal as a result. Now no one can accuse the coalition of engaging in dark maneuvers or hidden colonialism. This is a radical shift.

BHL, are you up to the task of misusing the word 'radical' or one of its cognates twice in one interview? I mean, could you...

Lévy: The surprise, the incredulity and the gratefulness of the three Libyans when they understood what Sarkozy had just said to them. The great significance of what he proposed to them. The radicalism of his gesture. That moment of astonishment and of realization -- it was a beautiful moment.

This is exhausting. I'll turn this one over to Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Can you imagine a world without Bernard-Henri Lévy?
Lévy: Yes, it would all work quite well without me.

BHL Indicted

I'm a few weeks late on this one, but it's worth posting nonetheless. On Counterpunch (here), Tariq Ali writes:

“Order for the  indictment of Bernard-Henri Lévy before the Assize Court, and for  his arrest:
             
We have determined that whereas investigation has established the following facts concerning the accused:

- His unrelenting promotion of imperialism and Zionism,

- His intellectual fakery, symptom of philosophical nullity amid the accumulation of capital and power,

- His leveling of false accusations and calumnies against Iran,

- His warmongering and advocacy of “humanitarian imperialism,”

- His aiding in the creation and promotion of SOS Racisme to smother autonomous immigration movements,

- His dissemination of false news likely to sow social and eligious discord between Christians and Muslims.

For these reasons, we rule that  there is sufficient evidence against Bernard-Henri Lévy that he  committed such acts, punishable under the Criminal Code, in regard to Articles 175, 176, 181, 183 and 184. We order the indictment of Bernard-Henri Lévy, to be lodged at the Court of Assizes of the department of Seine- Saint-Denis to be tried according to law.”

Executed in Chambers, December 18, 2010.”

We've been following BHL's antics for some time: whether he is working some bad scholarship, blabbering about Icelandic volcanoes, or prevaricating about Israel/Palestine.

Gideon Levy: The Punishment of Gaza

"Words," Gideon Levy writes, in The Punishment of Gaza (Verso, 2010), "do not kill; but words can ease the work of killing." Any number of misnomers and euphemisms can make the casualties of war less shocking, can turn the collective punishment of an entire population into a 'just war' against Hamas, can make the temporary cessation of state belligerence into a 'humanitarian' cease-fire.

Nevertheless, this is not entirely the fault of language. It requires a  concerted campaign of misinformation to make so many euphemisms legible, so even the most recent example of the belligerence of Israeli Defense Forces will appear, in the North American media, not as deliberate tactics but as defensive tactics. Not that this is confined to North America. Bernard-Henri Levy, who we've already criticized before (here and here), manages to twist the IDF's aggression around into a tactical error, all while bemoaning the "inversion of values" and the "hijacking of meaning" by the international condemnation of Israel's attack on the Gaza flotilla. BHL knows that you've got to ease the conscience of the world's liberals to remain an intellectual media personality.

Hence the importance of voices such as Gideon Levy, a journalist and editor for Haaretz, and an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories (and, incidentally, a critic of BHL). His recent book, made up of articles published in Haaretz from 2006 to 2009, is an incisive condemnation of Israel's four year long blockade of Gaza. Incisive, and, as one encounters the details of life under the blockade, infuriating. The Punishment of Gaza gives a narrative voice to the sustained collective punishment endured by the population of Gaza ever since Hamas won the majority in Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. [1]

Levy's main concern is Operation Cast Lead, which lasted from December 27, 2008 to January 17, 2009. In that short time, Israeli bombardments killed over 1,300 Palestinians, injured over 5,000, and left over 100,000 homeless. However, as many critics of United States foreign policy know, numbers alone do not make an argument; they require context. Otherwise, they can also be used to justify war under the guise of humanitarian intervention. In The Punishment of Gaza, Levy provides the context of these statistics. First, he argues that Israel's disengagement from Gaza is a method of oppression from without, that is, a blockade intended as collective punishment. Second, he argues that the casualties of the IDF's onslaught are not accidents, but tactical targets in their occupation. For example, numerous articles show how civilians, including children, are deliberate targets in military operations, not because they are singled out, but because the Israeli army does not enforce repercussions for soldiers who kill or injure civilians. 

But, he argues, none of this would be possible without a political culture that dehumanizes Palestinians when it does not ignore them. He writes that the injustices continue because 

we have trained our soldiers to think that the lives and property of Palestinians have no value whatsoever. It is part of a process of dehumanization that has endured for dozens of years--the fruits of the occupation (142).

