Philosophy War: Bernard-Henri Lévy (stricken with botulism) vs. Michel Onfray (up-and-comer)

Bernard-Henri Lévy aka BHL

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The other Sunday, watching Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN, I was appalled to see Bernard-Henri Lévy aka BHL barking up the wrong tree again: discussing Pakistan, the Taliban, and the abortive Times Square bombing. The man thinks he’s got somehow the key to the “unconscious” and the short-circuits in the “libido” of wannabe and avowed terrorists because he’d spent some time in Pakistan.

I put these Freudian words in brackets because BHL used them during that segment of GPS and because of the relevance they will have further below. I also wondered why Zakaria included him on the panel in the first place—a panel debating what could have motivated the unhinged man who wanted to blow up his SUV in Times Square—while he had in the studio at least two specialists of the region who were better equipped (one pundit was for example from that region) to attempt an explanation of the nebulous motivation of Islamists than 10 BHLs…

BHL assured Zakaria he’s been busy “reflecting” and “thinking” about Pakistan and the motivations of the young Taliban, including the crazy man of Times Square—and he’d crack open the mystery one of these days…

Well, BHL better stick to this new line of punditry in America, for his public and flashy philosopher’s career might be over in France where he’s become a joke.

All hell broke loose on the ass of BHL in January. That’s when his new philosophical musings titled “De la guerre en philosophie” [Of War in Philosophy] came out.

Readers of the book couldn’t believe their eyes when they encountered this passage on p. 122 of the essay:

“… Or once again Kant, the so-called sage of Königsberg, the archetypal lifeless and bodiless, of whom Jean-Baptiste Botul has shown, in the wake of WWII, in his series of conferences to neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was a false abstract, a pure spirit of pure appearance…”

After laughing their heads off, the readers wondered if BHL had simply run mad.

Jean-Baptiste Botul (1896-1947) mentioned by BHL in that excerpt never actually existed as a human being. He was a character invented by Frédéric Pagès, a columnist of the satirical weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné” and a prankster to boot. Pagès had written a prankster’s hoax of a book titled “Vie sexuelle d’Emmanuel Kant” [Immanuel Kant’s Sex Life] published in 1999, and republished in 2004 from which BHL got that quote. As Pagès also happens to be a philosopher, his well-written hoax could fool anyone. That is, anyone who’s not a philosopher.

But not BHL, a philosopher, who should have known better as what is purported to be Kant, his work and his nature in the hoax simply don’t square with the basic biographical and philosophical elements known by serious philosophers about the man. What’s even worse is that everyone—that is, every single serious French intellectual—knows about Frédéric Pagès’s hoax. There’s a group of intellectual pranksters called the “Association des Amis de Botul” [Association of Botul’s Friends] who meet and carry on fake but witty philosophical debates. And Jean-Baptiste Botul is even on Wikipedia in English, French, and German.

This is just uncautionable for a writer and a philosopher. And it’s an insult to readers who’ve wasted their money and time to read a careless writer. If this one went in unfettered into the product, what other falsehoods could have gone into the book?

Just think of the mischievous Keith Olbermann and his belly laugh at the mention of the next literary installment of Sarah Palin and you get an idea of the stock BHL among the Parisian literati these days.

BHL was born rich and owns shares in several powerful media groups and publishing houses, including the socialist-leaning newspaper Libération. But this didn’t prevent Eric Aeschimann and Robert Maggiori who wrote to write a stinging comment on this Botul fiasco titled “Bernard-Henri Lévy stricken with botulism” in Libération. The headline was followed by a secondary headline that read, “A hoax—the essayist fell into a trap of his own making by quoting Jean-Baptiste Botul.”

The most devastating part of the article was its conclusion:

“Botox. Frédéric Pagès invents Botul in 1996, taking advantage of the promising homophony with ‘botulism,’ a deadly disease caused by botulinum toxin, the word Botox stems from there. 'It has never been explicitly established that Botul hasn’t lived and it is therefore not to be excluded that one day history would prove Bernard-Henri Lévy correct,' [quipped] Frédéric Pagès.”

This intellectual debacle is of the same magnitude as the hoax of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont pulled at the expenses of Social Text (on this hoax, see their “Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science”; and its sequel by Alan Sokal, “Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture”).

And it is therefore an even more serious intellectual and political imposture, aided and abetted by Fareed Zakaria, to have BHL on CNN expound empty Freudian punditry on the making of the Times Square bomber whereas he can no longer control the elementary cultural parameters of his own native country and of his field of expertise!

One would think that after his “botulism” debacle, BHL would lie low for a while, avoiding unnecessary intellectual controversy.

No, he went at it again on April 29 when he launched on his blog on the website of Le Point an incoherent attack against the philosopher Michel Onfray’s well-researched and monumental anti-Freud book “Le crépuscule d’une idole: l’affabulation freudienne” [The Twilight of an idol: the Freudian Fantasy] published by Grasset (see cover photo below). (For those interested, Schoenhof’s in Cambridge, MA, will have the book in the first couple of weeks of June—the book just came out in mid-April—at the bargain price of $53.95)…

 Michel Onfray

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Let me back up a bit.

