From his reporting in Bangladesh in 1971 to his most recent stances in favor of the Sudanese insurrection of General Yasir Armin, BHL has struggled against all sorts of adversity, but there is one enemy that he has always kept in his sights, tried to yoke, and feared: purity. The ideal of purity. Or better yet, the will to purity. More consequential, more powerful, in his eyes, than the will to know, perhaps more destructive and nihilistic than the Nietzschean will to power, the will to purity resides within an episteme that Lévy has spent his philosophical career trying to defeat. The reason is that purity epitomizes the dark forces that the writer-philosopher has doggedly chronicled over the past four decades. Behind the fulminations of this or that nationalistic or populist leader and in the back of the minds of the young, machete-wielding killers of the Rwandan genocide, the ethnic purifiers of Greater Serbia, the Anglo-Pakistani assassin of journalist Daniel Pearl, and even the self-righteous French commentators on the moral failings of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the wake of the Sofitel affair—a single demon can be detected, hidden under dissimilar motives, and that is the demon of purity.

The recurrence of this motif gives BHL a distinctive place in the antitotalitarian family. Hannah Arendt sees the ultimate signature of totalitarianism in the rejection of “human plurality.” François Furet (The Passing of an Illusion) is inclined to blame historicist illusion. And Alain Finkielkraut (L’humanité perdue) asserts that Arendt and Furet are both right, describing totalitarianism as hypnosis by the number two—that is, as a reduction of the human problem to a choice between “two camps” represented by Robespierre and Lenin. By contrast to all three thinkers, BHL prefers to probe, to pull at threads, to dissect what he sees as “a sad passion.” That difference results in definitions that seem to deviate from the mainstream of the antitotalitarian movement. For the founder of the Messager européen, escaping totalitarianism meant “counting up to three.” For the editor-in-chief of La Règle du Jeu it means, above all, resisting the enchantments of purity.

What does it mean to resist the temptations of purity? It was in 1994 that this idea, which would prove so important in Lévy’s writing, first took form. The End of History and the Last Man, the bestseller by American political thinker Francis Fukuyama, published in French translation two years before, provided a glimpse of the global triumph of the liberal and democratic order, accomplished through contagion. And while nothing appeared capable of challenging the hegemony of Fukuyama’s model, while the gradual extinction of antagonisms on the peaceful horizon of the “end of history” was taken to be almost obvious, BHL set out like a sharpshooter to shake the “post-communist” consensus. Adhering faithfully to the line of his polemic, and even more to his pessimism and rejection of teleology, the philosopher explained in La Pureté dangereuse (Grasset, 1994) that, far from ensuring a happy ending to the world’s future, the fall of the Berlin Wall implied a crumbling, a fragmentation of the universal. To the promise of the gradual damping of conflict, the philosopher responded with the thesis of a tragic resurgence of conflict, a revival of âgon against a background of generalized relativism. In chapters that reprised Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, BHL described a twin threat: the expanding desert of anomie and the attrition of the great signifiers of universality.

Against the confident universalism of Fukuyama, BHL, who never ceased being an antitotalitarian, even after the evaporation of the Eastern Bloc, posited a troubled universalism. He made no secret of his unease. To take the full measure of the global regression that he foresaw, he deployed a new conceptual model, that of the “will to purity.” It was a model adapted to a new world still being formed, the only one, he claimed, to warn of the danger that lay ahead: “Do we really want to change times?” he asked. “To enter, with no possibility of return, the era that’s coming, with its one solution—the will to purity—that, alas, will be the new catch-phrase?” Honesty requires us to acknowledge, that the notion had already appeared one or two times in Lévy’s philosophy. In Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, the philosopher had dwelled momentarily on the ambiguous passion for purity, perceiving it as one of the drivers of modern unreason, guided by Baudelaire’s warnings on the topic of “mankind’s folly for purity.” But La pureté dangereuse broke new ground by putting purity at the center of a scheme that purported, to the exclusion of nearly all other factors, to explain the new configurations of barbarism.

Bernard-Henri Lévy was certain of it: Despite the optimistic predictions of Fukuyama, despite the Panglossian tendencies of Fukuyama’s French imitators, history was again lashed to the wheel. Exactly five years after taking this position, standing with Jacques Derrida and Christian Bourgois in defense of Salman Rushdie against the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, BHL drew up a discouraging list of the many places where a new collapse of sense and meaning was looming. Along with Russia, already in a nationalist swoon, and Rwanda, then split by genocide (the widespread denial of which would never cease to haunt him), BHL focused his analysis on the fate of two countries that the proponents of purity were doing their best to destroy.

First, Bosnia, that miracle of coexistence, that “open society” whose very qualities made it vulnerable to the fury and vandalism of Serb national-communism and its armed wing, the tchetniks. Bosnia, whose cause he had taken on two years before, a country in which “ethnic cleansing was not the means, but the end (….), not just an awful weapon wielded in pursuit of a war, which would at least have had its own logic, program, and goals, but the goal itself, the entire program of the war.” (1) That Bosnia which, because it was a microcosm of Europe, polarized the anger of those obsessed with land claims, the border fanatics, all those who hated the Danubian diversity and multiculturality celebrated by Claudio Magris.

Next, Algeria, where the philosopher was born, and one of the first fields of confrontation between secularism and what Lévy had not yet labeled “fascislamism.” Algeria, where the FIS (the Islamist party), supported by the GIA (groupes islamiques armés, armed Islamic groups) had launched all-out war against the regime born of the FLN. BHL writes: “As for Algeria, and all the other countries threatened by Islamism, or overtaken by it, they, too—and how!—are drunk on a form of purity, which it would be too easy to dismiss by contrasting it with the brazen spectacle of bare-faced corruption of the FLN state.”

Is Algeria drunk on purity? With a few other French thinkers of the era, including his friend André Glucksmann, Lévy reported from the field, hammering home this hypothesis, the proof of which he saw in the Islamist insurrection’s treatment of intellectuals, whose throats were slit at their front door or who were gunned down openly in the street, point blank, as if their very existence was “a sort of stain on the immanent unity of the Arab nation.”

A basic characteristic of the fascism of purity begins to emerge. As in Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, as in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the will to purity goes hand in hand with open hostility toward those who look too closely, those too devoted to thought, and those who cultivate the critical spirit. “In Rwanda, intellectuals were identified by the fact that they wore glasses. In Algeria, they were recognized by their appearance, their gestures, their way of walking, standing, or dressing—any mark of difference, sometimes nearly imperceptible, that betrayed western influence and that disturbed the tranquility of the Ummah. Cleanliness, uniqueness, permanence, timelessness, limpidity: These are the bywords of purity. And invariably it is in the name of that purity that, after a clandestine drubbing and unending terror, a man whose sole crime was thinking is executed.” (2)

Lévy’s journalistic insights into the ravages of purity also underpin a phenomenology of the will to purity that revisits and updates his oldest conceptual formulations. According to BHL, “whenever integrality, purity, is in the driver’s seat, we have to assume the presence of a fundamentalism that may not always speak its name but that should be recognized and identified for what it is.” Politically, this implies the existence of a “fundamentalist international” whose signature is the “fantasy of a body, whole and entire, but purged of its parasitic elements.”

Baudelaire, remember, faulted the “friends of the human race,” that is, those who had not yet come to be known as progressives, for ignoring original sin. The poet’s refusal to play along with the denial of the fall of man was, according to the author of The Last Days of Charles Baudelaire, one of the most brilliant esthetic and ethical threads in Baudelaire’s work. To the extent that, in BHL’s eyes, the will to purity is fundamentally anti-Baudelairian: In it, original sin is always imagined to be annullable. The knotty, twisted wood of humanity can be straightened at will. In this sense, the fundamentalist is not blinded so much by his crazy convictions as by a faulty ontology: Trapped in a labyrinth of surreality, he has faith in the existence of a “good origin,” the full plenitude of which must be fully restored at all costs. “There is only one beginning, and it was good, goes the thinking of someone whose judgment is affected by the will to purity. If only Stalin had not betrayed Lenin. If only the Emir had not strayed from the Caliph.”

In other words: “Deviation (…), an error of interpretation, of understanding of the sacred text” derailed the train. One need only go back to the point at which the deviation occurred and start over. One need only reboot history. Above and beyond the correction of the Lucretian clinamen, the denial of original sin encourages a demiurgic, alchemistic politics: “Original sin is radical, irremediable—and that is exactly what makes it intolerable to the fundamentalist. The advantage of the idea of deviation is that one can return to the fork, taking the right path this time, and, in so doing, erase the original mistake.” (3) In the “purist’s” vision of history, one may lodge an appeal against evil before a divine court: “Fundamentalism (…) is a return, not to origins, but to the point of deviation from the straight and narrow.” (4)

Lévy warns us not to deceive ourselves into thinking that this metaphysical regression affects certain “secular religions” more than others. In the course of the twentieth century, all swayed to the mad cadences of the desire for purity. Every one, including the various manifestations of communism, which did not wait for Stalin before splintering into competing orthodoxies and breaking into two parts the history of the human race; the various religious fundamentalisms, grafted onto the resurrection of the “origin”; and, of course, all of the forms of fascism and the multiple variants of the “revolutionary right,” which give free rein to the ultimate fantasy, that of the “fundamentalist international”—again, the fantasy of a perfect body purged of its parasites. That was the fantasy at work in the fascist revolution that resulted in the Vichy regime, which right thinkers long persisted in viewing as a mild and benevolent form of reaction. Expanding on the thesis of his Idéologie française, BHL shows that the “the sinister and chilling nightmare of Vichy,” in the words of Roland Barthes, was also a nightmare of purity, for the will to purity was able to prop itself up by appealing to forms of naturalism and organicism congruent with its orientations.

Naturalism, first: In the case of the regime founded by Marshal Pétain on the ruins of the republican France of Léon Blum and Jules Moch, naturalism is the very air that one breathes. In this telluric grounding, where good blood and good sense combined to defeat the transcendentalists of the despised republic, the motto was to rely on the “spontaneous substantialism of societies.” A strategy of “regeneration,” directed against all those who were thought to be muddying the holistic comity of eternal France (the Jews, the freemasons, and the communists, among others) restored to positions of authority the instincts, primordial allegiances and associations, and basic identities—the roots that supposedly do not lie. (5)

And, second, organicism: “The complete society, present to itself, natural, that extraordinary and exquisitely formed social body that, in order to be reborn, awaits only the removal of the miasmas of the law, politics, ideas, and representation. Is that imagined society,” Lévy asks, “not another version of the ‘good community’ that was the dream of the fundamentalists?”

Naturalism, organicism, denial of original sin. Can it be by chance that the three basic affects of the will to purity, as suggested in scattered observations in La Pureté dangereuse, are close, in the realm of philosophical meaning, to the terrible atmosphere of gnosis? The gnostic experience is that of the being cast adrift, the dereliction of man abandoned in a universe that is not only unfinished but also evil. In Late Antiquity, gnosis culminated in escapism. Those who cultivated it preferred to escape to other realms, to a hidden world, to a consoling surreality far from the uninhabitable Earth. In modern times, the gnostic aspiration is re-anchored in the here and now. The task is to carve out a new man, raised up from his limitations. The transfiguration of human nature becomes once again a promise to be fulfilled on the horizon of history. The German philosopher Hans Jonas and his contemporary Eric Voegelin produced a brilliant exegesis of the gnostic tradition. Their reading rests on the affinity between the primordial experience of gnosis—that of an odious world to be fled and deserted—and the totalitarian solutions forged in the modern era in the hope of escaping the human dilemma.

When the human subject experiences himself primarily as cast adrift (geworfen), he is forced, in order to regain control over his own existence, to refashion his stay on earth. “The existing reality must be annihilated,” wrote Voegelin. “That is the major task of gnosis.” In his autobiographical notes, commenting on the practical consequences of the gnostic stance, he added, in a disillusioned voice, “The metastatic hope for a new world to take the place of the old during one’s own lifetime has become a permanent source of trouble in political life.” Why? Because, in the gnostic view, “the eschatological state of perfection will be attained by direct violence.” Voegelin, an anti-Nazi conservative, had the German catastrophe in mind when he wrote those pessimistic lines. They remind us of BHL’s brilliant passage on what Emmanuel Levinas called the “philosophy of Hitlerism”: “Nazism and the will to purity. It would be useful to reread all of the canonical texts of Nazism, to revisit all of its programs and the accumulated literature of propaganda, by Goebbels, Rosenberg, and others (both before and after taking power), in order to tease out the signs of that other metaphorical constellation, this one framed in positive terms, that of the radiant evocation of the lost virginity of Aryan Germany.” (6)

On the frontier of apocalyptic delirium, the will to purity dissipates and vanishes, leaving the stage to another diabolical figure that is its extension and projected shadow: the will to cure—otherwise known as medicalism. In Lévy’s thinking, that is the capping concept that emerges from analysis of the totalitarian phenomenon. (cf. notice « VOLONTE DE GUERIR »)

Translation by Steven Kennedy

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(1) La pureté dangereuse, p. 71.
(2) La pureté dangereuse, p. 77.
(3) La pureté dangereuse p. 123.
(4) La pureté dangereuse, p. 124.
(5) La pureté dangereuse, p. 258 and 208.
(6) La pureté dangereuse, p. 100.

