| Daniela
Hurezanu
Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Trans. by Charlotte Mandell. American Vertigo Random
House, 2006 308 pp. $24.95
When I heard of Garrison Keillor’s review of Bernard-Henri
Lévy’s American Vertigo in The New York
Times Book Review, my initial thought was that Keillor should
first take a twenty-year break from his current activities,
read some books, and then write a review about one of the
most famous contemporary European philosophers.
Being European at origin—although not French—I
was, of course, familiar with Lévy’s popularity,
and I had read some of his writings. I therefore began reading
his book with strong intellectual curiosity, a curiosity enhanced
by the fact that I had read other books or essays written
by Lévy’s fellow countrymen on the same subject:
Sartre’s essays written in 1945 and published in Situations
III, Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day
(1947), Edgar Morin’s Journal de Californie
(1970), Yves Berger’s novels inspired by the mythology
of the Wild West, and of course, Jean Baudrillard’s
America (1986).
After reading about a third of Lévy’s book, I
decided to read Keillor’s review. By then I had gone
through such a rollercoaster of mixed feelings that the review
was a welcome catharsis. I still believe that it is slightly
embarrassing for a journal like The New York Times Book
Review to assign the review of a book written by a philosopher
to a writer famous for his ramblings through the prairie,
on the grounds that they have both written about “America.”
But I realize now that the chanter of Lake Wobegon—to
use Lévy’s words from his response in the same
publication—has much more in common with the chanter
of Seattle and brotherly French-American love than the latter
might realize or want to admit.
Of course, Lévy is no ordinary philosopher; not only
isn’t he confined to the ivory tower of the academic
world, but, as his huge photo in the Times is insidiously
telling us, he is a philosopher who can unfasten his shirt
to the last two buttons so we can almost see his bellybutton
(others, who have seen Lévy live at various public
events, have been luckier than us and declare having seen
his bellybutton). Maybe this is what it takes to make everyone
believe that, if one is so confident in one’s bellybutton,
he must really have something to show. Even Michael Krasny
finished his interview with Lévy on KQED radio in San
Francisco by complementing him on his looks—“handsome”
was the word he used.
Being a woman who has nothing against handsome men and even
less against handsome philosophers, I kept staring at both
the Times photo and the one on the book jacket. Lévy
is a normal-looking man in his late fifties, neither handsome
nor ugly. True, we are far from Sartre’s froglike features,
and Lévy’s taste in clothing is definitely superior
to that of Derrida. Looking at the photo on his book jacket
I wondered if he is not—at least a little—ashamed
to see himself described as someone who “was hailed
by Vanity Fair magazine as ‘Superman and prophet:
we have no equivalent in the United States.’”
We certainly don’t. But maybe I overestimate Lévy’s
Frenchness; for all his very French rhetoric, there is one
aspect in which Lévy is very un-French: for him, ridicule
doesn’t kill.
One of the most complex things about American Vertigo
is the position from which it is written: written by a French
philosopher who, like all French philosophers, has been more
or less influenced by Marx, yet with no trace of Marx in it.
American Vertigo is written in the (acknowledged)
shadow of Alexis de Tocqueville. But there are many other
(unacknowledged) shadows that hover above the book, the shadows
of those who have traveled across America and written about
it before Lévy, those I mentioned earlier, and of whom
only one is given credit. I will return to this.
And last but not least there is the political context in which
American Vertigo was written, the context of the
post-Iraq invasion and of the French-American conflict that
has developed because of it. In this context Lévy’s
book is a polemic directed at his countrymen who have been,
as we know only too well, strongly opposed to the Iraq war.
But if you didn’t know this, you would never find it
out from Lévy’s book. In a puzzling logic that
underlies the entire book, Lévy criticizes the anti-Americanism
of his countrymen and of Europeans in general, without bothering
to see any connection between this feeling of animosity and
the precise historical moment when it exploded. Instead, we
find out from Lévy that these viscerally irrational
anti-Americans blame the United States for everything: the
war in Darfur, hunger in Nigeria, women humiliated in Afghan
villages. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention . . . Iraq.
But we get his point. What we don’t get is why when
referring to this anti-Americanism, Lévy never seems
to make any distinction between the American government and
other things “American:” the American people,
American culture, etc. Throughout the entire book he uses
one word, “America,” as if there were some kind
of American entity out there, which he feels obligated to
defend against the anti-Americans.
