Bernard-Henri Lévy on Beauvoir

We must pay homage to the woman who, as Philippe Val noted in "La Transmission Beauvoir," buried the ghost of Madame Bovary, her hysteria, her "woman's illness," her suffering, which at the time people thought was innate, eternal--and this in in Freud's time, before modern thought appropriated his movement.

Don't miss BHL's homage to Simone de Beauvoir in The New Republic.

(and don't miss mine in The Quarterly Conversation!)

Comments

[Lucas]

Lauren,
You and your fellow Americans should realize that BHL is not a philosopher but a clown and a buffoon.
You want real French philosophy, read Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Baudrillard, if you are a right winger, read Aron, but please forget about this pompous arrogant shmuck BHL and his unending and shameless self-promotion.
As a Frenchman, I am ashamed of BHL.
Your article on Beauvoir is much better than his poorly translated melodramatic one.

[maitresse]

Lucas, calm down. Thank you for the compliment (but it's apples and oranges; his is a melodramatic panegyric; mine is an analytic essay). But let's not get carried away. You're setting up a false binary between BHL on one side and Derrida and Baudrillard on the other. Someone else could come along and tell you Baudrillard is full of it and how can you lump him in with Foucault? And someone else will come along and argue against Foucault, and so on.

It's doubly insulting to assume that "my fellow Americans" and I have no idea that you and your "fellow Frenchmen" think BHL is a clown and a buffoon. You're not the first to say it. We can read. Some of us read French, so we've heard it many times.

I've not read any of BHL's work at all (I've been too busy reading Derrida and Foucault, so pat me on the head). But it's not a capital offense against philosophy to link to something the man wrote on a subject that is dear to my heart.

[nancy]

I am not American nor French, but I do agree with Lukas about BHL....and I think he "lumped" the others together only to show what other philosophers and thinkers France has, and merely to suggest reading them instead. With that said, (and i don't know what your views are on BHL but I don't think that matters), rather, you just wanted to offer an exmple of an article or piece about Beauvoir, who means something to you. Right? And it is a shame if anyone knocks Baudrillard...
nancy

[ralf heinritz]

Aron a right winger? Right most of the time wringer of marxoid stupidities more likely. To call clowns like maoist (isn` t he) Badiou, Derridada or Baudi philosophers is a bit rich in itself (Alan Sokal), but not to see the revolutionary character of true liberalism a serious problem.
Karl Marx worshiped the futurist character of liberalism and he was dead right in his analysis. Capitalism can simply not be right wing in the sense of reactionary or conservative (China!).
But Aron is seen as reac, because he did not worship scum like Stalin or Mao, and his political correct thinking won in the end. This is unforgivable.
Anti-liberalism is the dumb Continental intelli` s curse, as anti-semitism was dumb guy socialism.
And sadly even of hyper intelligent ones like Castoriadis.

[ralf heinritz]

Aron a right winger? Right most of the time wringer of marxoid stupidities more likely. To call clowns like maoist (isn` t he) Badiou, Derridada or Baudi philosophers is a bit rich in itself (Alan Sokal), but not to see the revolutionary character of true liberalism a serious problem.
Karl Marx worshiped the futurist character of liberalism and he was dead right in his analysis. Capitalism can simply not be right wing in the sense of reactionary or conservative (China!).
But Aron is seen as reac, because he did not worship scum like Stalin or Mao, and his political correct thinking won in the end. This is unforgivable.
Anti-liberalism is the dumb Continental intelli` s curse, as anti-semitism was dumb guy socialism.
And sadly even of hyper intelligent ones like Castoriadis.

[ralf heinritz]

Aron a right winger? Right most of the time wringer of marxoid stupidities more likely. To call clowns like maoist (isn` t he) Badiou, Derridada or Baudi philosophers is a bit rich in itself (Alan Sokal), but not to see the revolutionary character of true liberalism a serious problem.
Karl Marx worshiped the futurist character of liberalism and he was dead right in his analysis. Capitalism can simply not be right wing in the sense of reactionary or conservative (China!).
But Aron is seen as reac, because he did not worship scum like Stalin or Mao, and his political correct thinking won in the end. This is unforgivable.
Anti-liberalism is the dumb Continental intelli` s curse, as anti-semitism was dumb guy socialism.
And sadly even of hyper intelligent ones like Castoriadis.