An importance based on a good deal of thought: Since radical Islam burst onto the world scene at the end of the 1980s, Lévy has forged theoretical models to assess the danger posed by the phenomenon. To the leading proponent of the “clash of civilizations,” Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, Lévy consistently objected that Islamic fundamentalism was not a single block nor a coherent entity shut off from and incompatible with other entities. Just back from Afghanistan in April 2002, BHL already understood the fracture in the world of Islam: “Enlightened Islam against fundamentalist Islam: That is … the major issue of our new century. The Afghan people and Hamid Karzai will not prevail in that battle unless we help them. (2)

American Vertigo, Lévy’s chronicle of a trip he took through the United States in 2004 in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, first appeared in English in January 2006. In it, Lévy refined his thoughts on the subject of radical Islam: “The only clash of cultures or world visions that has meaning today is not the clash between America and Islam [but] within the borders of Islam, the clash of two Islams, embodied in the names of Massoud and the Taliban.” (3)

Over the past decade, BHL has developed a set of axioms for the struggle against fanaticism. Again and again he has insisted that the true fissure is not the split between the Islamic world and the rest of the planet, but rather the collection of fissures that divides the civilized world into two irreconcilable families: the adherents of the “open society” and the rear guard of intolerance and identity-based exclusion, isolation, and withdrawal: the “democrats” versus the “theocrats”; the adepts of secularism and the separation of powers (chiefly, of religion from the state) versus the violent minority of theological-political zealots.

Nothing is more foreign to his thinking than the temptation, widespread in American conservativism, to caricature Islam as being prone to violence. Radical Islam, and the global threat that it poses to liberty, the rule of law, and, above all, to Muslim women, must be seen not as the fulfillment but rather as the betrayal of the peaceful message of the Muslim faith. Radical Islam relies on criminal methods and an apocalyptic Gigantomachy in which the Koran plays very little part. The Islamic world is riven and ravaged by a high-intensity philosophical war whose shifting front lines Lévy has followed doggedly from Bosnia, in 1993, to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2002 and Sudan in 2012.

There is indeed “a political battle between the peaceful legacy of the Koran and the legacy that propels the preachers of jihad; a merciless war pitting the partisans of aggiornamento, on the one hand, the adherents of a faith that, like other monotheisms before it, resolves to accommodate itself to the rights of the individual, of the other, against the proponents of what I believe I may be the first to have labeled fascislamism.” (4)

Fascislamism: The word is new, at least in French, since several neoconservative American authors, such as David Horowitz, have also used the expression. In summer 2006, while covering the war unleashed by Hezbollah against Israel, BHL used the term to designate the new global enemy, decrying “fascislamism with an Islamic face, a third wave of fascism, a movement that is to our generation what original fascism and communist totalitarianism were to our elders.” (5)

Two years later, in 2008, with Philippe Val, who was then director of Charlie-Hebdo, he organized support for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament of Somali origin, who had been sentenced to death by the fundamentalists and abandoned by the Dutch authorities. That effort led him to formulate the categorical imperative of our time: “I believe that we have a duty of solidarity with those who fight against Islamism and for the values of tolerance, freedom, and secularism. Do you remember the demonstrations, the chains of solidarity that formed on behalf of Sakharov and his fellow dissidents? Well Ayaan is like Sakharov. (6)

Like Sakharov? Really?

In fact, it was a good parallel, and a compelling one. The difference is that Sakharov was the victim of the Soviet Union, a police ideocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, by contrast, defied an Islamist theocracy.

Like the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who, in Le Village de l’Allemand, evokes the unspoken collaboration of some Arabs with European fascism, BHL knows how to go about tracing the ideological pedigree of radical Islam. He is well aware that, of all possible genealogies, the persecutors of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen, Naguib Mahfouz, and Iranian Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani (7)  chose the darkest. He knows that it was from European fascism, and particularly from National Socialism, that most morbid of the conservative revolutions of the twentieth century, that the liquidators of the enlightened legacy of Al-Farabi, Averroes, and Rumi drew their inspiration and models. The bloodthirsty age whose coming is proclaimed from the Sahel to Indonesia by these impassive horsemen of the apocalypse must be understood as a delayed effect of fascism outside the area where it was born, as the fascist legacy streaming over the Arab world like a comet’s tail,(8) or, if one prefers, as the deferred exportation of the terrifyingly antihumanist, homicidal thinking of Thomas Mann’s Jesuit character, Naphta, in The Magic Mountain.

A delayed effect of fascism? The tail of the comet of extreme-right revolutionaries? By 1933, BHL reminds us, Naphtas had begun to act in the Arab world: Hassan al-Banna, who founded the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, theorized, in the purest subservience to Nazi terminology, “the industry of death.” To serve the Reich, the Brotherhood pushed servility to the extent of “inventing Arab-Muslim origins for Hitler—a house in Tanta, in the Nile Delta, a house that was supposedly his mother’s birthplace.” (9) As the Nazi death factories quickened their pace in Europe, antisemitism was in full bloom in the Middle East, home to 700,000 Jews. As for Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937, who some still like to paint as an Arab patriot, superstitious but debonnair, BHL reminds us that he was no stranger to infamy.

Nevertheless, eight decades later, “the fact is that, on this matter of Islamism, and, more particularly, on the German-Islamic pact during World War II about which so little is said today—even though it had, and has, no less impact than the Nazi-Soviet pact—a whole body of knowledge existed, and has mysteriously been lost.” (10)  To inventory that pilfered, ransacked knowledge, to give a voice to the silence of that past, to bring back to life an entire lost section of “antifascist memory”—those are the goals that Lévy has set for himself since La pureté dangereuse (1994) (11), and, even more explicitly, since his novel-investigation of 2003, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville) (12)

Inside the “matrix” of fascislamism

Sometimes it happens that artists have a foreboding, as if in a flash, of oncoming disaster.

Claude—yes, Paul Claudel, the very conservative author of The Satin Slipper, the corseted diplomat of the period between the two wars—was he such an artist? Could this paragon of bourgeois conformism have been capable, one fleeting day, of the degree of higher consciousness that Spinoza, in the fifth book of his Ethics, calls “the third kind of knowledge”? Was Claudel, at least on that day, a visionary? Could he see the barbarous developments lurking just around the corner?

Whatever the case, he made a piercing prediction in his Journal for May 21, 1935, cited by BHL in Left in Dark Times: “A sort of Islamism is forming at the center of Europe.”

Today, of course, as we have too often seen, a wholly objectionable polemical or apologetic use is made of the long-distance affinity between forms of totalitarianism. This is what we get from Fox News and from American editorialists overeager to demonize Islam. And, in France, there are still too many people who like to play with the false idea that Islam is prey to an irrepressible impulse toward violence and war, and that jihad is thus the one true face of Islam.

None of that is acceptable; indeed it is urgent that we respond to these supposed “breakers of taboos.” But what we cannot do is stop thinking, stop exploring and investigating the recent past, or stop lighting up the blind alleys of the history of the first decades of the twentieth century, which, even then, was globalized.

Consistent with the work of essayist Paul Berman, Lévy’s own exploration of the concept of “fascislamism” opens up an archaeological space, in Michel Foucault’s sense of the term, space for an archaeology of fundamentalism within Islam. Far from being a subjective hypothesis, the linking of radical Islam to Europe’s anti-liberal revolutions of the 1920s and 1930s has been corroborated in recent years by several historians, including historians of ideas. One of the most recent is Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Princeton University Press, 2010), a French translation of which was published in 2012 by Calmann-Lévy and the Shoah Memorial under the title Hitler, la propagande et le monde arabe. Herf is a German historian at the University of Maryland.

Following Lévy’s lead, Herf dispels the darkness and the veil of denial that shroud an essential aspect of the resurgent totalitarian impulse: the dangerous liaisons between the Third Reich and several Arab leaders of the time. The author is innocent of any mistrust of the Arab world or the Muslim faith. He is not an adherent of the idea of the “clash of civilizations.” Inspired by anti-totalitarianism, in the manner of BHL’s friends Michael Walzer and Paul Berman, Herf sees radical Islam not as a consequence of the Koran and the civilization it spawned but rather a resurrection of the totalitarian nightmare that gripped Europe between the two world wars. His inquiry mines vast amounts of data, including sound recordings transcribed by the American intelligence services in Cairo. His piecing together of the puzzle of the Nazis’ political contacts on the southern rim of the Mediterranean is methodical and dispassionate. And it confirms one of BHL’s seminal intuitions: the intense cross-fertilization between the anti-western reaction that was building in the Arab world at the time and the political expression of that reaction in the form of fascism in Europe.

On November 28, 1941, notes Herf, Hitler received with great ceremony and even affection, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who was then in exile in Berlin and who became the most effective transmitter of the Nazi message in the eastern Mediterranean. Through him, even before the start of the second world war, Nazi leaders pursued their insane ideological ambitions, building a communications machine specifically designed to spread the message of hate and death throughout North Africa and the Middle East, a machine that ran full bore into 1945. Herf exposes the sophisticated strategies the SS used to export their obsessions and to attract to the Nazi cause Arab wielders of power and influence. Examples include the dropping of millions of pamphlets by the Afrika Korps over Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, as well as the Reich’s shortwave radio broadcasts that hammered home the message to “kill the Jews before they kill you.” In January 1944, according to Herf, Heinrich Himmler himself addressed the Bosnian members of an SS division founded by el-Husseini: “What could possibly separate we Germans from you Muslims? We have common objectives. For two hundred years, Germany has not had the least bit of friction with Islam.”

In that tirade, Himmler sought to cement the allegiance of the Arab world to the pagan, anti-semitic Reich. He sought to silence those in the Arab world who were trying to resist the dark tide of Nazi occultism. He omitted mention of devout Muslims’ rescues of Jews, actions that honor Islam. (13) He scorned the Muslim faithful who had elected to oppose his homicidal regime by enlisting under the colors of Free France. But ideas have consequences. Herf’s work, elaborating on the historical insights of Berman and the conceptualization of BHL, underscore the instrumental quality of ideas. It shows that the ideological “superstructure” so dear to Louis Althusser and his axiomatics of “theoretical praxis” was not, is not, detached from reality or from “infrastructure”—indeed it molds and shapes it. The Nazi regime was defeated in 1945, but the regime’s demise did not halt the viral growth of ideologies that, since the Nazi capitulation, have spread beyond Europe in unexpected ways. Did the end of the war fracture the conspiratorial granite of the Hitlerian Weltanschauung, which the Third Reich had tried, through tireless propaganda, to convey beyond its zone of immediate harm? Did the Liberation neutralize the cloud of poisonous ideas that the regime had for years pumped into the air around the world? Are we really sure that this diabolical matrix has ceased spreading fanaticism? That question is at the heart of a Voltairean line of inquiry that BHL has followed concerning what he calls “contemporary vileness.” (14) In 1946, with Hitler gone from the world stage, Jeffrey Herf notes that Hassan El-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, encouraged the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with these words: “Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin el-Husseini will continue the struggle.”

Herf is exploring an almost virgin territory, a sort of no-man’s-land of historical knowledge. In the wake of just the few earlier studies—Berman’s excellent Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2004), and, in 2010, the essay The Flight of the Intellectuals: The Controversy Over Islamism and the Press (Melville, 2011; Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma and Avishaï Margalit (Penguin, 2005); and Croissant fertile et croix gammée: Le IIIe Reich, les Arabes et la Palestine by Martin Cüppers and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (Verdier, 2010)—Herf asserts not only that radical Islamism is not an avatar of Islam, but that it has nothing in common with Islam, being instead the most recent toxic pearl ejected from the diseased oyster of fascism.

A concept, but for what?

Whence the urgency, faced with gauntlet thrown at the feet of the democracies by the “new barbarians,” as BHL put it in Who Killed Daniel Pearl, to remain skeptical of those tenured members of the “world university,” recently evoked by Jean-Claude Milner, who engage in anti-Zionist demonology and tell us to “move on—nothing to see here” (15); to avoid those mediocre thinkers who, according to Berman, “are on the run, too quick to laugh nervously at outspoken Muslim progressives and reluctant to tell the truth about the reality of Islamism; and to keep at bay those useful idiots who indulge, in Alain Finkielkraut’s apt phrase, “the new demons of Islamo-progressivism.”

And above all, to support, wherever they can be found, those whom Lévy calls “the sons of Massoud.” To aid them, to “Tikkunize” for them. To give “support and arms” to that “majority of the Muslim world that aspires quietly, like the women of Algeria and the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to enjoy freedom of judgment and belief, democracy, the right to blaspheme, equality of the sexes, and, in short, all the values extolled by Voltaire.” (16)

Because history has not ended. As BHL says, paraphrasing Toynbee, “History is still on the move.”

The jihadi death squads, Pearl’s assassins, have not won. But we need to stand firm, with quiet determination, alongside Massoud’s progeny, alongside all of the children of the Islaim of enlightenment and peace, and to resist those whom Spinoza, faced with other forms of fanaticism, called the ultimi Barbarum.