To prove that French “anti-Americanism” is not
the result of a specific political crisis but an “ancient”
French problem, Lévy quotes Buffon, who was “linking
corruption of souls and bodies in the New World to the excessive
humidity of the climate” (8). We recognize in this rather
amusing quote the grotesqueness of a “scientific”
way of thinking that was common in the 18th-19th centuries.
Baudelaire too has linked the stupidity of people from Bordeaux
to the city’s climate, and as far as I know, no one
has accused him of anti-Bordeauism.
Among the 20th century anti-American Frenchmen and Europeans,
the others mentioned are Céline, Drieu La Rochelle,
Bernanos and the German philosopher Heidegger. We aren’t
surprised, of course, to see the names of these right-wing
writers—who are not on Lévys’s list of
“favorite authors”—among the anti-Americans.
But here comes the surprise: when we are given an example
of a “friend of America,” guess who it is? Sartre.
With this name we enter the mysterious psychological landscape
that may give us a clue to the intricacies of Lévy’s
contorted rationale in his ode to “America.”
For most readers the name of the philosopher Sartre is inseparable
from the image of the convinced communist, who, like all convinced
communists, had serious ideological reasons not to be very
fond of the American lifestyle. But this is what Lévy,
who has written a biography of Sartre—and, incidentally,
not a bad one—has to say about the most famous Communist
thinker of the 20th century: “Sartre, that friend of
Huston and Dos Passos, that lover of Manhattan and its skyscrapers,
that admirer of the American way of life” (12—my
emphasis). Of all the French writers who are or have been
admirers of things American, we are given one name—with
the exception of Tocqueville and of Lévy himself, of
course—and that is Sartre. Here we need to pause for
an instant and examine the enormity of this statement.
Sartre has indeed written about Manhattan, but his writings
on the subject are not as much infused with the love that
Lévy—in his desire to enlist fellow countrymen
in his ode to “America”—credits him with,
than with the fascination we always have when discovering
something other, a fascination very much controlled by the
almost clinical objectivity of the analysis. Sartre reads
the geometry of a city—in this case, New York—in
a way that will later be structurally absorbed by Roland Barthes—in
his essay on Japan, for example—or by Jean Baudrillard
in his numerous writings about America. More specifically,
Sartre reads the lines of New York as distilled meanings of
certain national (ideological) characteristics. In New York’s
rational organization of space and its horizontal rectangular
grid, he sees an expression of American conformism; in the
verticality of its skyscrapers, the specificity of American
individualism, of the man who can claim he is an “individual”
only if he “makes” himself, and thus climbs the
ladder of public recognition.
Why is it then that Lévy feels such a need to force
this presumed love down Sartre’s throat? The word “skyscraper”
might give us a clue: Lévy confesses a passion for
the word “gratte-ciel” (“skyscraper”)
since childhood; Sartre “loves” skyscrapers; Lévy
“loves” America; but Lévy also loves Sartre,
so the only way to reconcile his loves is by convincing us
that Sartre too “loves” America.
If Lévy really wanted a “lover” of America,
Simone de Beauvoir would have been a better example—although
her America is no blind love either; but she gets no mention
whatsoever in Lévy’s book. Nelson Algren, on
the other hand, who is known in France only because, and for,
his affair with her, is mentioned.
Sartre and Tocqueville are alter-egos (and what an ego!) of
Lévy, and since this book is, even more than about
America, about Lévy and the projection of his ego onto
a superpower with which he identifies (up to a point), an
entire symbiosis with a very twisted logic is set in place:
Tocqueville-Sartre-Lévy equals love for American democracy
equals French love for social justice equals exceptional situation
of a French intellectual among his (“anti-American”)
countrymen. Thus Lévy manages to blend into a single
universalism the American concept of democracy, inseparable
from the idea of free market, and the French concept of democracy,
inseparable from the idea of social justice. Thus when he
sings his ode to America, he can indirectly praise French
universalism or whatever is left of it. This is very obvious
from Lévy’s repeated insistence on the sameness
of France and America, an insistence whose background is the
belief in the two countries’ uniqueness within the global
concert of nations. We, French and Americans, are the same
and we are different from the others, Lévy tells us.
We cannot help but wonder: is this how we fight what Lévy
calls the “evil demon of roots and origins”? By
believing in the exceptionality of certain countries, which,
as it happens, are our own countries?