Just as there are generations of Palestinians who have been raised in refugee camps, there are Israelis who know of no other political culture than one in which the occupation is the order of things, where even the so-called moderates push over each other on the race to start another war (recall that, while it is not directly discussed by Levy, the Second Lebanon War also takes place during the time period covered by the book).[2]

Levy dismisses equivocations between the two sources of violence. The defense of Israeli aggression rests on the spectre of terrorism and the destruction of Israel, which are woven together in Western representations of the fear of Hamas. But, Levy argues, to perpetuate the occupation due to threats to Israeli security  is to mistake the effect for the cause. Only Israel can end the blockade and the occupation, even if it shows no inclination to do so. International opinion and policy does not show much inclination to intervene, with the exception of the growing strength of the campaign for divestment in Israel. As dire (for the Palestinians) as the situation appears, Levy shows, clearly and directly, that Israel is responsible for the continued injustices of the occupation. "Israelis," Levy writes in the final chapter, in a moment of polemic, "aren't paying any price for the injustice of occupation" (144). Only when Israelis feel some degree of international pressure through divestment and boycott, and domestic pressure through self-criticism, will it end. Formulations such as these sound abstract, but in The Punishment of Gaza they are given in concrete detail.

Notes

[1] This is not to ignore the fact that 'narrative voices' ought to also include analyses of the blockade by Palestinians. Levy's book is hindered by the fact that the information is largely 'second hand,' because Israeli journalists have been prohibited from visiting Gaza since November 2006.

[2] See the chapter "No Moderates Left" (available online here), or more recently "Kahane Won," previously discussed by Joshua.

Dominique Lecourt's "The Mediocracy"

(Trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2001)

As Matt McLennan pointed out in his review essay on Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone," the discourse of humanitarianism depoliticizes global conflict by portraying it as an opposition between evil and good people, between "resource-hungry, power-hungry people on one side, and those who just want to go about their lives on the other." Behind this dichotomy of good and evil lurks any number of Northern prejudices and stereotypes concerning the global South, if not a kind of resignation that such distant destruction is intractable, since the global South, according to this paternalistic view, lacks a strong 'tradition' of liberalism, tolerance and democratic 'values.'

North American philosophy has largely internalized these constraints and, with the rewards of funding and grant money, it has provided any number of ideological justifications for global inequalities or imperial violence under the rubric of liberalism, tolerance and democracy. Which might help explain the scorn with which some of these partisans of humanitarianism greet "French philosophy" in North American academe.

For years, Derrida, Foucault, or Lyotard represented, in their opposition to humanism or humanitarianism, the pinnacle of professional and political irresponsibility to many of their opponents. Now imagine the intensificaiton of scorn for those former students of Althusser, Jacques Rancière and the outspoken and unapologetic former Maoist Alain Badiou, the latter especially prepared to lead the militant youth off to the next Cultural Revolution. Those 'responsible' members of North American academe must wonder how France continues to place such irresponsible philosophers in the most respectable institutions. One wonders how many of these responsible philosophers felt relief at the prospect that 'The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy' at Middlesex University will have to shutter its doors.

It must come as some surprise then that "French philosophy" is not the mainstream philosophy of France. Instead, since the 1970s, the nouveaux philosophes have capitalized on the convergence of corporate media, big business and humanitarianism in France.

Dominique Lecourt's The Mediocracy is a translation of two texts, separated by two decades, that indict the  the 'New Philosophers' for their role in reducing the revolutionary spirit of May '68 to a philosophy of consensus, consolation, and humanitarianism. The first, originally published in 1999 as Les piètres penseurs, reflects on the consequences of the nouveaux philosophes as media intellectuals, and the second, Dissidence ou révolution? (1978), presented here as an appendix, is a fiery polemic directed against André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy et al., as they were emerging as a-- sorry for all the inverted commas here, but they are necessary-- 'dissident' 'school' of 'thought' in France.

They would find it fitting to be called dissidents, because this is just the kind of hyperbole that they would pass off their philosophy under the cover of modesty. This 'modesty' has a specific rhetorical context, for what binds the New Philosophers to each other is their common renunciation of their so-called revolutionary past. As Lecourt notes, there is a long history of criticizing Marxism as totalitarian because in theory it seeks to grasp human relations as a totality. This is, by the 1970s, a textbook manoeuvre in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, but it had often been conducted from the outside of Marxist discourse. Being former Maoists, the nouveaux philosophes approached this critique from the inside, so to speak. Their joint renunciation of what they called their 'complicity' in 'Marxist' oppression coincided with the French publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

Renunciation, as Lecourt points out, is not the same as self-critique. Self-critique, in its better moments, is brought on when one recognizes changing conditions in social relationships, and as Lecourt points out, by the 1970s, Marxism had fallen into a critical crisis. But the New Philosophers did not seek to renovate their theoretical commitments, they outright rejected them. However, since much of what has transpired since their turn to democratic values and free-marketeering has been, in the West and across the globe, an intensification of capitalism through neo-liberal policies. Insofar as they've resigned themselves to the imperfectibility of human 'nature,' they are now arguably more complicit with the situation than before. Not only do they preach resignation, but they actively work against new emancipatory change. Lecourt states, already in 1978:

Renunciation, resignation: under the cover of its 'radical anti-Marxism', the Western ideology of 'dissidence' is an ideology of the political abdication of the intellectuals. [...] It inflects [this conjecture] in the direction of flight when it is confronted with the 'discovery' of the crisis of Marxism. Rather than analysing the real history of this crisis in order to identify what is at issue with it, the New Philosophers prefer to proclaim that 'the class struggle has disappeared', explaining that ultimately it existed solely in the theoretical imagination of Marx and his successors (174).