Lévy is not naïve. His hope is not for an anodyne “happy ending.” He knows that a good working concept such as “fascislamism” does not do away with the problems that it designates. He also knows that the battle of fanaticism against the democracies is coming around again on the wheel of history and that we are not likely to see it withdraw of its own accord. “The supply of possible barbarisms,” he wrote in the foreword to War, Evil, and the End of History (Melville, 2004), “which we had believed to be depleted, now has an unexpected variant.” But at least the concept of fascislamism allows us to see clearly and to approach the field of battle with our eyes open. By resituating radical Islam in the long European night of totalitarian forms, this new philosopheme has the advantage of emphasizing the extreme modernity of this most recent of the “secular religions.” Radical Islam owes its power to attract adherents to that very modernity, that terrible, implacable newness. It represents not a stubborn artifact of another age but rather an exalted future. It is, in Heideggerian terms, highly suited to the age of calculating thought and technical neutrality. Omar Sheikh, the Anglo-Pakistani killer of Daniel Pearl, as portrayed by BHL with disquieting insight, began as a sociologically integrated young man, universally esteemed by those he met. The child of a quiet family with no links to jihadism, he excelled in his classes at the London School of Economics. But at some point, according to Lévy, his critical faculties, the virtues of self-scrutiny cultivated in the best schools in England, yielded suddenly and tragically to a fascination with purity, with the absolute.

How did this pure product of the West, educated and technified, become a radical militant of anti-western terrorism, hijacked and mentally reprogrammed by the brainwashing of the madrasas? That is the dizzying enigma that kept the author of the novel-investigation in suspense.

He does not claim to have solved the riddle, at least not completely. Nor does he think that he can illuminate every dark corner of Sheikh’s homicidal trajectory.

Faced with the decision of Daniel Pearl’s assassin to commit a fascislamist act, BHL does not dispel each and every contradiction and dilemma. He does not presume to explain the inexplicable. His thought remains in the realm of epokhè—somewhere between doubt and certitude.

But, at the same time, BHL acknowledges the urgency of the eternal Leninist question: What is to be done?

In the incertitude and indecision of the present moment, as Arab revolutions dangle between “the southern slope of freedom,” in the words of Mahmoud Hussein, and the reformation of servitude, BHL reaffirms Voltaire’s rejection of consolations, theodicies, and the “providential monadology” imagined by Leibniz. In his view, the blind negativity of jihadism demands a “volontarism” without foundation or ontological certitude, or, as he put it in his preface to Voltaire’s Le Philosophe ignorant, a “skepticism without despair.” At the same time, he appropriates another piece of Voltaire’s advice, a commandment that may be the fundamental principle of “Lévyism,” the injunction not to lurk, idle, in the shadows.

Alexis Lacroix
Translation by Steven Kennedy
________________________________________________

(1) The Oath of Tobruk, DVD.
(2) Rapport au président de la République et au Premier ministre sur la participation de la France à la reconstruction de l’Afghanistan, Grasset / La Documentation française.
(3) American Vertigo, Random House, 2007, p. 266.
(4) Bloc-notes, Le Point, October 23, 2010.
(5) Bloc-notes, Le Point, December 23, 2010. [[vraiment décembre? ou octobre comme avant?]]
(6) Interview with nouvelobs.com, February 8, 2008.
(7) See posts on VOLONTE DE PURETE / VOLONTE DE GUERIR. [[je ne sais pas encore comment on va traduire ces deux rubriques]]
(8)  Bernard-Henri Lévy, Pièces d’identité, Grasset, p. 1,268
(9) Ce grand Cadavre à la renverse, Grasset, 2007, p. 338. Published in English as Left in Dark Times, Random House, 2009, p. 169.
(10) Left in Dark Times, op. cit., p. 171.
(11) See posts on VOLONTE de PURETE and VOLONTE de GUERIR.
(12) First published in French as Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, Grasset, 2003.
(13) L’Etoile jaune et le croissant, Mohammed Aïssaoui, Gallimard, 2012.
(14) Voltaire, Le Philosophe ignorant, preface by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Biblio-essais, 2009, p. 16.
(15) Jean-Claude Milner speaking on “Répliques,” France Culture, October 27, 2012.
(16) Voltaire, le philosophe ignorant, op. cit., p. 15.

An importance based on a good deal of thought: Since radical Islam burst onto the world scene at the end of the 1980s, Lévy has forged theoretical models to assess the danger posed by the phenomenon. To the leading proponent of the “clash of civilizations,” Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, Lévy consistently objected that Islamic fundamentalism was not a single block nor a coherent entity shut off from and incompatible with other entities. Just back from Afghanistan in April 2002, BHL already understood the fracture in the world of Islam: “Enlightened Islam against fundamentalist Islam: That is … the major issue of our new century. The Afghan people and Hamid Karzai will not prevail in that battle unless we help them. (2)

American Vertigo, Lévy’s chronicle of a trip he took through the United States in 2004 in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, first appeared in English in January 2006. In it, Lévy refined his thoughts on the subject of radical Islam: “The only clash of cultures or world visions that has meaning today is not the clash between America and Islam [but] within the borders of Islam, the clash of two Islams, embodied in the names of Massoud and the Taliban.” (3)

Over the past decade, BHL has developed a set of axioms for the struggle against fanaticism. Again and again he has insisted that the true fissure is not the split between the Islamic world and the rest of the planet, but rather the collection of fissures that divides the civilized world into two irreconcilable families: the adherents of the “open society” and the rear guard of intolerance and identity-based exclusion, isolation, and withdrawal: the “democrats” versus the “theocrats”; the adepts of secularism and the separation of powers (chiefly, of religion from the state) versus the violent minority of theological-political zealots.

Nothing is more foreign to his thinking than the temptation, widespread in American conservativism, to caricature Islam as being prone to violence. Radical Islam, and the global threat that it poses to liberty, the rule of law, and, above all, to Muslim women, must be seen not as the fulfillment but rather as the betrayal of the peaceful message of the Muslim faith. Radical Islam relies on criminal methods and an apocalyptic Gigantomachy in which the Koran plays very little part. The Islamic world is riven and ravaged by a high-intensity philosophical war whose shifting front lines Lévy has followed doggedly from Bosnia, in 1993, to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2002 and Sudan in 2012.

There is indeed “a political battle between the peaceful legacy of the Koran and the legacy that propels the preachers of jihad; a merciless war pitting the partisans of aggiornamento, on the one hand, the adherents of a faith that, like other monotheisms before it, resolves to accommodate itself to the rights of the individual, of the other, against the proponents of what I believe I may be the first to have labeled fascislamism.” (4)

Fascislamism: The word is new, at least in French, since several neoconservative American authors, such as David Horowitz, have also used the expression. In summer 2006, while covering the war unleashed by Hezbollah against Israel, BHL used the term to designate the new global enemy, decrying “fascislamism with an Islamic face, a third wave of fascism, a movement that is to our generation what original fascism and communist totalitarianism were to our elders.” (5)

Two years later, in 2008, with Philippe Val, who was then director of Charlie-Hebdo, he organized support for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament of Somali origin, who had been sentenced to death by the fundamentalists and abandoned by the Dutch authorities. That effort led him to formulate the categorical imperative of our time: “I believe that we have a duty of solidarity with those who fight against Islamism and for the values of tolerance, freedom, and secularism. Do you remember the demonstrations, the chains of solidarity that formed on behalf of Sakharov and his fellow dissidents? Well Ayaan is like Sakharov. (6)

Like Sakharov? Really?

In fact, it was a good parallel, and a compelling one. The difference is that Sakharov was the victim of the Soviet Union, a police ideocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, by contrast, defied an Islamist theocracy.

Like the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who, in Le Village de l’Allemand, evokes the unspoken collaboration of some Arabs with European fascism, BHL knows how to go about tracing the ideological pedigree of radical Islam. He is well aware that, of all possible genealogies, the persecutors of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen, Naguib Mahfouz, and Iranian Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani (7)  chose the darkest. He knows that it was from European fascism, and particularly from National Socialism, that most morbid of the conservative revolutions of the twentieth century, that the liquidators of the enlightened legacy of Al-Farabi, Averroes, and Rumi drew their inspiration and models. The bloodthirsty age whose coming is proclaimed from the Sahel to Indonesia by these impassive horsemen of the apocalypse must be understood as a delayed effect of fascism outside the area where it was born, as the fascist legacy streaming over the Arab world like a comet’s tail,(8) or, if one prefers, as the deferred exportation of the terrifyingly antihumanist, homicidal thinking of Thomas Mann’s Jesuit character, Naphta, in The Magic Mountain.

A delayed effect of fascism? The tail of the comet of extreme-right revolutionaries? By 1933, BHL reminds us, Naphtas had begun to act in the Arab world: Hassan al-Banna, who founded the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, theorized, in the purest subservience to Nazi terminology, “the industry of death.” To serve the Reich, the Brotherhood pushed servility to the extent of “inventing Arab-Muslim origins for Hitler—a house in Tanta, in the Nile Delta, a house that was supposedly his mother’s birthplace.” (9) As the Nazi death factories quickened their pace in Europe, antisemitism was in full bloom in the Middle East, home to 700,000 Jews. As for Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937, who some still like to paint as an Arab patriot, superstitious but debonnair, BHL reminds us that he was no stranger to infamy.

Nevertheless, eight decades later, “the fact is that, on this matter of Islamism, and, more particularly, on the German-Islamic pact during World War II about which so little is said today—even though it had, and has, no less impact than the Nazi-Soviet pact—a whole body of knowledge existed, and has mysteriously been lost.” (10)  To inventory that pilfered, ransacked knowledge, to give a voice to the silence of that past, to bring back to life an entire lost section of “antifascist memory”—those are the goals that Lévy has set for himself since La pureté dangereuse (1994) (11), and, even more explicitly, since his novel-investigation of 2003, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville) (12)

Inside the “matrix” of fascislamism

Sometimes it happens that artists have a foreboding, as if in a flash, of oncoming disaster.

Claude—yes, Paul Claudel, the very conservative author of The Satin Slipper, the corseted diplomat of the period between the two wars—was he such an artist? Could this paragon of bourgeois conformism have been capable, one fleeting day, of the degree of higher consciousness that Spinoza, in the fifth book of his Ethics, calls “the third kind of knowledge”? Was Claudel, at least on that day, a visionary? Could he see the barbarous developments lurking just around the corner?

Whatever the case, he made a piercing prediction in his Journal for May 21, 1935, cited by BHL in Left in Dark Times: “A sort of Islamism is forming at the center of Europe.”

Today, of course, as we have too often seen, a wholly objectionable polemical or apologetic use is made of the long-distance affinity between forms of totalitarianism. This is what we get from Fox News and from American editorialists overeager to demonize Islam. And, in France, there are still too many people who like to play with the false idea that Islam is prey to an irrepressible impulse toward violence and war, and that jihad is thus the one true face of Islam.

None of that is acceptable; indeed it is urgent that we respond to these supposed “breakers of taboos.” But what we cannot do is stop thinking, stop exploring and investigating the recent past, or stop lighting up the blind alleys of the history of the first decades of the twentieth century, which, even then, was globalized.

Consistent with the work of essayist Paul Berman, Lévy’s own exploration of the concept of “fascislamism” opens up an archaeological space, in Michel Foucault’s sense of the term, space for an archaeology of fundamentalism within Islam. Far from being a subjective hypothesis, the linking of radical Islam to Europe’s anti-liberal revolutions of the 1920s and 1930s has been corroborated in recent years by several historians, including historians of ideas. One of the most recent is Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Princeton University Press, 2010), a French translation of which was published in 2012 by Calmann-Lévy and the Shoah Memorial under the title Hitler, la propagande et le monde arabe. Herf is a German historian at the University of Maryland.

Following Lévy’s lead, Herf dispels the darkness and the veil of denial that shroud an essential aspect of the resurgent totalitarian impulse: the dangerous liaisons between the Third Reich and several Arab leaders of the time. The author is innocent of any mistrust of the Arab world or the Muslim faith. He is not an adherent of the idea of the “clash of civilizations.” Inspired by anti-totalitarianism, in the manner of BHL’s friends Michael Walzer and Paul Berman, Herf sees radical Islam not as a consequence of the Koran and the civilization it spawned but rather a resurrection of the totalitarian nightmare that gripped Europe between the two world wars. His inquiry mines vast amounts of data, including sound recordings transcribed by the American intelligence services in Cairo. His piecing together of the puzzle of the Nazis’ political contacts on the southern rim of the Mediterranean is methodical and dispassionate. And it confirms one of BHL’s seminal intuitions: the intense cross-fertilization between the anti-western reaction that was building in the Arab world at the time and the political expression of that reaction in the form of fascism in Europe.

On November 28, 1941, notes Herf, Hitler received with great ceremony and even affection, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who was then in exile in Berlin and who became the most effective transmitter of the Nazi message in the eastern Mediterranean. Through him, even before the start of the second world war, Nazi leaders pursued their insane ideological ambitions, building a communications machine specifically designed to spread the message of hate and death throughout North Africa and the Middle East, a machine that ran full bore into 1945. Herf exposes the sophisticated strategies the SS used to export their obsessions and to attract to the Nazi cause Arab wielders of power and influence. Examples include the dropping of millions of pamphlets by the Afrika Korps over Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, as well as the Reich’s shortwave radio broadcasts that hammered home the message to “kill the Jews before they kill you.” In January 1944, according to Herf, Heinrich Himmler himself addressed the Bosnian members of an SS division founded by el-Husseini: “What could possibly separate we Germans from you Muslims? We have common objectives. For two hundred years, Germany has not had the least bit of friction with Islam.”

