Bernard-Henri Lévy > Breaking news

Bernard-Henri Lévy was eighth in rank to be awarded the agrégation in philosophy in June, 1971. To tell the truth, philosophy was not his only vocation at the time. He had, of course, earned his master’s degree in philosophy (Formation et déplacement des concepts scientifiques selon Georges Canguilhem ). But he had simultaneously earned a master’s in history and nearly finished studies at Sciences Po that would have made him eligible to apply for entry to the ENA. Better still, in the fall of 1970, he registered for the agrégation in History and geography, and this was the agrégation he began to prepare. It was only several months later, probably in January 1971, that, under the influence of Louis Althusser, he definitively changed directions and made philosophy his primary subject.

That year’s program centred around three great authors: Leibniz, Aristotle, and Nietzsche.

The subject of his «Grande Leçon» (the grave oral exam, key to the test, based on a subject selected at random for which the candidate had six hours to prepare, secluded in the Sorbonne’s Grande Bibliothèque) was “Pleasure”.

We have succeeded in finding the subject for the written exam, “La Grande Dissertation”, another major aspect of the competitive exam. It was «The Unknown».
After the agrégation, Bernard-Henri Lévy began teaching at a lycée, as is expected of all agrégés. He was assigned to the Lycée de Luzarche, in the Paris area, where one of his colleagues was Pierre Manent, another Normalian who has since written Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Julliard – réed. Gallimard 2006) and La Raison des nations (Gallimard, 2006).

He also taught epistemology at Strasbourg’s Université Louis Pasteur.

During the same years, 1972 to 1974, he returned to the rue d’Ulm to teach a course entitled «Politiques de Nietzsche» to students of the aggregation.

However, he rapidly cut his ties to teaching to join the staff of Grasset and begin the career with which we are all familiar.

Laurence Roblin

June 16th, 2011

Le Normalien de la rue d’Ulm

Bernard-Henri Lévy ranked seventh on the entry exam for the l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm. And, greater proof of excellence, he passed the exam «en carré», according to the expression at the time that may still be current, that is to say, on his first attempt.

Normally, the khâgneux (students of the ENS of the rue d’Ulm) may have made one, two or three attempts to pass the entry exam. In this case, they are, respectively, “ carré», “cube”, or “bica”. Well, BHL made it on the first round and thus became one of the prestigious Ecole Normale’s rare and famous “carré”s.

Due to the events of May 1968, that year the entrance exam was postponed until November, so he did not really start classes until the very end of the year. But, after consulting a few others who were in the same class, I reconstituted some of the elements of that year’s entrance exam.

The subject of the philosophy exam was: What philosophical meaning should one give to the expression “one must take care of appearances”?

The subject of the oral exam was rigor and exactitude.

Scarcely sterling results on the Ancient History exam demonstrated that he was less than inspired by the topic, «The Jews in the Roman Empire».

However, he earned the best grade of his entire class on a test specifically devoted to Homer, one I do not know if Normalians are still subject to today, in which one must translate a text from The Illiad and the Odyssey, with neither dictionary nor any particular preparation, before the jury.

BHL devoted his academic career at the Ecole Normale to both the serious and the whimsical. The latter he has amply described himself in Comédie, so I will not dwell on it here. But on the serious side, I would like to add a few details. At the Ecole Normale, of course, he met Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s seminar was his inspiration for the great text on Artaud and Nietzche, which I hope to place on line soon, consisting of a comparative analysis of Theatre and its Double and The Birth of Tragedy. It is there, also, at the Ecole Normale that he got to know Jean Beaufret, during a tumultuous meeting he describes in De la guerre en philosophie. And it was there that he knew Georges Canguilhem, to whom he devoted his master’s thesis, directed by Michel Serres and entitled Formation et déplacement des concepts scientifiques selon Georges Canguilhem. I hope to find this text too and to put in on line one day.

His studies at the Ecole Normale did not prevent him from travelling. To Ireland, in Artaud’s footsteps, particularly to the Aran Islands. To Mexico, in 1969, which resulted in his first article published in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, entitled Mexique: nationalisation de l’impérialisme. He spent several months in Mexico, between February and April of 1969, and it was there that he established friendships with the great Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzales Casanova and with Octavio Paz.

He passed the last year of his studies, known as the «additional” year, in an unconventional manner, well known to his biographers, when, at André Malraux’s urging, he left for Bangladesh. Officially, of course, he was writing a postgraduate thesis under the direction of Charles Bettelheim, to whom he had been introduced by Althusser. Like the text on Mexico published in Les Temps Modernes, it was to focus on questions related to «internal colonialism». In fact, he did not write this postgraduate thesis, but he did return from his trip with his first book, Les Indes rouges, which was published by Maspero.

Bernard-Henri Lévy made some solid friendships in those years at the Ecole Normale. Several years later, he re-connected with his former classmate, Jean-Luc Marion, on the occasion of the publication of The Complete Works of Lévinas by Grasset, as with Jean-Michel Desprats, editor of the Pléiade edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, to whom he is still close. And the late Alexandre Delamarre, who seems to have been his closest friend in those Ecole Normale years.

Other complicities, rather unexpected and less explicit, came out of those years, with Alain Badiou, for example. I cannot explain otherwise the way Lévy let the Marxist philosopher off the hook when the latter was accused of antisemitism by some of his friends. Nor can I explain the strange appearance, on April 7th, 2004, at the locale of the Ecole Normale, of the two great intellectuals previously mentioned. To the astonishment of all present, there was no row between Badiou and Lévy but, on the contrary, a very singular homage on the part of Badiou, a few lines of which I cite here: “We are all aware that Bernard-Henri Lévy is a superior writer, a philosopher who has treated very complex concepts. At the same time, he is also, in a free and deliberate manner, a media person, a man of mass communication, a man of distribution, of circulation, something of a man of exhibition.” Or, «You know, Lenin—now here’s an anachronistic quote, but I cite him all the same!–once said that intellectual youth was ‘the sensitive plate of its time’. By the same token, one could purport that Bernard-Henri Lévy has definitively remained among intellectual youth, for he is truly not only an interpreter but, perhaps better still, a sensitive plate of the concerns of the era. Consequently, I believe this Leninist definition of youth applies to him.” And later on: « In this sense, from his original participation to an initial assessment of the revolutionary period, at the end of the 1970s, up until his current vast investigation of the imminent diversity of the Muslim world, he has always very closely followed the things that strike the conscience, the opinion, or the spectacle of the successive phases of our times.” Or, finally: «Today, it’s a bit like the refinement of his work on Sartre. Examined closely, we perceive that he places Sartre neither entirely in the old world, nor completely in the new one. In this figure exemplifying the old rapport of intellectuals to change, it is apparent that something of the old world can be suggested in the new world, where it still resonates at the price of important divisions, of a subtle and complex internal contradiction.”

Normalians as a brotherhood? A club? In any case, that is what these two great «archicubes» (still another word borrowed from the jargon of former Normalians) seem to think!

Liliane Lazar.