Lecourt lists the formulas of complicity in a footnote: Lévy's 'The idea of a dominant class is meaningless,' Glucksmann's 'Capital does not exist,' 'Labour does not exist...' I supposes it's quite comfortable in the green rooms of the French media...

This poses the question of how Glucksmann or BHL or Luc Ferry became known as a group of philosophers rather that, as we would say today, pundits. Lecourt recalls, when he initially sought to publish Dissidence ou révolution?, Althusser's reproach for taking the group too seriously and lending, via critique, an air of legitimacy to them. However, in retrospect, Lecourt recognizes that they-- the Althusserians and others-- had underestimated the savvyness of the New Philosophers. He identifies  two crucial factors at work in the ascendancy of the New Philosophers, both of which involve the appropriation of the work and legacy of established figures in French thought, Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Lecourt argues that Foucault bears some responsibility for the rise of the New Philosophers, which was nearly concurrent with Foucault's critique of Marxist historiography and Freudian (Lacanian) analysis. The New Philosophers simplified and generalized Foucault's analyses of power and knowledge to add philosophical weight to their critique of the entire praxis surrounding revolution and the seizure of state power, and, as they saw it, its inevitable catastrophe. Lecourt cites numerous passages where Foucault's subtle research is broadly generalized and appropriated by their critique of power. What is more surprising-- insofar as Foucault's critique of Marxism is generally decontextualized in his reception in the English speaking world-- is that Foucault returned the favor. He not only did interviews with them, he also wrote a glowing review of Glucksmann's Les maîtres penseurs, lending intellectual legitimacy to the nouveaux philosophes. It's difficult not to think that Foucault's tactical alliance with these mediatic anti-Marxists does not betray some opportunism on his part. This alliance, Lecourt notes,  ultimately drove a wedge between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.


More important to the rise of the New Philosophers is how they exploited a reunion of two long-quarreling philosophers. Lecourt argues that one image in particular cemented the nouveau program of humanitarianism. On June 26, 1979,* Sartre joined joined a delegation to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to request assistance for a humanitarian mission to help people fleeing Cambodia and Vietnam. After the meeting, a photograph was captured of the ailing Sartre being accompanied, arm in arm, by Raymond Aron and André Glucksmann. Lecourt writes that it was a potent image :

More potent, perhaps, than was realized at the time. For it did not just involve a kind of public reconciliation between the two veteran rivals of the French intelligentsia, through the intermediary of a philosopher who had been a pupil of the one and a fellow traveller of the other. The trio had in fact just solicited the aid of the President of the Republic for the operation 'A boat of Vietnam,' mounted by Bernard Kouchner. Humanitarian action was making its official entry into French politics at the very top....The Elysée trio was conveying this message: now is no longer the time for political analysis and action; let us aid the victims without pondering the responsibility of the various parties in the human disaster that is unfolding (116).

Humanitarianism, Lecourt argues, requires the substitution of ethics for politics. It requires a discourse which seeks to 'combat Evil.' The problem with combatting 'evil' is that it depoliticizes whatever catastrophe it comfronts. By 'naturalizing' catastrophe-- in the sense that it presupposes a particular picture of human nature that we have already discussed-- all moments of suffering are emptied of their political significance. It is, to use a Lacanian pun, a kind of 'television':

without rooting these images in concrete reflection on any singular history, and without offering viewers the perspective of a rational understanding, it is not human 'fraternity' or 'solidarity' that is solicited and reinforced, but utter sentimentalism that is exploited (119).

But there is another side of the image of Sartre-Aron-Glucksmann (not, I think, stressed adequately by Lecourt): it portrays politics as an elite and administrative affair. The various strands of consensus, democratic values and humanitarianism are picked up here: politics is not a popular or emancipatory praxis, it is something conducted by elites, intellectuals, and our elected representatives. Didn't Sartre ask, only a few years earlier, if elections were not a trap for fools (piège à cons)?