In that tirade, Himmler sought to cement the allegiance of the Arab world to the pagan, anti-semitic Reich. He sought to silence those in the Arab world who were trying to resist the dark tide of Nazi occultism. He omitted mention of devout Muslims’ rescues of Jews, actions that honor Islam. (13) He scorned the Muslim faithful who had elected to oppose his homicidal regime by enlisting under the colors of Free France. But ideas have consequences. Herf’s work, elaborating on the historical insights of Berman and the conceptualization of BHL, underscore the instrumental quality of ideas. It shows that the ideological “superstructure” so dear to Louis Althusser and his axiomatics of “theoretical praxis” was not, is not, detached from reality or from “infrastructure”—indeed it molds and shapes it. The Nazi regime was defeated in 1945, but the regime’s demise did not halt the viral growth of ideologies that, since the Nazi capitulation, have spread beyond Europe in unexpected ways. Did the end of the war fracture the conspiratorial granite of the Hitlerian Weltanschauung, which the Third Reich had tried, through tireless propaganda, to convey beyond its zone of immediate harm? Did the Liberation neutralize the cloud of poisonous ideas that the regime had for years pumped into the air around the world? Are we really sure that this diabolical matrix has ceased spreading fanaticism? That question is at the heart of a Voltairean line of inquiry that BHL has followed concerning what he calls “contemporary vileness.” (14) In 1946, with Hitler gone from the world stage, Jeffrey Herf notes that Hassan El-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, encouraged the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with these words: “Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin el-Husseini will continue the struggle.”

Herf is exploring an almost virgin territory, a sort of no-man’s-land of historical knowledge. In the wake of just the few earlier studies—Berman’s excellent Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2004), and, in 2010, the essay The Flight of the Intellectuals: The Controversy Over Islamism and the Press (Melville, 2011; Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma and Avishaï Margalit (Penguin, 2005); and Croissant fertile et croix gammée: Le IIIe Reich, les Arabes et la Palestine by Martin Cüppers and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (Verdier, 2010)—Herf asserts not only that radical Islamism is not an avatar of Islam, but that it has nothing in common with Islam, being instead the most recent toxic pearl ejected from the diseased oyster of fascism.

A concept, but for what?

Whence the urgency, faced with gauntlet thrown at the feet of the democracies by the “new barbarians,” as BHL put it in Who Killed Daniel Pearl, to remain skeptical of those tenured members of the “world university,” recently evoked by Jean-Claude Milner, who engage in anti-Zionist demonology and tell us to “move on—nothing to see here” (15); to avoid those mediocre thinkers who, according to Berman, “are on the run, too quick to laugh nervously at outspoken Muslim progressives and reluctant to tell the truth about the reality of Islamism; and to keep at bay those useful idiots who indulge, in Alain Finkielkraut’s apt phrase, “the new demons of Islamo-progressivism.”

And above all, to support, wherever they can be found, those whom Lévy calls “the sons of Massoud.” To aid them, to “Tikkunize” for them. To give “support and arms” to that “majority of the Muslim world that aspires quietly, like the women of Algeria and the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to enjoy freedom of judgment and belief, democracy, the right to blaspheme, equality of the sexes, and, in short, all the values extolled by Voltaire.” (16)

Because history has not ended. As BHL says, paraphrasing Toynbee, “History is still on the move.”

The jihadi death squads, Pearl’s assassins, have not won. But we need to stand firm, with quiet determination, alongside Massoud’s progeny, alongside all of the children of the Islaim of enlightenment and peace, and to resist those whom Spinoza, faced with other forms of fanaticism, called the ultimi Barbarum.

Lévy is not naïve. His hope is not for an anodyne “happy ending.” He knows that a good working concept such as “fascislamism” does not do away with the problems that it designates. He also knows that the battle of fanaticism against the democracies is coming around again on the wheel of history and that we are not likely to see it withdraw of its own accord. “The supply of possible barbarisms,” he wrote in the foreword to War, Evil, and the End of History (Melville, 2004), “which we had believed to be depleted, now has an unexpected variant.” But at least the concept of fascislamism allows us to see clearly and to approach the field of battle with our eyes open. By resituating radical Islam in the long European night of totalitarian forms, this new philosopheme has the advantage of emphasizing the extreme modernity of this most recent of the “secular religions.” Radical Islam owes its power to attract adherents to that very modernity, that terrible, implacable newness. It represents not a stubborn artifact of another age but rather an exalted future. It is, in Heideggerian terms, highly suited to the age of calculating thought and technical neutrality. Omar Sheikh, the Anglo-Pakistani killer of Daniel Pearl, as portrayed by BHL with disquieting insight, began as a sociologically integrated young man, universally esteemed by those he met. The child of a quiet family with no links to jihadism, he excelled in his classes at the London School of Economics. But at some point, according to Lévy, his critical faculties, the virtues of self-scrutiny cultivated in the best schools in England, yielded suddenly and tragically to a fascination with purity, with the absolute.

How did this pure product of the West, educated and technified, become a radical militant of anti-western terrorism, hijacked and mentally reprogrammed by the brainwashing of the madrasas? That is the dizzying enigma that kept the author of the novel-investigation in suspense.

He does not claim to have solved the riddle, at least not completely. Nor does he think that he can illuminate every dark corner of Sheikh’s homicidal trajectory.

Faced with the decision of Daniel Pearl’s assassin to commit a fascislamist act, BHL does not dispel each and every contradiction and dilemma. He does not presume to explain the inexplicable. His thought remains in the realm of epokhè—somewhere between doubt and certitude.

But, at the same time, BHL acknowledges the urgency of the eternal Leninist question: What is to be done?

In the incertitude and indecision of the present moment, as Arab revolutions dangle between “the southern slope of freedom,” in the words of Mahmoud Hussein, and the reformation of servitude, BHL reaffirms Voltaire’s rejection of consolations, theodicies, and the “providential monadology” imagined by Leibniz. In his view, the blind negativity of jihadism demands a “volontarism” without foundation or ontological certitude, or, as he put it in his preface to Voltaire’s Le Philosophe ignorant, a “skepticism without despair.” At the same time, he appropriates another piece of Voltaire’s advice, a commandment that may be the fundamental principle of “Lévyism,” the injunction not to lurk, idle, in the shadows.

Translation by Steven Kennedy
________________________________________________

(1) The Oath of Tobruk, DVD.
(2) Rapport au président de la République et au Premier ministre sur la participation de la France à la reconstruction de l’Afghanistan, Grasset / La Documentation française.
(3) American Vertigo, Random House, 2007, p. 266.
(4) Bloc-notes, Le Point, October 23, 2010.
(5) Bloc-notes, Le Point, December 23, 2010.
(6) Interview with nouvelobs.com, February 8, 2008.
(7) See posts on VOLONTE DE PURETE / VOLONTE DE GUERIR.
(8)  Bernard-Henri Lévy, Pièces d’identité, Grasset, p. 1,268
(9) Ce grand Cadavre à la renverse, Grasset, 2007, p. 338. Published in English as Left in Dark Times, Random House, 2009, p. 169.
(10) Left in Dark Times, op. cit., p. 171.
(11) See posts on VOLONTE de PURETE and VOLONTE de GUERIR.
(12) First published in French as Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, Grasset, 2003.
(13) L’Etoile jaune et le croissant, Mohammed Aïssaoui, Gallimard, 2012.
(14) Voltaire, Le Philosophe ignorant, preface by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Biblio-essais, 2009, p. 16.
(15) Jean-Claude Milner speaking on “Répliques,” France Culture, October 27, 2012.
(16) Voltaire, le philosophe ignorant, op. cit., p. 15.

Les Indes rouges was published almost 40 years ago. In it, the climate of the time, colored by the pro-Beijing stance of France’s maoists, is palpable. But since his time with the Bangladeshi maoists known as Naxalites, the future New Philosopher has felt passionately about the question of the meaning of war and has not concealed his skepticism about the halo of romanticism that often surrounds war. Two intuitions that would later prove important came together in this youthful text—first, that of the bankruptcy of historicism (cf. notice « ANTIPROGRESSISME »), and, second, the inkling that he would soon be obliged to consider himself a warrior. (2)

This agonistic conception of intellectual life is inseparable from Lévy’s ethical perspective, in which he is neither a “committed spectator” in the manner of Raymond Aron, nor a “confidant of providence” like the communist intellectuals whom Aron grapples with in Peace and War—or, more precisely, whom he judges on appeal from the putative judgments of history, as only a philosopher assigned to a post far to the rear of the front line can do.

So it was not by chance that, following 1977’s Barbarism with a Human Face, the ethical perspective of Bernard-Henri Lévy was bound up closely with a radical critique of historicism (or the belief in social progress based on historical evidence), which soon became one of the main thrusts of his philosophy.

What effect, one may ask, did this antihistoricist turn have on his thoughts, and recently his actions, concerning war? What is the link between his dismissal of the philosophies of history and the attention he has focused on episodes of conflict? As Lévy suggested as early as Le lys et la cendre (1995), and even more insistently in his reporting on “forgotten wars,” from the Nuba mountains of South Sudan to Colombia, published in Le Monde in 2001, war will have a different meaning depending on whether or not it is conceived as part of a grand scheme of history.

As long as one remains within the echo chamber of historical necessity, in which even the most horrifying events can be deemed necessary for human progress or evolution—as long as one remains remains under the influence of Weltgeschichte, in other words—the smallest war assumes meaning, falling within a secular theodicy that keeps it from appearing as pure and simple carnage, no matter how cruel it is or how many ordinary lives it obliterates. This is the meaning of the remark that opens his 2001 collection of reports on the forgotten wars, Reflections sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire (reflections on war, evil, and the end of history): “For a long time, wars had meaning.” (3) Wars just and unjust, wars of aggression and resistance, wars of religion, wars of national liberation, and finally “revolutionary wars whose protagonists stormed the heavens in order to build a new world”—when the Hegelian dialectic held sway, no conflict failed to register on the “world-historical” radar screen. And if, as sometimes happened, the protagonists lost their will to fight, well then Ideology stepped in to give their struggle the foundation that it seemed to lack, closing the ranks of the confused and dispirited combattants. From this point of view, Lévy wrote, the lowliest “guerrilla from the Mollucan Islands, South India, or Peru … was, whether he knew it or not, a participant in a global struggle.”

That providential mechanism is now obsolete: “The decline of Marxism and the rest of the great myths that together gave meaning to something meaningless, namely people’s endless pain and suffering, broke that hoary catechism into a thousand pieces,” Lévy wrote. (4) The breakdown of the philosophical machine that had justified “the world’s agonies” meant that naked violence could no longer be fed into the gargantuan maw of Progress. It also meant, BHL added, that loss, ruin, and entropy returned to world history. Along with tragedy.

That metaphysical revolution legitimized fear in the face of the irreparable: “In the past, in our lands, the absurd and the tragic were understood as singular, personal feelings,” wrote Lévy (5). “We believed in the absurd, but within the confines of private life. We could accept madness, even the idea of living to die, but, again, in the context of individual destinies. But when confronted with the transports of the species as a whole, majestic or convulsive, the position changed and different theme music, a different fanfare, was cued up. The same people who swore by La Nausée in the personal sphere had trouble imagining pure savagery and naked violence, insisting that the collective, no matter how dark, was necessarily the site of the workings of reason and its obligatory results.” In other words, the withdrawal of the secular theodices and the cloak of abstractions that they threw over conflict, exposed to the naked light the grinding “storm of steel” of Ernst Jünger (6): “It is as if a mighty tide went out, leaving behind men and women who continue to fight—sometimes with even greater ferocity than before—with the difference that their clash is now devoid of the sense, the promises, and the epiphanies that it once held.” (7)

As Lévy intuited as early as La Pureté dangereuse (1994), the decline of the philosophies of history offered humanity a chance at freedom, but it also floated the threat of a partitioning or fragmentation of the world, putting it on a collision course with meaninglessness and nihilism. “I foresee a proliferation of wars, all of which will be civil wars,” the philosopher wrote at the time, alarmed by the cruelty of Algeria’s jihadists toward the country’s civilian population. (8)

And what is the consequence of that fracturing of the shared world? “More and more numerous are conflicts that have severed the cord that tied them to the universal, conflicts the outcome of which, one feels (rightly or wrongly) will in no way change the fate of the planet.” (9)

Of course, some wars are immunized against the absurd, and Bernard-Henri Lévy earns his living exploring them: The wars of an armed people against tyranny, for example, such as the rebellion against Gaddafi of the chebabs of Cyrenaica and their brothers in Jebel Nafusa, whom Lévy, after a trip to Egypt in February 2011, would aid in a manner without equivalent in modern intellectual history. Or the insurrection of the Bosnians against Serbia’s Panzer-like communists in 1992–93. (10) Or the uprising of the young Republic of Georgia against the Russian tanks and missiles of Putin and Medvedev in 2008. All of these BHL observed and reported on. (11) The struggle of the Afghans, supported by a coalition of allies, against the radical Islamic Taliban falls into the same category (12) (cf. notice « FASCISLAMISME »).

In the planetary thaw of meaning, only wars of deliverance, wars that break chains and reignite the flame of the people’s spring, retain a positive side. But the desert that forms around nihilism supports few such wars, while greatly increases the number of those that Lévy calls “untouchable.”

