French Philosophe Bernard-Henri Levy Was Born Dressed in a Black Suit

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Joshua Stein

12/24/07 11:00AM

Filed to: freedom ties

Author, philosopher (and Paul Janka lookalike!) Bernard-Henri Levy was recently queried about his personal style by Amanda Christine Miller, who is like the Huffington Post's low-rent answer to Deborah Solomon. (Previously she has asked CNN hottie Christiane Amanpour about her safari jackets and Slash about his top hat.) This week she embarrassed America with the man the French call simply BHL.

How long have you had your logo of a white unbuttoned shirt with a dark suit and no tie?
Always. Since Always.
How did it start?
Always, I say. Therefore no beginning. By definition, no beginning.
How has it evolved over time?
It has not evolved. I believe that time stands still.
What statement does your look make about you and your work?
This logo is the simplest it can be. Don't you think? I don't understand why it poses a problem. I do not even comprehend why it is being commented on. And I do not see what it says, at a profound level, about me.

What's My Logo: Bernard Henri Lévy On His Signature Suits And Unbuttoned Shirts [HuffPo]

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Tiraspol Groom Joshua Stein 12/24/07 04:10PM

@Pope John Peeps II: Um, no, he doesn't have a lot of legitimacy in Europe. He has a lot of legitimacy at the 92nd Street Y and at Vanity Fair and at Christopher Hitchens' cocktail parties. He did attend the best schools (normalien), and he wrote Barbarism with a Human Face, which captured the late 70's reactionary zeitgeist against the Soviet-backing Solzhenitsyn-denying French Communist Party and the Maoist 68ers. That doesn't make him a genius, but a glamorous vehicle for conventional wisdom with the sort of credentials that could at the time compete with the profs at U Paris-Vincennes. His book on Daniel Pearl is quite good as a true crime entry, though his self-absorption often gets the best of him. He is good at navigating between UN-do-goodism and humanitarian intervention, and he is apparently good at fucking hot chicks, but he is no philosopher king.

SheWalkedWithAZombie Joshua Stein 12/24/07 08:38PM

@poisonville: @bananappeal: @krucoff: @Arundel:

@Pope John Peeps II: What they said, dude.

I was trained in poststructuralism during its fucking heyday (80s

and early 90s) so: 1. I do speak pomo, 2. having drunk the Kool-Aid I

now tend to be easily unimpressed, and 3. I am, as you insightfully

noted, "extremely ignorant."

I reserve my right to make fun of the pretentions of annoying,

overrated French philosophers. Especially on Gawker. Especially on

Christmas. And as someone raised on Monty Python I believe that making

fun of the French is one of life's great joys.

This has nothing to do with my intellectual, literary and artistic

Francophilic tendencies... like the fact that no many how many times I

read Madame Bovary it utterly destroys me.

As a gift of the spirit, here is one of my favorite versions of one of my favorite carols: [www.youtube.com] : a 1980s tv performance of Siouxsie & the Banshees doing "Il Est Né" with a cameo by Robert Smith ... back in the day.

I'm old.

Joyeux Noël — À tout le monde.

Lucia Toledo Joshua Stein 12/25/07 10:13PM

It's great to see a great intellectual act, because he is French or straight or maybe both, like a clueless dick. Remember Derrida, in (I think) Amy Ziering Kofman's film— contending that a question like "Tell us about how you fell in love with your wife?" was valueless?

LaPretentieuse Joshua Stein 12/24/07 05:47PM

I admire BHI but I also think he lost a lot of gravitas the day he married Dombasle. There's nothing wrong with her necessarily, but it's hard to give your full respect to someone whose concept of feminine beauty (and by extension, Beauty?) is so pedestrian.