The worst thing about death, Sartre argues, is that people can then say whatever they want about you (Being and Nothingess, 694). And in this regard, it becomes clear that Lecourt's Mediocracy aims to defend a radical intellectual legacy that is always in danger of being canonized and depoliticized. It is not only the legacies of Sartre or Foucault, but May '68 and even philosophy itself, which are all in danger of being appropriated by the New Philosophers. These "multimedia moralists," he argues, reduce philosophy to a glorification of the individual and a preservation of 'values.' Political analysis becomes what Lecourt calls the intensification of public opinion, "translating the spontaneous expression of...affects into noble discourse" (136). These days, the New Philosophers don't even bother with the "noble discourse." Here's BHL-- who we've already lampooned for his shoddy research-- parodying himself on the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull:

Silence, says the volcano, silence, I'm the one who is speaking now. Nobody move. Until further notice, your flying machines are no longer allowed in the sky. Each of you stay exactly where you were at the instant my eruption of sulfur, nitrous gas and bitumen (Marquis de Sade again) began. And no one, it's true, is stirring. And the planet, in fact, is holding its breath, waiting for the volcano to become silent. And a shiver goes through us all, at the idea of a force which extends beyond our will and suddenly dictates its own law.

That is the lesson of the volcano. Under the volcano, certainly not the beach, but the necessary patience of things. From the burning throat of the volcano, a message of humility and a call for moderation. Blessed be the volcano. Fortunate the chaos it foments. And this time, may Empedocles remain standing straight in his sandals.

The labored reference to a well-known slogan of May '68 ("Beneath the paving stones, the beach") says it all: no more revolutions, nor more critiques of political economy, the true lesson is "the necessary patience of things." An easy moral for consensual times. Between the latest free associations of BHL and the earlier works of the New Philosophers, the emphasis is the same: politics concerns the private sphere of existence, only there is it possible to cultivate one's individuality and advance one's interests, rather than  concerning a transformative and revolutionary practice. A familiar refrain in the English speaking world, but one that required a significant amount of effort to establish itself in France. Lecourt's The Mediocracy is a powerful intervention, at turns personal and polemical, against the mediatic punditry of the nouveaux philosophes, against the daily-televised blather that insists that we accept the world as it is.

*Being part-memoir, Lecourt dates this incident 1978.

Further Suggestions for BHL's Research

Not that I thought that many of the nouveaux philosophes had much intellectual integrity, but the latest news on Bernard-Henri Lévy, television personality and bloviator at large, is that BHL's current book, entitled De la guerre en philosophie, cites a hoax source to support his arguments against Immanuel Kant. The Telegraph UK reports that

In his book, which has received lavish praise from some quarters, the open-shirted Mr Lévy lays into the philosopher Immanuel Kant as being unhinged and a "fake". To support his claims, he cites a certain Jean-Baptiste Botul, whom he describes as a post-War authority on Kant. But the chorus of approval turned to laughter after a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur pointed out that Mr Botul does not exist: he is a fictional character created in by a contemporary satirical journalist, Frédéric Pagès. [...]

But Mr Lévy missed the joke, citing Mr Botul from a "series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay" he supposedly gave after the war, in which he said that "their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance".

With or without his intellectual integrity intact, I'm sure Mr. BHL will continue to write, so let me suggest a few more avenues of research. There are, in fact, several dangerous writers moving in little-known fascist circles in the Americas that BHL might want to discredit. They are first profiled in Roberto Bolaño's path-breaking Nazi Literature in the Americas, which was published in translation by New Directions in 2008.

BHL might want to refute, first, Luiz Fontaine Da Souza (1900-1977), a Brazilian writer who dedicated much of his work to attacking the legacy of French Enlightenment philosophy in a series of Refutations aimed at Voltaire (1921), Diderot (1925), Montesquieu (1930) and Rousseau (1932). However, no threat, for Fontaine, loomed as large as the ascendency of existentialism and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, to whom he dedicated six volumes of criticism. Five volumes of his Critique of Being and Nothingness appeared in his lifetime from 1955-1962, and a sixth was neither completed nor published. Taking on the work of Fontaine ought to be personal for BHL.

Then there are a few other fascist writers still living. The include the American novelist Harry Silebius, sci-fi writers Gustavo Borda and Zach Sodenstern, and poet and land artist Willy Schürholz. What they share in common is anti-semitism. Silebius, of Richmond, Virginia, has dedicated several novels to the scenario that Hitler's forces conquer North America. Borda's science fiction has gained him some recognition in his native Guatamala, while Sodenstern's series on the Fourth Reich in America have been made into cult films.

However, the most scorn and most serious philosophical journalism should be reserved for Schürholz, whose career rests on his land art. He's produced nothing like the well-known Spiral Jetty, instead this fascist poet has dug the maps of what he has called an "ideal concentration camp" in deserts in Atacama, Arizona, and a wheat field in Colorado.

BHL should act now before these pernicious characters gain more influence and notoriety, as Silebius, according to Bolaño's research, does not die until 2014, Borda until 2016, Sodenstern until 2021, and Schürholz, who holds a Chilean cultural attaché position in Angola, until 2029.