“Untouchable wars?” In Lévy’s thinking, the expression reinforces the concept of “forgotten wars,” for which it also serves as a synonym. The usage was the subject of a trenchant analysis by Jean-Claude Milner in his Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (2003), in which the linguist praised Lévy’s double conceptual innovation: “The oblivion that he evokes is structural rather than circumstantial, akin to untouchability in the caste system.” (13) Further, Milner explains: “Those looking for meaning can adapt to war as understood by Clauswitz—that is, as a continuation of politics by other means. But the context of such wars is peace. Clauswitzian wars are a preparation for peace using specific means…. By contrast, there are wars that it is impossible to view as peace in the making. Those wars we forget—we do not touch them…. This new form of noli me tangere exists alongside the hermeneutic conception of peace, of which it is the bloody opposite.” (14)

What is the intellectual to do in the face of a river of desolation that has no common word to describe it (Lévy calls it “disbeing”) and no bed to contain it? Is it possible to philosophize on the shunned theaters of extreme terror? Yes, is his answer, but only if one abandons, once inside the zone of horror, all of the hallowed trappings of the scholar—the confidant of providence, the adviser of princes, the expert—to become what he called, in Le Siècle de Sartre, “Hegel’s Jew,” who declined the almighty’s offer of salvation. (15)

Hegel’s Jew? Is that Lévy’s self-portrait, painted against the background of the “forgotten wars”? No doubt, but that’s not all it is. The distinctive feature of these untouchable conflicts is that they constitute “wars without a name,” (16) or wars whose names “tell us nothing about anything.” The first task of the reporter, then, is “name the places,” “to create not commonplaces but places in common,” and “to make people hear ‘Huambo’ and immediately see the abomination, unobscured by any memorial.” (17) Now, this act of restorative naming (cf. notice « REPARATION ») can be performed only by a mind that has been relieved of its Hegelian baggage. Knowing that horror is irreducible, knowing that the extreme vulnerability of the human world is a challenge to his sense of responsibility, Hegel’s Jew does not count on any consolation from dialectics and accepts the humble but enormous role of the witness to ruin.

In 2010, Bernard-Henri Lévy offered an image closely related to this axiom of responsibility by contrasting the “doe of Venus” (or of dawn or of the Talmud) to “Minerva’s owl,” a central figure in the Hegelian dialectic. (18) Whereas the latter, once night falls over the battlefield, takes flight to deliver the verdict of History, the former, rebellious and messianic, rubs history the wrong way and, in a manner closer to Walter Benjamin than to the philosophers of reason in history, steps between the belligerents, distinguishing the agressor from the aggressed, in the hope of reducing the scale of the devastation in both camps. A mere image? No, for between the lines, this double metaphor expresses the role that BHL assigns to the intellectual in situations of extreme hostility, particularly those that are the most vicious. The role of witness, of course, in the line of fire if need be, but even more important, that of a conscience capable of evoking the heroism of the victims, capable of restoring their names and faces, of pulling from the fire their fragile singularity.

This is reluctant war, war waged without relish. (19) Though still war, it is purged of the status symbols of salvational violence. Lévy’s allegory of the doe of the Talmud, offered a little over a year before the start of the war against Gaddafi’s tyranny, announces the philosophical task that BHL set for himself in taking up the cause of a free Libya, the task of a new Byron protected against romantic exaltation by keeping his eye on the goal, which is to save lives. That is far indeed from the reductionist image of the warlord conveyed by the derisive monniker “Lawrence of Libya.” But it is very close to the anti-Franco Malraux of Serra de Teruel.

Translation by Steven Kennedy

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1. Originally published by Maspero in 1973 as Bangla-Desh: Nationalisme dans la révolution. Reprinted in 1985 by Livre de Poche/Biblios.

2. On this point, see La pureté dangereuse, Grasset, 1994.

3. Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, Biblio-essais, p. 21. Originally published by Grasset, 2001.

4. Ibid.

5. “Les damnés de la guerre,” Le Monde, May 30, 2001, www.lemonde.fr/conflitsbhl.

6. Jünger’s Stahlgewittern (1920) was published in 2004 by Penguin as Storm of Steel.

7. “Les damnés de la guerre,” op. cit.

8. La pureté dangereuse, Grasset, 1994, p. 183.

9. Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, op. cit., p. 21–22.

10. cf. Le lys et la cendre: Journal d’un ecrivain au temps de la guerre de Bosnie, Grasset, 1996.

11. Pièces d’identité, Grasset, 2010.

12. Report of the President and the Prime Minister on France’s Contribution to the Reconstruction of Afghanistan, Grasset, avril 2002.

13. Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Verdier, 2003, p. 90.

14. Ibid., pp. 90-91

15. Le Siècle de Sartre, Grasset, 2000. In an anecdote from Hegel, the Almighty appears before a Jew and offers him a choice between eternal salvation and the morning paper. The Jew chooses the morning paper.

16. Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, op. cit., p. 129.

17. Ibid., p. 125.

18. De la guerre en philosophie, Grasset, 2010, p. 105 .

19. La guerre sans l’aimer (Grasset, 2012) is the title of BHL’s book about the Libyan revolution of 2011. The title can be translated in various ways, from the literal (“war without loving it”) to the transformed (“reluctant war”).

Actually, one such pause occurred before L’Idéologie française and one after. In taut and emphatic prose that Philippe Sollers described as “the best critical French” (2), the philosopher did far more than clean the Augean stables of the country’s collective memory. His persuasive and alarmed eloquence expressed an original vision, unsettling for his “strange country” (3), humming with murmured secrets, and encircled by a “dark cloak of night” (4).

With this work Lévy became the first intellectual in postwar France to provide a transcendental treatment of Pétainism. He approached the so-called National Revolution as the apotheosis of cowardice and humiliation, treating Pétainism less as a phase of history than as a system of thought and seeing it not only through the lens of political and institutional history but also in its place in the intellectual landscape in which ideas appear, circulate, and are reconfigured. In light of Lévy’s seminal approach, “the age of Mr. Pétain,” as historian Alain-Gérard Slama was to call it, could no longer be confined to the few years of the National Revolution.

The aim of BHL’s book, at once simple and prodigiously ambitious, was to dig into the depths of our literary tradition and the unconcious stratum of our language to uncover the predispositions toward a form of Pétainism that was all the more fearsome for being a cultural phenomenon before it was a political one—a phenomenon that was structured like a language.

The boldness of this critical rereading of Pétainism lay in reminding us that the chain of meaning within which it is expressed was formed well in advance of the “sinister and chilling nightmare of Vichy” (5). Of that Pétainism Lévy retraced the diabolically patient germination [(cf. notice « VOLONTE de PURETE »),] in 330 pages that revisit the “textual icepack” in which his collection of obsessions are frozen. The graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, steeped in the teaching of Louis Althusser, converted for the occasion to Gramsciism, certain that the overturning of “historic blocs” would pave the way for the victories—or, it depends—the disasters of tomorrow. That is exactly what happened, well before the National Revolution, to French ideology. Authors of very different stripes—Vacher de Lapouge, Georges Sorel, Proudhon, Edouard Drumont, and even Paul Valéry—who embraced ethical and political positions that were often at odds, paved the path to ruin. From the last decades of the nineteenth century, even before the moment of truth that was the Dreyfus Affair, and consistent with the position of Julien Benda in Trahison des clercs, these shepherds of sense began to betray their role, having begun to flatter the demons of belonging, to favor the organic and corporatist society over the open society, and, in so doing, sketching the outlines of a “discreet and sometimes brutally explosive infamy” (6).

L’Idéologie française traces their corruption, documenting the patient genesis of an “infinitely cunning racism” (7) very different from the racism then rampant in Germany. The native variety allowed a defeated France to welcome as a “divine surprise” the hazy dream of “organic consolidation” by the National Revolution of a “devitalized” society. In other words, Lévy decoded, with a tip of the hat to Lacan, the unconscious matrix in which Pétainism grew.

January 1, 1981. At the time, the young philosopher had published some journalistic accounts and a book about the war in Bangladesh (Les Indes rouges) (cf. notice « GUERRES »); an essay about the modernity of the Bible and the spirit of monotheism, Le Testament de Dieu ; and a critique of the reactionary essence of communism, La Barbarie à visage humain (published in English as Barbarism with a Human Face) (cf. notice « ANTIPROGRESSISME »). As he explained later, he believed firmly in the “combined virtues of philosophy, style, and political struggle” (8). A disciple of Althusser, then—but with the party discipline of Malraux. Four years after the battle of the “new philosophers,” he no longer doubted the need tto “open a new front in the just fight against the French lie” (9). So what was important to him? To defeat the strategies of denial that were then vigorously asserting themselves against the background of denial-based “revival,” the provocations of La Vieille Taupe, and the doctrinal rearmament of extreme-right neopaganism.

Alarmed by what he called the “discordant refrain” of a France “miraculously immunized against the barbarous deliriums that had bloodied the century” (10), the philosopher set out to oppose the stifling of investigations into the ideological origins of “fascism in French colors.” In his scope, of course, were the right—the French right couched in their pious amnesia; but also the left, or, at any rate, that antiliberal wing of the left indifferent to human rights, the wing deplored in their own time by Simone Veil and Walter Benjamin, which had not been able to stand up to fascism because fascism appeared to such leftists to be just a variant of capitalism, indistinct from the rest.

At the time, Lévy could not guess that his “descent into the depths” would encounter an obstacle: crossfire from revisionists hell-bent on defending the credo of the innocence of France. In a few days, their concerted denial pushed L’Idéologie française into the eye of a storm that, three decades later, has not wholly subsided.

A stormy publication and a record scandal. The central thesis, everyone understood, was the unspoken, underground, and, nearly indiscernible existence of a distinct, specific, and very basic form of fascism, of a telluric and regressive temptation that slowly took shape in the inner sanctum of our our culture, a fascism fed by the murky sediments of a long “conservative revolution” unleashed by apparently unlikely authors such as Péguy and Mounier. A fascism whose delirium Lévy was attempting, with exposition as his only weapon, to lash to the discipline of logical discourse.

Was his project an intolerable one? It was, to be sure, an iconoclastic thesis for a France in the twilight of Giscardism, because it instantly dried up the bubbling spring of exoneration for the Vichy episode, both on the right and on the left, which had been a steady flow of mental gymnastics bent on reclassifying the four years of the National Revolution as an accidental and regrettable exception that, in the final analysis, could in no way comprise the essence of France. The strength and the crime of L’Idéologie française was that it insisted on the banality of a humiliating period, that of Pétainism.

In 1995, in the preface to the Bosnian translation of L’Idéologie française, the philospher confessed that “the real problem, the challenge posed by the book, was to identify a French strain of fascism in which I intended to include, quite literally, protestations of patriotism, shrill nationalism (even if sincere at bottom), hate for Germany, and attachment to occupied territory, that were unaccompanied by any will to resist Hitler’s pressure or his model, the subtext being to substitute for it a distinctively French version, which was, until the occupation of the south in November 1942, the whole idea behind the notorious Uriage school, for example” (11).

With aims like that, Bernard-Henri Lévy was almost certain to inspire a very wide assortment of enemies, from left-leaning Christians to communists, supported, at the other end of the ideological spectrum, by the still-influential if low-lying disciples of Charles Maurras. Four months before the presidential election of 1981, he was the man through whom the long-delayed scandal arrived. You be the judge. Except for Raymond Aron, who was terrified by the idea of a rift in the national compact, most of the critics of L’Idéologie française were not bent on intellectual refutation but rather on refusal, more or less dilatory, of critical discussion (12).  Sociologist Daniel Lindenberg, a member of the editorial committee of Esprit and the author of a recently published (and excellent) essay on the weakness of the Marxist tradition in France, faulted Lévy for trying to “exonerate Germany” (14). Former communist Alain Besançon spoke for the conservative camp, declaring scornfully that “his work does not rise to the level required for criticism, strictly speaking, to operate” (15). Center-left intellectual Jacques Julliard took it upon himself to write a harsh critique of the book, threatening to resign from the Nouvel Observateur if the fortnightly’s editorial committee refused to publish it.

Could so much turmoil and panic have had anything to do with the fact that the buccaneering interpretations of the philosopher, offered at the risk of being taken out of context and, as Aron lamented, “without the the slightest understanding of the crises of conscience faced by countless good French citizens,” had stood the procedures of academic historiography on their head? Or that the work, in blurring the hallowed distinction between Pétainists and collaborators, had disturbed long-settled memories? Aron’s critique (entitled simply “Provocation”) seems to support the second hypothesis: “He delivers the truth so that the French nation may understand and overcome its past,” Aron wrote, “throwing salt in badly stitched wounds. Through his hysteria, he will feed the hysteria of a segment of the Jewish community already prone to delusional words and acts.”

The jury is still out, but nothing illustrates more dramatically the furor that Lévy caused than the reception given to the pages he devoted to Uriage, the famous school for civil servants founded by a young, demobilized offier, Pierre Dunoyer de Ségonzac, that set up shop at the dawn of the National Revolution in a château in the Isère department for the purpose of training senior civil servants for the new regime. Lévy wrote that, even though Uriage defected to the Resistance at the end of 1942, well in advance of most of those who ultimately joined the Resistance, and though some of the school’s alumni demonstrated remarkable bravery in the Vercors underground, the school was, from 1940 through the end of 1942, the laboratory of “the most fundamental values” of Pétainism.