There is one moment toward the end of the book when the two
exceptional countries are joined by a third one: Israel. In
a conversation with Samuel Huntington, Lévy puts forward
the idea that “Israel, along with France and America,
is one of the rare countries founded on […] a ‘creed’”
(230). Lévy doesn’t have time to give us details
about the creed because of Huntington’s violent reaction,
but we can certainly speculate on what this creed might be.
We can indeed see a parallel between America and France as
the inventors of the modern concept of democracy, and we can
also see a parallel between America and Israel as countries
founded by emigrants who fled European religious intolerance
in search of a Promised Land; but we can’t really see
the parallel between France and Israel. The only element that
links the three countries together is . . . Lévy and
his emotional investment in these countries. Here again we
are tempted to ask: what has happened to the force of reason
of the Enlightenment when our politics is rooted in our emotional
attachments?
American Vertigo is written with the declared goal
of dispelling certain clichés and essentialist views
that many Frenchmen and Europeans in general have about America.
It is also built on an insurmountable paradox: on the one
hand, a declaration of love for America every few pages; on
the other, the content of the book, which is in sharp contrast
with this declaration. Alas (or Dieu merci?), Lévy
cannot escape his Frenchness.
To convince us of his love, Lévy retakes all the beaten
paths of past generations of Frenchmen fascinated with America:
like them, he loves the Beat generation, Kerouac, Henry Miller,
Hemingway and his successor Jim Harrison, the American West,
certain Hollywood film directors, such as Wenders and Hitchcock—who
are, in fact, the products of a European imagination transplanted
on American soil. The result is (involuntarily) hilarious:
Lévy doesn’t seem to realize how ridiculous it
is to use in 2005 the cultural model of the 1940s as a sign
of his Americanophilia. After World War II Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir had, in a way, discovered America for their contemporaries.
At the time the differences in lifestyle between the two continents
were much bigger than they are today, and few were so knowledgeable
about American literature, jazz and film—Simone de Beauvoir
used to watch as many as three American movies a day—as
the famous couple was. But how can Lévy claim for himself
this uniqueness today? How can he see himself as an exception
among his (“anti-American”) countrymen because
he loves several American writers and film directors? Maybe
someone should break the news to him that the entire planet
now watches American movies and reads books by American writers.
Isn’t he aware of the fact that many of his countrymen
have been formed by American culture (formed in a deep way
by popular American culture, not by reading Tocqueville and
several American writers who have lived in Paris) yet they
don’t go around claiming that they are “friends”
of America, and more importantly, don’t feel obligated
to defend its foreign policy, as Lévy does? Godard,
for one, has never been shy of acknowledging his big debt
to American cinema, but that hasn’t stopped him from
criticizing what Lévy feels obligated to defend. The
Italian Umberto Eco, who has also traveled across America
and written about it, has a much deeper connection than Lévy
with American culture: as a child during the Mussolini years,
he used to escape in the dream world of American comic books.
But unlike Lévy, he doesn’t base his political
positions on the fictions that have populated his inner world.
Which brings us to the crux of the matter: at a surface level—the
level at which the book invokes Tocqueville as its spiritual
guide—American Vertigo is about using the force
of reason against the irrational forces that loom in today’s
world. The “uncivilized” part of the world, that
is. The force of reason is represented by the heritage of
the Enlightenment, which, says Lévy, is best represented
by American democracy. Of course he is perfectly aware of
the forces of unreason—evangelical Christianity and
the culture of violence as incarnated in the “culture”
of guns—that are woven into the fabric of American democracy,
and he is revolted by them. But the fact that these forces
of unreason are present in American democracy doesn’t
mean that America is the fundamentalist country many Europeans
believe it to be. In the end, America is an agnostic country,
says Lévy, because, unlike European nations, it was
“born secular.”
Here again we enter myth. Forget about the religious sects
that founded America. Forget about the “God Bless America”
of the American presidents—a “universal,”
not a Christian God, if we are to believe Lévy’s
argument. The fact that this “universal” God now
has a messianic voice that endows America with a special mission
in the world doesn’t seem to present a contradiction
for the atheist and the defender of the values of the Enlightenment
Lévy claims to be. On the contrary, he firmly believes
in this mission.
