Bernard-Henri Lévy

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism (Random House’s version of « Ce Grand Cadavre à la renverse, published by Grasset a year ago) is out in the U.S., as of Tuesday, September 16.Bernard-Henri Lévy started his 3-week tour on Monday with a stream of daily sold-out events in New York’s most prestigious—and largest—venues where only the happy few among America’s literary lions traditionally engage in debates and conversations to promote their work.

He started with a riveting conversation with America’s TV star commentator on politics, arts and letters, Charlie Rose.
That night, he swung by Washington, DC, for a lively debate with Francis Fukuyama at Johns Hopkins University to the delight of an avid, young and mostly academic audience.
Back in New York on Tuesday evening, an audience of 700 jammed the auditorium of the legendary New York Public Library in anxious anticipation of fireworks between BHL and Slavoj Zizek. “We’re enemies,” Zizek declared to BHL’s editor in the Green Room before the debate. Paul Holdengräber, New York’s impresario of public events whose NYPL Live program is now an institution, adeptly but understandably with a few sweat beads on the forehead, launched the debate with questions on the French riots of 2005, May 68, Islamofascism. BHL parried Zizek’s polemical thrusts with an impassioned argument that the left must embrace liberalism, that the revolutionary catechism is dead, and that the left’s bad instincts threaten to once again give succor to totalitarianism, genocide, and dictatorship in many places in the world.
Was Zizek more jet-lagged than BHL, or was he a bit unnerved by the French intellectual’s sharp yet nuanced command of the topics? In any case, Zizek certainly did not convincingly punch back.From a strict publishing point of view, a successful lecture at a bookstore is a publisher’s priority.

For that reason, the outpouring at BHL’s lecture at Barnes & Noble’s flagship store at Union Square went far beyond Random House’s already high expectations. As his publisher noted: absolutely no one draws crowds like this!

Two years after the publication of New York Times bestseller American Vertigo, New York gave BHL the warmest welcome the author could have dreamed of.
The early reviews of the books have all been enormously favourable.
Caroline Weber, for the New York Times, was first to acclaim the book and write about the BHL phenomenon: “Tireless crusader, renegade philosopher, inveterate fame seeker; superstar in France, hero in Bosnia, wild card in the United States.”
Carlin Romano, Book Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote in the Chronicle Review: “Lévy is a kind of American Pragmatist in Paris whose philosophical urgencies arise from confrontation with conceptual problems in his chock-full activist life. (…) Lévy’s engagement with the entire firmament of French thought, his focused attention on such conundrums as atheism and moral universalism, and his battles against knee-jerk anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism make Left in Dark Times the most accessible introduction to who he is today.” He concludes with “[BHL] is an admirable warrior of ideas who continues to take personal risks for truth as he sees it.”

Adam Kirsch, leading critic at the New York Sun, ponders the question posed by the book—“What remained to make the left the left?—and writes: “Bernard-Henri Lévy gives a convincing and very troubling answer to that question.” (…) Mr. Lévy offers the best summary I have seen of that worldview, which can be glimpsed in the works of many influential left-wing philosophers and journalists.” He then adds: “After reading Left in Dark Times, it is impossible to deny that the left, whatever its past glories — and Mr. Lévy remembers them all, from the Dreyfus affair to the events of 1968 — is now a danger to truly liberal values.”

The Economist starts its own review with a note on the book’s author before launching into a very thorough analysis of the book: “It is, or was, fashionable to look down on Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French writer and intellectual. The left tends to despise him for questioning its idols. It doesn’t help that he is rich, talks intelligibly and has a beautiful wife. The right condescends to him for being vain, glib and writing too many books.”

Finally, Alan Wolfe, in the Boston Globe, calls Left in Dark Times “a moving and inspiring book.”

More to come, of course…

Par Hélène Brenkman