That was too much, and the intellectuals of the “Uriage lobby,” in Revel’s droll phrase, launched a counter-offensive. Their motto was to save, at all costs, Emmanuel Mounier. To dispel the suspicions surrounding the father of personalism, the philosophical pillar of Uriage, Lévy’s detractors were biting and condescending: “The difference between our slanderers and ourselves,” thundered Jean-Marie Domenach in Le Matin on January 15, 1981, “is that for them, fascism is no more than an idea (…) They have never had the opportunity to meet a real fascist, not a mild writer like A. de Benoist, but a real one, with a submachine gun and skull and crossbones. When the country is run by people like that, ‘literary ethics’ is not of much use. You have to fight. With guns, if you have them. And that is what we did at Uriage when we joined the armed Resistance in early 1943. That was our fascism—to allow Lévy to be free today to publish his ravings.”

One witness to this backpeddling was not surprised. Philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, writing also in Le Matin, explained that Bernard-Henri Lévy’s work was “hard to accept” for the two complementary and complicit poles of the nebulous ideology that, in the France of 1981, was the target of the book. “A party with fluid but extensive borders” (16) was joining ranks because, under the “suffocating shroud” (17) of a country that believed that it had survived the century unscathed, the unveiling of a contrary truth was unwelcome. And yet Lévy held fast: At the moment of the “abandonment” evoked by Emmanuel Lévinas (18), what contributed the most to turning the country of the rights of man into its opposite were not the crackpot career paths of the pilgrims of Sigmaringen or the embarrassing offers of service to Nazi Germany of small collaborationist groups—no, it was the accommodation to the unacceptable of men and women whom the French ideology had inoculated against evil.

Another lid was lifted by the book, a lid under which “festered the most poisoned watters of the national past and present” (19): the taboo concerning the meaning of Pétainism. In his critical review (20), Desanti evoked the diffuse ideological “sediment” that was the matrix of Lévy’s study: “A muddy sort of sediment full of malignant nutrients that one might refer to by the symbolic name of ‘fascism.” That sediment is what lay at the bottom of the hearts of so many Frenchmen who, on the surface, appeared so different: Pétain and Thorez, Péguy and Drumont, Proudhon and Jules Guesde, Sorel and Bergson, Marchais and the new right.” Lévy added, “The faces and stances are different, but they all look the same in the gut.” It was a terse phrase, inevitably unjust, given the immense differences in the personal ethical paths of Drumont and Bergson, for example, with one popularizing the macabre proposition of an antisemitism that was “neither of the right nor the left,” and the other, a learned and scholarly Jew caught up at the end of his life in the Vichy nightmare, petitioning the complaisant authorities to exempt him from the obligation of wearing the yellow star. But Desanti was not far off. For the disparate figures that Lévy named contributed to various degrees, and sometimes without knowing it, to the viral spread of the French ideology. The thought of all of them could be traced back to “that matrix, both philosophical and literary, most of whose elements survive to this day.” He continued, “One has only to recreate [that matrix] to bring into being, if not its worst emanations, then at least the site of the infection: the cult of roots and the disdain for the cosmopolitan spirit, a hate for ideas and intellectuals, primal anti-Americanism, a rejection of ‘artificial nations,’ and a nostalgia for ‘lost purity’ and ‘authentic community’” (21).

In France more than elsewhere, ideas have consequences. Anti-individualism, antiliberalism, and, if one dare to say it, anti-idealism (that is, extreme naturalism) (22), make up the doctrinal tripod of Pétainism. Contrary to appearances, the French ideology does not put the longing for the past in the driver’s seat. As Drumont suspected, the revolutionary boldness of the doctrinal precipitate that came together in the last decades of the nineteenth century consisted instead of fetishizing the “spontaneous substantialism of societies” (23). It was a hasty synthesis in which good blood and good sense supported and consoled each other against Reason, against the spirit of inquiry, and against “verbose” abstractions. By subordinating human obligations to and through the exaltation of the gods of iron and wood, a chthonic and telluric “secular religion” was formed that consigned individuals to dark shores on which their individuality is lost.

Lévy did not always refrain from a grandiloquence of which maturity has now cured him. The fact remains that the breathless pages that he devotes to the eruption of the irrational—to that first defeat of thinking consecrated, even before the Dreyfus Affair, by the pregnant celebration of the Land and of the Dead—offer an approximate idea of the disaster that, much later, a philosopher such as Levinas, impressed by the premonition and the memory of the Nazi horror, would describe as “enslavement by the root.” Pétainism, as L’Idéologie française proposed to define and combat it, was not one reaction among others, the umpteenth avatar of “the rhetoric of reaction” (in Albert O. Hirschman’s phrase); it was, instead, an implicit ideology of organicism that proposed to repair the social bond by substituting for the conscious acts of citizens a set of ascribed allegiances, submerging the community of citizens in a “community of communities” (24), and, finally, elevating custom to primacy over law.

This brand of “fascism with French colors” should not be a matter of indifference today. Its essential element—the quest for an unpossessable “origin” that tormented the younger Péguy—was set up well before 1940 by minds that the author describes as “sorcerer’s apprentices.” And because, on that plain of sense already scorched by the fire of local superstition, the machine designed to dismantle the great symbols of universality was running amok.

A trance, the author suggests, from which we may not have completely awoken. If L’Idéologie française retains its relevance 30 years after its publication it is because the pieces of the puzzle are still there, ready to stoke the “French form of the delusion” in a new way, with the elements rearranged. In his Mémoires, Revel is right to describe the idea behind Lévy’s Idéologie française as a “tactical weapon,” a “ram designed to break down the wall of silence” (25). What the author of Without Marx or Jesus could not have anticipated was the extent to which that tactical weapon, beyond its immediate salutary effect in ending France’s amnesia in 1981, also provided a decoding device, a Benjaminian “fire alarm” that can be useful today in other emergencies and against other threats.

Well used, L’Idéologie française, turns out to be a pertinent work of philophy. Not, as is often stupidly said, to bury perfectly legitimate national pride under a mountain of unending repentance, but to be able to identify smoldering sites of obscurantism.

In Ce grand cadavre à la renverse (2007, later published in English under the title Left in Dark Times), the philosopher invokes the notion of French ideology as a sort of sensor or collector that takes in a “swarm of ideas whose leading exponents are not always consciously aware of what they are espousing” and “the ideological dens where the concepts of liberalism, the idea of Europe, the politics of human rights, or the dream of an all-embracing concept of humanity are being methodically crushed.” (26).

So L’Idéologie française? A sentinel that, relieved of its polemic baggage, is capable of alerting us, for example, to the reprogramming of the software of a segment of the left using a lexicon and doctrine borrowed from the opposing political side? A synoptic dashboard capable of detecting the abduction of progressivism by what the philosopher dubs the “droiche” (or, in English, the “rift,” a fusion of right and left) (27). Of this recent abduction, this hijacking, one of the most flagrant symptoms would be, according to Lévy, the retreat of a significant segment of progressivism into anti-Americanism, an impulse amounting to a “pull toward the worst” or another form of “socialism for dummies” (28). Yet another sign would be the enthusiastic reception given by so many adherents of anticapitalist neo-radicalism to the judicial decisions of Carl Schmitt, the judge during the Third Reich.

As Bernard-Henri Lévy reminds us in L’Idéologie française, it was not always so in the progressive camp. For a long time, the left, or at least its avant-garde, was viscerally liberal—it embraced the rule of law—and generally pro-American. It will be remembered, for example, that Bukharin and many French socialists, from Guesde to Jaurès, exhorted the communists to “add Americanism to Marxism,” taking their cue from Marx himself, who admired the United States as a “magnificent” country where political emancipation had been achieved. But this suggests yet another hypothesis: What if the French ideology, which continued to exert its influence after the Liberation, also exerted a strong pull toward intellectual regression?

Let’s ponder that for a moment. Neither Barrès, in claiming to see the origin of American excess in the fact that the country was founded solely on the basis of a contractual promise, nor Maurras, in his portrait of a “neuropathic” federation, could have imagined that one day, thanks to a grotesque inversion made possible by the wiring of the French ideology, this trumped-up bogeyman, “the inner America,” would find its most fanatical promoters on the left!

Paradoxically, that day came with the Liberation. After the communists of the 1930s, exuding their aversion to a fantasized “American left” in the mold of Jules Moch, Léon Blum’s minister of public works, there was Maurice Thorez, who, in the middle of the Cold War, felt compelled to vituperate bombastically against a Hollywood that was supposedly making France’s “young girls the docile slaves of American multimillionaires.” Even after the fall of communism, one cannot be sure that matters are settled on this point. What are we to make of that contingent of neo-radical intellectuals, now almost chic, who are endeavoring to convert the Empire, as they like to call it, into the site of planetary catastrophe? What are we to think of the way these individuals, who claim to be rebuilding the “communist hypothesis” on prestige and reason, are reviving, perhaps without realizing it, the virulence of French (and, frankly, German) strains of fascism on the subject of the “Amerikan” hydra? What can one say about the rapidity with which these anticapitalists, lined up edge to edge with the other extreme, have appropriated all of the mental categories and hateful semantics that racked the prefascists Drieu, Morand, and Maulnier, whose doctrinal history has been catalogued by another philosopher, André Glucksmann (29)?

One can find many faults with L’Idéologie française, in some ways a callow and ardent treatise. But it cannot be denied that the book put its finger on an aberration that has haunted the kingdom of France since Drumont came of age—since, to cite the exact date, the founder of La Libre Parole, in radically reevaluating ideological signs and affiliations, developed the most fearsome political scrambler, one that in 2012 made it possible for racists on the extreme right to intimidate social-democratic and social-liberal universalists by overtaking them on their left.

In this sense, Lévy’s book of modest origins was prophetic. Clavel, consistently, praised it, whereas Aron, timidly, limited himself to suggesting that Lévy review some of Aron’s own cherished works, not admitting the degree to which he secretely shared some of the book’s gloomy insights. Consider these words from the Aron article already cited:  “Fascism has never ‘taken’ in France, like a mayonnaise that will not stay emulsified. The communal, anti-individualist ideologies of the 1930s never moved beyond the salons of the Parisian intelligentsia. They came to power as a result of a national catastrophe,” the professor reassures as. Fortified by this historic truth, Aron, in the manner of someone suppressing an unpleasant thought, spares himself from having to get to the essential idea of his junior compatriot’s book, which was the viral nature of the fascist idea, which was and is capable of thriving in a variety of ways other than the assumption of state power (30). Supported by the comforting thought that fascism had never come to power in France, the sociologist not only published numerous articles in L’Express in 1982 and early 1983 (the last months of his life) that betrayed a persistent underestimation of the Le Pen phenomenon—but he also testified against Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell and his concept of the “revolutionary right” in the defamation suit brought against Sternhell by Bertrand de Jouvenel.

It is not insignificant that it was a center-right liberal who objected to the audacity of the center-left liberal that Lévy had already become. In France, as Emile Benvéniste said, ideas  have a memory even more tenacious than that of water. When it comes to antitotalitarian vigilance, the critical acuity and lucidity of liberal progressives have been and remain truer and stronger than those of the liberal conservatives.

Translation by Steven Kennedy

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(1) Le voleur dans la maison vide, Plon, p. 594.
(2) “Français, vous pouvez savoir,” by Philippe Sollers, Le Matin, January 15, 1981.
(3) L’Idéologie française, Grasset, collection “Figures,” 1981, p. 7
(4) Ibid., p. 9
(5) Ibid., p. 25
(6) Ibid, p. 18
(7) Ibid, p. [X]
(8) Pièces d’identité, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Grasset, 2010, p. 1,237
(9) Ibid.
(10) L’Idéologie française, op. cit., p. 9
(11) Pièces d’identité, op. cit., p. 1,237
(12) “La provocation,” Raymond Aron, L’Express, February 7, 1981.
(13) From the personal recollection of Jean-François Revel, Aron’s friend and colleague at L’Express, we know that Aron, even though he blasted the recklessness of L’Idéologie française, did not disapprove of its essential message or approach. He even found, in the charge against “the France of abdication,” particularly in the pages devoted to Mounier and Esprit, a reflection of his deep, if secret, conviction. On this point, see Le voleur dans la maison vide, Jean-François Revel, Plon, 1998, p. 595.
(14) Le Matin, January 15, 1981.
(15) Alain Besançon, Le Point, January 26, 1981.
(16) Pièces d’identité, op. cit.
(17) L’Idéologie française, op. cit., p. [X].
(18) “Sans nom,” in Noms propres, Emmanuel Lévinas, Biblios-essais.
(19) Revel, op. cit.
(20) Le Matin, January 15, 1981.
(21) Pièces d’identité, op. cit., p. [X].
(22) L’Idéologie française, op. cit. , p. [X].
(23) L’Idéologie française, op. cit., p.203. Voir, aussi, La Pureté dangereuse, Grasset, 1994.
(24) L’Idéologie française, op. cit., p. 233.
(25) Revel, op. cit., p. 597.
(26) Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, Grasset, 2007, p. 404.
(27) Bernard-Henri Lévy in Le Matin, quoted in Questions de principe I, Gonthier-Denoël, p. [X].
(28) See American Vertigo, Grasset, 2006, and Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, op. cit., p. 243 and passim.
(29) In Dostoïevski à Manhattan, Robert Laffont, 2002.
(30) See the important edited volume that provides a retrospective on the critiques of the ideas of Zeev Sternhell and Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le mythe de l’allergie française au fascisme, edited by Michel Dobry, Albin Michel, 2003.