Indeed, whenever Lévy is in need of finding arguments
in favor of American foreign policy we enter a territory where
all those beautiful values of the Enlightenment—reason,
etc.—that he so wishes to export to other parts of the
world, suddenly vanish. He starts his journey across America
with the conviction that the “idea” (his word)
of America needs to be defended in spite of everything. But
over and over again he falls into the exact trap in which
the Europeans have fallen throughout their history. The Europeans
have been, Lévy tells us, too often prey to ideology,
and have worked toward their servitude imagining they were
freeing themselves. True enough. But during his journey, Lévy,
confronted with American reality, refuses to acknowledge the
consequences of this reality and stubbornly clings to his
“idea.”
For the most part, American Vertigo is a harsh criticism
of the American way of life, yet Lévy “loves”
America because he needs the idea of America. But the America
he loves has nothing to do with the real America his book
unveils. The America he loves is a mythology, a fiction made
by Europeans: it is no accident that many of Lévy’s
cultural references—his American “loves”—are
the same writers and artists that all French travelers have
written about for the past six decades. As for many of his
compatriots, for Lévy American literature seems to
have stopped at the Beat generation. In this respect at least,
American Francophiles have a more updated object of desire
than Americanophile Frenchmen. How does Lévy fight
clichés and essentialist judgments about America when
his entire book sanctifies and petrifies at the same time
the figures of an American mythology that French intellectuals
seem incapable of overcoming?
The foundational myth of the French-American connection starts,
of course, with a Frenchman: Tocqueville. This primordial
figure around which American Vertigo is woven is
in the center of two scenes, both funny and symptomatic of
Lévy’s rapport with America. Both involve a confrontation
between the Frenchman and an American figure of authority:
in the first scene Lévy gets out of his car and proceeds
to urinate at the edge of a field; a policeman arrives and
informs him that “taking a piss is forbidden”
and he should “keep moving;” Lévy replies
that he is French, which doesn’t impress the cop, who
informs him that “the law is the same for everyone.”
Here, Lévy becomes even more French and declares proudly
that he has written a book on Daniel Pearl—the cop is
still unimpressed and Lévy still doesn’t get
it that in this country being a writer doesn’t mean
anything. But then “a sort of miracle occurs”
when Lévy mentions Tocqueville and the cop’s
face lights up, and Lévy is beyond himself with joy
because this American cop loves Tocqueville, and from this
one scene he infers that all Americans love Tocqueville.
But later in the book there is another scene: Lévy
is in an airplane with other journalists accompanying John
Kerry during the presidential campaign and he is the only
one to whom access to the candidate is systematically denied.
Exasperated, he informs Kerry’s aides that he is a writer
and again he mentions Tocqueville but the aides of the Francophile
candidate are not impressed.
Why is Lévy so eager to believe that in America everyone
loves Tocqueville? For the same reason that the few things
and places he actually loves about America are a little .
. . French, or at least European: Miller and Hemingway lived
in France and loved it; Kerouac is of French origin; Jim Harrison,
who is more admired in France than in the States, is an incarnation
of Hemingway; the American filmmakers loved by Lévy
(Wenders and Hitchcock) are actually European; he loves New
Orleans (pre-Katrina, although at the end of the book there
is a poignant post-Katrina analysis); and after he delivers
a eulogy of Seattle with the embarrassing title ”Seattle
mon amour” (the allusion to Marguerite Duras notwithstanding)
in which for several pages he starts almost every sentence
with “I loved,” he decides toward the end of the
book that the city he loves most in America is Savannah. You’ll
never guess why: the house in which he is a guest used to
belong to a B-H Lévy!
Lévy’s America is a mythological character in
an archetypal story whose hero is Himself; America is the
lover who is loved because and insofar as she resembles France.
Lévy’s love for the other is ultimately, love
for Himself: it is Frenchness he comes to look for in America.
He admits it himself at the end of the book when, analyzing
his desire to travel West, he states that, unlike traveling
East—toward Asia, etc.—traveling West is not the
expression of a desire for the exotic Other, but a desire
for sameness and the familiar.
Besides the rather quick assumption that the Other is always
“exotic,” Lévy also makes the very quick
assumption that exoticism functions only one way (toward the
East and those that the West has always attempted to “civilize”).
Actually, exoticism can function both ways: the “savage”
too can find the “civilized” exotic; thus, at
her arrival in America, Simone de Beauvoir sees herself as
“the savage who marvels at a bicycle.”
Lévy’s rapport with America resides in a contradiction
which is the very contradiction between reality and myth.
