Bernard-Henri Lévy’s first appearance on the French television program Apostrophes in May 1977 set the tone for his career. Responding to left-wing critics of his fellow “New Philosophers,” a group of young thinkers who denounced communism and socialism, the 29-year-old Lévy galvanized viewers with his signature décolleté—the bare chest displayed through his unbuttoned shirt—his elegant mane, and his smirking dismissal of his interlocutors’ leftist pieties. It was the first time, but not the last, that he fixed in France’s national consciousness the traits of his personal image and flair for shifting debates from their ostensible subject to his own scintillating persona.
For nearly half a century, Lévy has been one of the most visible public intellectuals in France and a master at manipulating philosophical and political controversy. With his good looks and outsized ego, Lévy is a compelling performer. He is also an irresistible target for critics from the left, right, and center. The inaccuracies and incoherencies of his voluminous body of work have been exposed in a number of unflattering biographies, of which the best is Philippe Cohen’s 2005 book BHL. The media’s tendency to thus refer to Lévy by his initials, BHL, suggests that he is, like LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), an iconic national brand—and perhaps nothing more than a label. Since the earliest days of Lévy’s career, rivals have denounced him as a cynical, vacuous pseudo-philosopher who puts intellectual culture in the service of self-aggrandizing spectacle.