1976. Late in the spring of that year, the young Lévy was instrumental in the formation of a group whose purpose was to resist this bronze idol of a doctrine, which his friend André Glucksmann had termed “Marxism–nihilism.” With that group the “New Philosophy” was born. (4) The nimble, vibrant language of the group’s leading voice tore into the idea of the progress of history, mauling those who manipulated or magnified it. Not so much the idea of humanity advancing slowly up the immutable ladder of time, but the more pernicious central axiom of progressivism, according to which progress, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty said in a passage recently cited by Bernard-Henri Lévy, “drives history the way the steering wheel drives the engine” (5)—in short, the certainty that a new form of politics is all that is required to overcome evil. A stubborn and literally ineradicable conviction in response to which Bernard-Henri Lévy has perceived, since this fight began, a single outcome and a single urgent task: “to push optimism to the wall.” (6) The author of Barbarism with a Human Face, braving the hegemonic and mutually interlocking dogmas of the time, bet on the fact that, far from bringing on conservative retractions, as the clouds bring on the storm, theoretical antiprogressivism would be a long-term necessity—a regulating idea, a doctrinal test necessary for any renaissance of the Left. Thirty years later, he has not wavered from that position: His stand is the same. As he wrote in Left in Dark Times (2007), the only chance for the party of the Left to “give itself a future” is to hunt down the progressivist chimera whenever it raises its head, to push optimism even further to the wall.

The political blindness of progressivism

The young graduate of France’s top school stubbornly asserted his pessimistic views against the spontaneous providentialism that prevailed in political discourse. Nothing, he declared, no matter how ardently desired, “escapes the master’s eye.” As long as fringes of human reality remain outside the grip of power, Power itself is what is real. “Which means, concretely,” the author added, “that anchoring the idea of happiness in the order of things and of the world is, alas, a fantasy, a delusion about the nature of reality, and anchoring that fantasy in the order of history and progress is another fantasy, a deception and a self-deception, about time.” The “dialectic” had throbbed in the heaven of ideas since Hegel and Marx—Lévy brought it down to earth, pulling back the curtain on the shadow world. The result was a sudden end to revolutionary intoxication. No longer did alienation have a great beyond. It follows, the author wrote, that “the idea of a ‘realist’ or ‘progressivist’ policy is always reactionary,” and “from the real and from progress, from their oracles and nascent authorities, nothing good can come, nothing that can ever escape the ovens of power.” The author of Barbarism with a Human Face exposed, in a few sentences, the impotence of revolutionary providentialism, its inability to break the vicious cycle of domination: “It is not an accident that the socialist revolutions were never able to stamp out the old bourgeois principle of the separation of powers, of order through violence, and of the military organization of production: Thinking of themselves as rejects of capitalism, tracing their birth back to something older, despite breaks here and there, they could not help but inherit in large part the shaping forces of the old world. Socialism, too, is part of a progression, and that is how, I repeat, it foundered in barbarism.” (7).

The antiprogressivism of Bernard-Henri Lévy was already, at this stage, a decoder of atrocities that explained how promises of emancipation came to be converted into engines of servitude. The revolution of 1917 and those that imitated it could not be considered, as Trotsky believed, “betrayed revolutions,” because their ultimate philosophical inspiration, the belief system from which they sprang, was the same as that of bourgeois capitalism. Progress, in other words, was the mental cop inside the brain of the revolutionaries, the tie that bound them to the world they were supposedly bringing down. And, he wrote, “socialism may be the sinister reality embodied by the gulag, but that is not because it distorts, caricatures, or betrays, but rather because it is faithful, excessively faithful, to the very idea of progress as the West produced it.” (8)

So what is to be done? And what can we hope for? Beyond simple political oppression, the philosophical concept of “barbarism with a human face,” as Bernard-Henri Lévy used it then, raised a set of philosophical questions with which he has wrestled in his later work. From that point on, the various strata of his work have had one overarching concern: not simply to expose the “reactionary idea of progress” as a wheel on which to break men or as a toy in the hands of “the remodelers of the human species” to be used to force the consent of the multitudes, but also, and more important, to unmask progressivism as a “meaning machine” that was inherently implacable and homicidal.

In Le Testament de Dieu (9), inspired by his early readings of the masterpiece of Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (10), Lévy showed that the mechanism of progressivism had the property of casting in steel and rendering unassailable (unbreakable, unmodifiable) the incandescent core of the Hegelian dialectic.

In Testament, the theoretical antiprogressivism of Bernard-Henri Lévy was grounded explicitly in a rejection of the philosophies of history, including those that Rosenzweig, as a foot soldier in Kaiser Wilhelm’s army, stationed in a trench near the Dardanelles, pilloried in handwritten manuscripts that he mailed back to his family in small bundles.

Intersecting “ideas of return”: From the beginning, there were echoes of Rosenzweig’s new philosophy in the “New Philosophy” that Lévy led. Bernard-Henri Lévy set Rosenzweig’s “anxieties” against historicism, that doctrinal laboratory of all forms of progressivism, the chemical formula for which he provided in an essay: “Whatever the sufferings, whatever the horrors, through which History has passed, by virtue of a mechanism that I, Hegel, call the dialectic, by virtue of a supreme law that I, Hegel, call History, or the unfolding of spirit through time, these horrors, these sufferings, are borne tragically, are shot through with a fundamental good of which those who suffer are not aware but to which they will give birth without knowing it,” he declared in November 1979 to the twentieth colloquium of Jewish intellectuals. (11) He then added, “That allows the French Communist Party to say that on balance socialism’s record is positive; it allows the right to say that unemployment is in the order of things, the price of growth, even if it is always the same people who pay that price. All of these errors fit neatly together to form a harmonious tableau.” At this point, Lévy was already convinced that to lead a serious attack on the secular religions, to undermine their power to intimidate and seduce, to defeat the scenario of a defeat of democracy that had been gnawing at his friend Jean-François Revel, he had to be bolder and more radical than Raymond Aron and return to the author of that great “harmony”: Hegel.

At the dawn of the 1980s, Lévy knew not only that providentialism was linked with appalling politics but also that it culminated in a preposterous ontology, an absurd metaphysics. That was the first step in what he would later, adopting Rosenzweig’s terminology, describe as his “return to the world.”

The metaphysical illusion of progressivism

From the start, the antiprogressivism of Bernard-Henri Lévy has owed as much to Baudelaire as to Rosenzweig. The year is 1988, and Lévy has a new project, a new investigation—his first real novelistic investigation: Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire (12). A chance digression into literary criticism? Hardly. For the portrait that Lévy paints of the author of Les Fleurs du Mal, using the device of a narrator who comes for a visit (a narrator bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the young Stéphane Mallarmé) and, while also drilling into “the secret reaches of a man of genius during the painful process of creation,” as the literary magazine of Le Figaro put it, is first and foremost an exploration of Baudelaire’s seditious metaphysics, a refined war of position based on spleen and melancholy, those Baudelairian conditions of the soul that, like Walter Benjamin in Zentralpark, Lévy uses as levers in his arguments.

By this measure, progressivism, to paraphrase Georges Politzer in his critique of Bergson, proves to be a “philosophical parade.” In addition to its role as the auxiliary to the “modern Machiavellianisms” so dear to Raymond Aron (13), nor and in providing philosophical cover for and encouraging the “compassionate zeal” of activists of all stripes, progressivism is wrong, Lévy insists, because it dreams reality more than it transforms it—its adherents fantasize a “new world, cleansed of its faults and sorrows.” (14) And that, he adds, means closing off the dark realm of the human condition, which he would later describe as the “unbreakable core of darkness that no amount of politics can ever extract.” (15) For the time being, in his work on Baudelaire, he described as “incurable” that damned part of the human condition.

Regardless, the stage was now set for the metaphysical war games. Melancholy over the incurable versus the machinations of a definitive cure, a final solution to the human problem. (cf. notices « VOLONTE de PURETE » et « VOLONTE de GUERIR) An articulate, lucid axiom of responsibility (based on Baudelaire and Rosenzweig, and later on Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin) versus the grandiose visions of human regeneration that bewitched Robespierre, Marat, and, even more so, Victor Hugo, along with many other engineers of the soul who were to follow. (16)

Accompanying the poet in his final hours in the Brussels hotel in which he had sought refuge, the author of Les Derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire was not content to skewer the “folly of purity” of the “friends of the people.” Nor did he refrain, in adopting the view of his host on “rough and irreconcilable humanity,” from seeing “in the belief in progress, in the improvement of the human race, in the birth of a new world freed from its burden of faults and sorrows, the most effective way of feeding the guillotines.” No. When Lévy allows Baudelaire to testify to his ardent faith in original sin (“man is a vile beast” (17)), he added to his arsenal a decisive weapon, a counter to the underestimation of evil that forms the doctrinal substratum of totalitarianism. From then on, Lévy placed great emphasis on contesting “this new idea, proper to the age of totalitarianism and the cornerstone on which it built its three churches (Dialectics, History, and the Absolute)—this idea that magically looks like nothing at all, and even, at first glance, looks like a good idea and an excellent piece of news, a cause for celebration, the idea that Evil does not exist—that there is no evil, only illness, which can be cured.” (18) At bottom, therefore, antiprogressivism is a refined form of antitotalitarianism. It was already, for Lévy, the main theme of that tragic or melancholic Left that he kept hoping would appear. Because, “here, too, the logic is implacable. Either we believe in Evil (we are, after all, Judeo-Christians) (…) or we don’t, in which case we are anti-Christian, anti-Jew, hostile to that offense against His Majesty Man that is the idea of original sin, and we suspect—what am I saying?—we proclaim that these stupid theologians haven’t understood a thing, that they’ve mistaken the part for the whole, made a crude blunder in mistaking Piraeus for a man and ordinary human illnesses for their terrible, enormous, radical Evil. So let’s move forward! First, let’s diagnose the illness. What germ or virus is causing it? Where in the body is it dwelling? How do we go about operating on it? Let’s get on with reeducation, prophylaxis, the hunt for harmful insects, and other symptoms of inhumanity! (19) (cf. « VOLONTE de GUERIR »).

The intensity of this cry of alarm did not escape Benny Lévy. In connection with the publication of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (2003), Benny Lévy was introducing a lecture by Bernard-Henri Lévy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dedicated to the journalist executed by Pakistani jihadists. In his remarks, the former proletarian leader summarized the approach of his friend Bernard-Henri Lévy as an effort to unveil, to pull out of its hole, to excavate that which hides “under the guise of progressivism.” Benny Lévy explained: “In rereading Barbarism with a Human Face, I came across a sentence that encapsulates a most acute intellectual journey: “Hitler did not die in Berlin; he won the war; he conquered his conquerors—all by means of the stone-dark night into which he plunged Europe.” (20) He added, “the secret foundation of my friendship with Bernard is that our Jewishness must not be masked. The modern Jew has to stop hiding his Jewishness—we have to stop being Marranos.” By praising, before an emotionally moved audience, “the source of the glimmering light of his book on Daniel Pearl” (cf. notice JUDAÏSME), Benny Lévy aptly captured the philosophical program of his friend. He could not have described more accurately the boldness, the perseverance, with which, since his days in Bangladesh in the early 1970s, Bernard-Henri Lévy has consistently stood out as the conscience of the Left, a concerned observer of its shortcomings, like the faithful adviser who reminds it to think and think again in order to remain true to its history. A self-definition that now alternates, particularly since Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, with Lévy’s more metaphysical self-concept as one of “Hegel’s Jews,” a reference to those dissidents from historicism, who, from Kierkegaard to Lévinas and now Lévy himself have striven to deactivate the Hegelian fog machine. (21) (cf. la section « SES MAÎTRES »)

The Left’s buzz killer and “Hegel’s Jew”: In both roles the philosopher stands at the opposite pole of the providentialist optimism whose theorems he promised, as a very young man, to thwart. In 2008, before the lens of Eric Dahan, who was filming Unreason in History for the “Empreintes” collection of France 5, Lévy made this surprising and important statement: “I was born in France at a time when the very idea that there might be a positive side to being a Jew seemed literally unthinkable.” (22) The opening sequence, from the inauguration of the Institute of Levinas Studies in Jerusalem, shows Bernard-Henri Lévy with Benny Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. Here Bernard-Henri Lévy appears more than ever to have returned. His return was not the same as that of Benny Lévy, the author of Le Meurtre du Pasteur. (23) Nor, most assuredly, was it the same as that of the “anti-contemporary” Finkielkraut of La Défaite de la pensée, whose animosity toward the Left has sharpened with the years. (24) But it has been a true and sincere return all the same, a return from the dead end of progressivism and the blind alleys of a purely political vision of the world. A slow and intimate turning that, as his colleagues realized as early as 2003, was for Bernard-Henri Lévy part and parcel of another urgent task—that of putting the Left back on the rails of its proud history, distancing it from the deceptive clarity of historical progressivism.