He doesn’t like what he sees, yet he desperately tries
to convince us and himself that the world must believe in
the American myth. This is what he hates in America: the huge
parking lots, the enormous malls, the megachurches, Puritanism
and its infiltration into politics, the obsession with money
and its constant presence in discussions about politics, the
hypocrisy of the media that has flagellated itself so much
for the Blair affair, but has had no problem with the journalist
who launched the Lewinsky affair by inventing a story simply
because he hated Clinton, the obsession with privatization
that has gone so far as to privatize prisons, the desolate
cities (Detroit, Cleveland, etc.) that are left to die—“killed,”
he says—the inhuman, artificial faces of the rich and
beautiful, the “derangement” of historical memory.
If this is “love,” it must be of a very twisted
kind.
Many pages in American Vertigo recycle ideas about
the primacy of the copy over the real in the American mind—see
the scene in which a copy of a fake mummy is displayed in
museums as the copy of an original even though everyone knows
that the original itself is a fake—about the transformation
of the real into a museum—see the pages on San Francisco,
for example, whose “decadent” mores are museified
into a parody of itself—about the fetish of the “ancient”
which can transform a simple cheese plate into a “relic”
or about the obsession with artificial, politically correct
environments, which can be seen even in a Las Vegas brothel.
All these reflections are written in a flowing style and are
certainly interesting, but we have been reading them for the
past thirty years in Baudrillard and Eco. And Lévy’s
framing of the rapport between the copy and the real as a
“derangement” of memory is much less convincing
than Baudrillard’s interpretation of the same rapport
as a consequence of the killing of the real by technology.
When Lévy ventures to squeeze his own original meaning
out of the American quotidian, he is not always successful.
Take, for example, his reflections on the American flag and
its overwhelming presence in the American landscape and public
places, the reflections that so much annoyed Keillor maybe
because he has never traveled beyond his prairie and doesn’t
know that for any foreigner the display of the American flag—its
huge dimensions and its presence on and inside the most diverse
kinds of buildings—is quite puzzling. The flag is certainly
a sign, en emblem worth discussing; but the “discussion”
it triggers in Lévy is filtered through a “philosophical”
pose, a posture he adopts at many moments in his book, which
brings to mind the image of a Zorro who has read Hegel—or
should we say “Superman,” like Vanity Fair?—exercising
in front of a mirror and unfastening yet another button of
his white shirt. After a sequence of interrogations about
the possible meaning(s) of this display of the flag, Lévy
ends with: “Or is it something else entirely?”
and concludes shaking his head and striking his chin with
gravity: “Maybe American patriotism is more complex,
more painful than it seems at first glance, and perhaps its
apparent excessiveness comes from that” (23).
This kind of conclusion is typical of many of Lévy’s
moments of “deep thoughts,” a sort of compensatory
“positive” view after several pages of criticism
of various things American. This forced positivity is particularly
embarrassing when it comes from a 21st century philosopher
who claims to be guided by the values of the Enlightenment
and doesn’t even seem to have a problem with the dubious
concept of “patriotism.” The very same philosopher
who is so critical of Europe’s past attachment to the
instinctual love for one’s place of origin and the mythology
of the earth. Here, as in many other instances, Lévy
has a compensatory view of America: what is dubious in Europe
must have “a more complex, more painful” aspect
in America. Here again, we are presented with the mythology
of an America that has escaped all the dangers of European
atavism; when the real hits him in the face, he turns the
other way, eyes fixed on his “idea,” and declares:
this is only the appearance of the real, the true real must
be “more complex, more painful.” More unreal.
Lévy’s reasoning makes me think of the interviews
published in the September 1, 2003, issue of The New Yorker
with himself and another famous French philosopher, André
Gluscksmann, in which the two Frenchmen denounce the anti-Americanism
of their compatriots, and Glucksmann compares Bush to a “Shakespearean
character” (he is not trying to be ironic and he doesn’t
mean Macbeth; for a Frenchman a Shakespearean character means
Hamlet).
Maybe the reality is much simpler: maybe in the same way Bush
is just an idiot, a “patriot” is always just an
idiot, whether Frenchman or American or whatever. And if one
looks closely one can find that America and Europe (and the
rest of the world for that matter) share all their signs of
atavism. Like the French children who are taught from an early
age the story of “nos ancêtres les Gaulois”—the
French myth of origin—American students are taught the
story of the Mayflower, the first ship to come to America
with British colonists. When I was a young immigrant in this
country, the manager of the apartment complex where we lived,
who happened to be a millionaire and an important member of
the First Baptist Church of the city, took us every Sunday
to church where we were schooled not only in the miracles
of Jesus but also in the greatness of a people who were the
descendants of the Mayflower.
If, instead of trying to find Shakespearean meanings in the
American flag, Lévy would have attempted to reflect
on the places where it is displayed, he could have seen that,
while in Europe and other places, the flag is raised only
on symbolic institutions of authority (like the City Hall),
in the States, the space of its display is very much enlarged.
One can see it in parking lots, in offices, in restaurants
(and, as we find out a hundred pages later in the book, even
in a brothel). This is obviously because space is entirely
de-sacralized—as Lévy himself has noted, there
is often no distinction between the space of a church and
that of a hotel or of a bank. Like everything else in the
States, the space where the flag is raised is democratic.
But the space where the flag is most likely to be raised is
that of businesses and huge parking lots with car dealerships.
This is because the unity of the country that is symbolized
by the flag is the commercial market. Incidentally, these
are also the places with the most “patriotic”
people. It is indeed not a unity based on the values of the
land, and one would be tempted, like Lévy, to conclude
that it is therefore less atavistic if one weren’t familiar
with the churches where these people go after they’ve
struck their last deal of the week, and where Jesus and the
heirs of the Mayflower hold hands and do business together.
But to return to Lévy’s American love story:
it is a rather unlikely and twisted story considering Lévy’s
biography. A Marxist in his youth and a leftist by temperament,
Lévy has been for many years a strong advocate for
human rights. In the late eighties and early nineties he was
very involved in the anticommunist movements in Eastern Europe,
and during the war in Bosnia he was one of those who militated
for a military intervention against the Serbs. In this respect
Lévy’s political positions have been consistent:
he is in favor of a “positive interventionism”
in places where human rights are violated. But in today’s
political context his advocacy for interventionism makes him
an ally of some the most reactionary forces in the States.
American Vertigo is therefore not only a trip across America
but also an attempt to reconcile Lévy’s contradictory
loves, and, as expected, the result is often grotesque.
What is Lévy’s position in regard to the Iraq
war? In the New Yorker interview mentioned above, Lévy
was presented as one of the rare French intellectuals who
are “anti-anti-American.” Lévy said then
and he repeats it in American Vertigo: although he was not
in favor of the intervention in Iraq because he knew that
Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, he believes
that Bush was justified in starting a war, except it was the
wrong war. He “mistook his target.” Lévy
doesn’t tell us whom he should have attacked instead,
but for pages and pages he builds a contorted rationale supposed
to convince us that the neoconservatives are the true democratic
force today.
To begin with, the number of neoconservatives he interviews
outnumbers by far that of the liberals and the leftists. Then
he proceeds to rewrite history in a way that can support his
new political alliances. Not only the neoconservatives are
today the true democratic force, they have always been fighters
for human rights. Whenever the neoconservatives have intervened
a dictatorship has fallen. “What is undeniable is that
a neoconservative is someone whose enemies are called Saddam
Hussein, Mullah Omar and Milosevic” (285). The implication
is that those who hate neoconservatives are “friends”
of these dictators; thus at some point Lévy blames
the millions of protesters against the Iraq war for not having
also protested against Saddam’s crimes. (When the whole
point of the protests was that the intervention had nothing
to do with Saddam’s crimes). He also very conveniently
forgets the years when the neoconservatives, these fighters
for human rights, have supported criminal guerrillas and military
dictators in South America. True, these years were before
the Bush administration. Now, for the first time in history,
says Lévy, the United States is actually acting in
conformity with its principles. It doesn’t only talk
about democracy as it did during the cold war, it actually
establishes democracies. His historical memory seems to be
a little short: wasn’t the war in Vietnam an attempt
to stop “dictatorship” and “establish a
democracy”? Weren’t all the interventions in South
America done in the name of democracy?
But forget about the past. In order to justify his position
Lévy needs to do some serious logic- and fact-bending.