Traduit par Steven Kennedy

———————-

(1) Alain Badiou, Le siècle, cited in Bernard-Henri Lévy, “Le siècle de Benny  Lévy,” Le Point, 24 February 2005.
(2) In the words of Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction, Belknap, 1991.
(3) cf. Une rage d’enfant, André Glucksmann, Plon, 2005.
(4) Bernard-Henri Lévy, Nouvelles littéraires, May 1976.
(5) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, cited in De la guerre en philosophie, Grasset, 2010.
(6) La Barbarie à visage humain, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Grasset, coll. Figures, 1977, p. 54. Published in English as Barbarism with a Human Face, Harper & Row, 1979.
(7) Ibid., p. 149.
(8) Ibid., p. 149.
(9) Le Testament de Dieu, Grasset, coll. Figures, June 1979.
(10) Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 1921. Published in French as L’Etoile de la Rédemption, Seuil, 1982.
(11) Exposé by Bernard-Henri Lévy in Politique et religion, Données et débats, Idées-Gallimard, 1981, p. 84.
(12) Les Derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Livre de Poche, 1988.
(13) Les machiavélismes modernes, Raymond Aron, de Fallois, 1994.
(14) Les Derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 293
(15) Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, Grasset, 2007, p. 140. Published in English as Left in Dark Times, Random House, 2009.
(16) Les Derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 292–293.
(17) Ibid., p. 293.
(18) Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, op. cit., p. 140.
(19) Ibid., p. 140–141.
(20) La Barbarie à visage humain, op. cit., p. 9.
(21) See Le siècle de Sartre (Grasset, 2010; published in English as Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Polity, 2003), Réflexions sur la guerre, le Mal, et la fin de l’histoire (Grasset, 2001, reprinted by Biblio-essais, p. 265–267; published in English as War, Evil, and the End of History, Melville House, 2004), and Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, op. cit., p. 147.
(22) La déraison dans l’histoire (Unreason in History), a documentary film by Eric Dahan (2009).
(23) Le Meurtre du Pasteur, Benny Lévy, Verdier/Grasset, coll. Figures, 2002.
(24) La Défaite de la raison, Alain Finkielkraut, Gallimard, 1989.

If, as Lévy has insisted since 1977, the belief in progress is a criminal illusion (cf. notice « ANTIPROGRESSISME »), it follows that man’s vulnerability is unlimited, that the world is at risk of falling apart, that it is beset by forces of rupture, and that barbarism is never far from regaining the upper hand. It also follows, as Lévy often points out, echoing Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, that the continuity of the world is vulnerable to outbursts of the death impulse—to the devil’s tricks. In BHL’s thinking, civilization is a fragile dike holding back the inhuman.

In pages that trembled with worry, Lévy described, in 1994 (1), the intrinsic fragility of civilization. “It is possible to believe in the crisis only when one no longer believes in death, but death is right here, at least as present as in the cities of waning empires.” He added, “I believe the world is falling to pieces …. When the dialectic reigned, there was order in the world. And in the world’s womb, pregnant with a frail, uncertain existence, there was the coming order, growing, kicking, straining to be born. The end of the dialectic means that there is just one order … and vast disorder. The old order may crumble before a new one appears.”

That prophecy was echoed in Réflexions sur la guerre, le mal et la fin de l’histoire (Reflections on War, Evil, and the End of History), published in 2001. While tracking “forgotten wars” from Burundi to Sri Lanka (cf. notice « GUERRES »), Bernard-Henri Lévy explored the revelatory power of these conflicts that are seemingly devoid of purpose or meaning, these wars that, because they are both lunatic and atelic, doom the world to a future as a ruin: “And what if modernity were that particular state of the world in which ‘every construction’ were destined to ‘fall immediately into ruin’ …. and if ruin were the first as well as the last word of the world into which we are entering?” (2)

A question haunts his work. A question that became an explicit through line, especially in the period between his examination of the forgotten wars and the start of his effort, in March 2011, to liberate Libya: How do we deal with the mortality of the human world? And what can be done to check it, to jam the machine of universal entropy?

What, indeed, can be done?

“Stop revolutionizing the world,” was the answer he gave to the magazine L’Arche, in February 2012. “Repair it. Just repair it. But do so passionately, energetically, and determinedly. That is what I believe. It’s what I have nearly always believed, even during my far-Left period at the end of the 1960s.”

So, might the duty to repair be the underlying motive behind what some describe as the philosopher’s “activism”? Probably—provided the act of repairing is defined in such a way as to meet two preconditions:

First, the concept must be distinguished from “regeneration” (cf. notice « VOLONTE de GUERIR »). Lévy himself recently emphasized the importance of the distinction: Whereas dialectical thinking—notably the thinking behind social revolution—aims to remake the human condition through the use of coercion and violence, repair works toward a much less grandiose goal, namely that of “saving lives” (3): “It’s a lovely word, really,” he writes in Pièces d’identité. “It’s the one that Camus used in The Rebel (1951), in refusing to go along with Sartre’s ideas of revolution and regeneration, which were then in vogue. It is the word of all humanists who know the danger of the competing idea, that of reinventing what it means to be human, of a history more or less broken in two, a break that one does not bother to repair because one is beginning anew.” (4)

So, no reinventing man. No waiting for a regeneration which, in one fell swoop, will do away with the “human problem.” BHL derives the humanism of repair from an inherited genealogy, that of antitotalitarianism, that of a critical tradition which, from Camus to Milosz and Kundera, has always detected in the impulse to create a clean slate the signature of barbarism.

But he also situates his axiomatics of repair outside the equally radical madness of “recommencement,” of making a new start, which is symptomatic of the dream of purity that figures in conservative revolutions, a dream that the defeat of Nazism did not extinguish entirely but that has continued to appeal to some intellectuals since the Liberation. Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian adherents of the conservative revolution (which often takes on an ecological hue) declare that they are working to “save” the world, but they remain prisoners, as Derrida observed, to their morbid fascination with origins.

Second, the notion of repair must be understood in light of its meaning in the Jewish tradition. As Lévy explains in the same passage from Pièces d’identité quoted previously, the Hebrew word meaning to repair is also associated with “the rabbis of Central Europe who, in the nineteenth century, following the example of the Vilna Gaon and Rabbi Hayim Volozyn and, reacting against all the false messiahs who, like Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, had fired up and nearly consumed European Judaism, offer the vision in which our task is simply to prevent the world that God created from disintegrating into dust and nothingness.”

Viewed within this tradition, the concept of repair, descending in a direct line from the Kabbalah and the Zohar, and transmitted to modern Europe through the teaching of the mitnagdim (the Vilna Gaon and his disciples, beginning with Rabbi Hayim Volozyn), is derived from the Jewish idea of tikkun olam or “repairing the world,” a notion formulated in the late Middle Ages by kabbalist thinker Isaac Luria (5). In the line of thought stretching from Luria to Hayim Volozyn, tikkun is more than a concept—it is the buttress of a veritable cosmogony, one in which man assumes the lofty but tricky role of “co-creator.”

According to the Kabbalah, after imparting life to the world God, literally withdraws. This is Luria’s idea of tzimtzum, the contraction of God, who leaves his creations with the task of holding together the pieces of the universe he has entrusted to them.

Lévy insists that this vision of a universe at risk of breaking apart in the manner of a “fragile, chaotic edifice” (6), which only the act of repair can keep from returning to nothingness (“literally, uncreating itself” [7]), is the product of an unexpected wager. Not a wager on a surfeit of God, but rather on an “empty heaven,” the eclipse, the “rarity,” or even the complete absence of God: “We need an antiwager that we can win not by betting on the existence but on the nonexistence of God,” Lévy wrote in Left in Dark Times. (8)

The “eclipse of God,” as Martin Buber would say, the fading away of the metaphysical shadow worlds, the “concealment of transcendence”— these did not disturb Lévy, because they created an opening for the exercise of responsibility. “That was the very heart of the great biblical wisdom that anchors if not on God’s silence, then at least on the rarity of His word, the necessity for a laborious, tireless, and efficient morality.” That is the morality of modest action.

Repair and the act of repairing: these philosophemes, while seemingly abstract, are never far removed from the urgent matters of our age. They interest Lévy so much because they illuminate the most pressing issues, from the recurrent debate on humanitarianism (cf. notice « DROITS de l’HOMME ») to the reemergence of the question of the “just war” with the Franco-British intervention in Libya (cf. notice « GUERRES »), not to mention the effort to rewrite the software that guides the political Left.

Repair as an alternative to the progressive narrative

In the epilogue of Left in Dark Times, Bernard-Henri Lévy addresses the “melancholy Left,” sketching for its adherents the outlines of a single urgent task, the urgent task of repair:

“And if I had one piece of advice, just one, for all those people I hear saying they want to renovate this and rebuilt that, if I had one contribution to bring to those projects of re-foundation that seem to be the leading issue of the day, it would be just that: think about the lesson of William of Orange on the one hand (9) and that of the Gaon of Vilna, and his disciple Rabbi Hayim Volozyn, on the other.

“First lesson. The empty heaven. Or, if it’s not empty yet, if idols remain, then the good Nietzschean hammer, the beau geste of the celestial road-mender, smashing the remaining stars in the firmament of Politics.

“Second lesson. The mourning period. Which is to say pain, but without nostalgia. Or nostalgia, but without the hope of return. No more odyssey. Farewell to Ithaca. Regret, yes, probably—yet the regret of nothing, a complete focus on the future.” (8)

Siding with the underdog: Messianism according to Bernard-Henri Lévy

That melancholy Left should take to heart the seditious attitude of Walter Benjamin. Like Benjamin, it should endeavor to rub history the wrong way. And, Lévy advises, it should follow Benjamin in not regretting the disappearance of the philosophies of history, which amounted to machines for the manufacture of misery and devastation on a grand scale. But unlike Benjamin, who kept watch over a darkening Europe while writing Zentralpark, a Left emancipated from lyricism must also know how to extricate itself from the Medusa-like spectacle of catastrophe by yanking on the emergency brake when threats loom. The Blue Helmet Left, like the hind of the Talmud, the doe of dawn of Psalm 22, must come to the aid of the humbled, of the “vanquished” of history (11), of “all the faces of the forgotten of the world” (12).

Taking the “side of the vanquished,” of course, is something that BHL has set out to do over four decades of public life. For him, that choice has always reflected a simple but cardinal rule of the game:  that of performing without a net—that is, without the security of a philosophy of history.

Is freedom difficult? Most assuredly. The progressives, like their brother-enemies, the conservatives, will stick to their position: History will roll on, they believe, and one day it will end, as Diderot solemnly assured them, at which point it will recognize its own. The laws of gravity, not of space but of time, are infallible, the theory goes, and each side believes that it alone possesses the secret key.

Lévy embraces a contrary certainty. Since his first trip to Bangladesh and his mission to persuade André Malraux to create international brigades to assist the victims of Pakistani fascism (an experience that changed him), BHL seems to have sensed that because he felt he was needed by the marginalized and the expendable (the hommes en trop of Claude Lefort), he was going to be condemned to swim against the current of the majority. That intuition produced a philosophy of fierce anti-historicism. With regard to Hegelianism and Hegel’s conviction that “the truth is at the end, when Minerva’s owl takes flight,” Lévy was not content to erect a discontinuous ontology, an elitist and tragic metaphysic inspired by Nietzsche and Baudelaire. To hold the line against historicism, he also mobilized the heavy artillery of messianism—a secularized messianism if you will, a messianism without God—that has inspired his expanding reliance on the concept of tikkun and the need to “tikkunize the world.” (13)

To tikkunize the world? In La Guerre sans l’aimer, Lévy’s journal of a writer involved in the Libyan spring, he wrote on June 22, 2011, that one of the goals of the Libyan campaign was to “reclaim for Africa its share of greatness” and “to bring that greatness to the level that the best of Europe joined it in pursuing.” (14) That assertion on Lévy’s part allowed some to claim that BHL totally underestimated the power of the Islamist backlash. On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that by aiding the Libyans to wrench free of Gaddafi’s tyranny Lévy tikkunized that part of the African continent by pointing the way to the lesser evil. And is not the ability to choose the lesser evil the prerequisite of any democratic and antidespotic politics?

Translation by Steven Kennedy

(1) La pureté dangereuse, Grasset, pp. 183–185.

(2) Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, preceded by Les Damnés de la guerre, Biblio-essais, p. 129.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Quatre lettres au directeur général de la Croix-Rouge française à propos de l’humanitaire, de son histoire et de la misère sociale en France, in Pièces d’identité, Grasset, 2010, pp. 933–959.

(5) La Kabbale, Gershom Scholem, Folio essais.

(6) Pièces d’identité, p. 288.

(7) Ibid., p. 288.

(8) Left in Dark Times, Random House, 2009, pp. 211–213. Originally published as Ce grand Cadavre à la renverse, Grasset, 2007, pp. 409–411.

(9) Ibid., p. 212. Lévy quotes the motto of William of Orange: “One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to persevere.”

(10) Ibid., pp. 212–213.

(11) Réflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal et la fin de l’Histoire, op. cit., p. 265. Also see the luminous analyses of philosopher Jean Tellez in Le philosophe en guerre: Introduction à la philosophie de Bernard-Henri Lévy, Germina, 2011 (particularly pp. 144–145)

(12) “Comment je suis juif,” 2003, in Questions de principe IX, Grasset, p. 387.

(13) See La Règle du Jeu, January 2012.

(14) La Guerre sans l’aimer—Journal d’un écrivain au cœur du printemps libyen, Grasset, 2011.