When he finds something to reproach about the current administration
he doesn’t target the administration itself, he targets
American intellectuals. Thus on the question of torture and
prisons, including Guantánamo, he is very critical
of the way the American media and American intellectuals have
framed the question of torture itself. Not that they haven’t
criticized torture, but when they did, it was usually as a
violation of the theory of just war and the Geneva conventions
rather than as a serious analysis of the question of torture
itself in a democracy. To his credit, on the question of torture
Lévy stands firm on his principles. But even then he
doesn’t spell out the obvious: it is the same neoconservatives
whom he credits with spreading democracy, and certain liberals,
who are finding exceptional circumstances for torture, not
the left.
When I say “the left” I mean a certain left—whom
Lévy calls “another ‘other left’”
to distinguish it from those like him who have left the left,
so to speak, and from certain liberals who find circumstances
in which torture can by justified—which is virtually
absent in his book. There is one little paragraph in which
he mentions the existence of this “‘other left’—embodied
by writers like Chomsky, Vidal, Boyle, and Sontag” (270),
without bothering to say more. What his opinion of this “other
left” is we can only infer from another paragraph two
pages further, when he does acknowledge that the most serious
analysis of Abu Ghraib was Susan Sontag’s text published
in The New York Times Magazine; but “unfortunately,”
he continues, its impact was “diminished because of
the author’s previous declarations about the ‘courage’
of the suicide bombers” (272).
This is one of the most dishonest statements in Lévy’s
entire book, a twisting of truth similar to that of “Sartre,
lover of America,” only in the other direction. Susan
Sontag, who was one of most dignified defenders of human rights
on the American continent, gets a kick in the butt obviously
because she doesn’t fit into Lévy’s definition
of a defender of human rights as a “spreader”
of democracy in regions that happen to have a lot of oil.
Someone who is not familiar with the context of the declarations
invoked by Lévy would think that she was a supporter
of terrorism! It is very surprising that Lévy, who
is otherwise a subtle observer, cannot tell that her response
to Bush’s repeated claim that the authors of the September
11 attacks were “cowards,” targets Bush’s
nationalist linguistic clichés (the enemy is always
a “coward,” while “we” are always
“heroes”) and points to the very obvious reality
that the terrorists may be many things, criminal, crazy, inhuman,
but certainly not “cowards.” Incidentally, Sontag
was also the most involved American intellectual in the Balkan
wars, and she supported, like Lévy, an intervention
in Bosnia. But as I already mentioned, as far as Lévy
is concerned, it is the neoconservatives who were Milosevic’s
enemies, not people like Sontag. And, when he tells us who
is in his opinion the American intellectual who most resembles
the European definition of an intellectual—that is,
an engaged intellectual—it is not Sontag who, besides
her political positions, was also by intellectual formation
as much (or more) European as (than) American, it is the (now
former) neoconservative Francis Fukuyama.
How are we to reconcile all these contradictions? How are
we to reconcile Lévy’s pages in the chapter “The
Revenge of the Little Man” (33-35) where he gives us
the most psychologically astute and stylistically accomplished
portrait of G. W. Bush I have ever read, with his support
for the little man’s administration? How are we to reconcile
the human rights activist who was Lévy with his incredible
cynicism when, in one of his analyses of the reasons for the
war in Iraq he admits that maybe “in their innermost
depths” the neoconservatives “had no concern other
than making a show of force while also—which wouldn’t,
by the way, have been an outright crime—securing oil
supplies for their country. But at least they’re taking
the trouble to talk about democracy too” (285). Here
again we need to pause. The logic is mind-boggling. Indeed,
“securing oil” isn’t a crime in itself,
except that one of its side effects happened to be the deaths
of thousands of people. And then the scene in which I secure
some oil from your fields while taking the trouble to give
you a lesson in democracy surpasses the most cynical declarations
from the White House. How are we to reconcile these words
with his statement, after several pages of endorsement of
neoconservatism: “the people I identify with […]
are named Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Morris Dees, Jim Harrison,
Norman Mailer” (290)?
We can’t reconcile these contradictions, and neither
can Lévy. Yet American Vertigo is not a book
that can be dismissed easily. In spite of its twisted logic
it has many brilliant pages: some of them are portraits of
people, a craft at which Lévy excels; others are descriptions
of places and institutions—powerful descriptions of
prisons and their hell, or images of desolate cities with
their dying downtowns, which bring to mind some Hollywood
dystopia, but which are only too real—done with a pathos
and authenticity that probably characterized many years ago
a young intellectual named Bernard-Henri Lévy of whom
little is left today.
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