Michel Onfray compiles in his book a mass of exhibits and evidence to support his multiple felony indictment charges against Freud…

Freud was: tolerant toward fascists (he dedicated a book he sent one of his major works to Mussolini as a present); a liar who claimed to have quit sex at age 38 in order to “sublimate” his “libido” into psychoanalysis all the while having sex with his sister-in-law; a patriarchal sexist; a vicious homophobe; a dictatorial personality with a massive “ego” who ran a tight ship around his psychoanalytical fantasies; a cult leader who built a coterie of a select few sycophants around him and to whom he’d distributed rings to be worn at all time to show their allegiance (these sycophants rallied blindly around this personality cult from which were excommunicated those who wavered in their faith: the name of the archetypal Nemesis-in-Chief and premier Antifreud comes readily to mind here: Carl G. Jung; or the lesser known Wilhelm Fliess); an out-of-control simplistic reductionist who saw the Oedipal complex at work everywhere; a base and venal crook from the gutters who proclaimed that only the rich who could afford expensive bills of unending sessions of analysis warranted the attention of psychoanalysis and actually carried out a systematic shakedown of the rich (hence, Marxian psychoanalysis is an oxymoron); an intellectual egomaniac who conflated his ‘literary philosophy’ based on his biography with the psyche of all human beings…

In other words: “psychoanalysis is (…) a true and right as long as it concerns Freud alone and no one else” or, as Elie Guedj put it, the book is based on Michel Onfray’s “credo,” a “Nietzschean idea according to which a system is only [an autobiographical] confession”:

“Onfray method consists in demonstrating the objective weakness, the little scientificity of psychoanalysis, for the sole profit of an absolutely subjective construct of a ‘philosophical autobiography.’ The critique is consequently severe, radical and, at times, astutely excessive. Onfray’s style—as always limpid, explicit and smashing—and a commented bibliography of almost 20 pages, carry intensely his subject. The whole [book]—convincingly—benefits from buttressed argumentation, from a solid corpus and from a martial tone that calls to mind 'philosophizing with hammer blows.' Whether you share or not its judgments or convictions, this subversive, irreverent, spicy and dense book embodies what Lévinas called 'philosophy as insomnia,” fighting against the merchants of slumber. Let’s bet it’d trigger fierce reactions.'

The book did spark and is still sparking fierce reactions in France indeed. Only in France, btw, as psychoanalysis (of the unconscious) never took root in the U.S. where it was instead its mild version of “ego psychology” that developed. And in the rest of the vast world, the psychoanalytical shamanism is nonexistent.

Well, some critics of Michel Onfray’s book have pointed to the fact that his essay could be misconstrued as an ad-hominem attack against Freud. They could be right. No need to go into Freud’s personal life to show that if one were to undertake a close reading of different periods of Freud—as did the French psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bernard Pontalis—clusters of shifting uncertainties pop up in Freud’s works.

The American critic Jeffrey Mehlman, who teaches literature at Boston University, even pushed Laplanche and Pontalis’s reading to its extreme consequences. Building on the method of textual superimposition crafted by Charles Mauron in his book “Des Métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel: Introduction à la Psychocritique” [From Obsessive metaphors to Personal Myth: Introduction to Psychocriticism] and taking some reading cues from Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Jeffrey Mehlman perfected the method of textual “genealogies” that made him stumble upon huge “palimpsestic” blocks in Freud’s works—that is, later blocks of theory that completely contradict and erase earlier theories or statements.

Thus, decades prior to Michel Onfray’s book, Jeffrey Mehlman had already deflated all the hot air contained in the balloon called “psychoanalysis.”

I need to mention here that Jeffrey Mehlman, a great debunker of Freud and psychoanalysis and other blatant instances of crass anti-Semitism in France, is Jewish. I mention this fact because some of those who recently came out in France to blast Michel Onfray’s book have claimed all sorts of nonsense—for instance that in attacking Freud, Onfray is somehow anti-Semitic! This is absolutely lurid and demented. Are those who placate Marx anti-Semitic too?

Members of the still powerful corporation guild of psychoanalysts in France have come out in full force to launch concerted attacks against Michel Onfray. Some members of this corporation have accused this brilliant subversive philosopher to be in cahoots with “neoliberalism” or “savage capitalism” of the era globalization. A preposterous accusation.

Among the enemies Michel Onfray had made in this guild is the celebrity psychoanalyst Roland Gori who gave an interview to Gilbert Charles of L’Express. The title of the interview is a quotation of Roland Gori’s own words:“Psychoanalysis clash with the culture of the moment.”


Roland Gori makes the following astonishing claim:

“Psychoanalysis, just as a certain humanist psychiatry, feels that the affect, the relational must be taken into account. For a very long time, this culture of concern for the self was in agreement with certain presuppositions of ‘humanist’ traditional capitalism, which had prevailed during a large part of the 20th century, till the 1980s. In contrast to Taylorism, it considered that the individual’s personal and psychological fulfillment contributed to the improvement of productivity. Today, this human aspect is swept away: they don’t bet on the subject any longer, but on his actions. All the cogwheels of liberal economy rest on the idea that human behavior is rational and that it is possible to predict the actions of the individual in function of the interests they find therein. The human has become a simple technical segment of production. The state mandates professionals—psychologists, psychiatrists, cops and journalists—to have individuals and populations to internalize these neoliberal values.”

Is this joke or what? In this day and age? Reading this statement out of its proper context, one would think it was written by some polymath from the 19th century. And it is a shame that psychoanalysis still remains in the curriculum of students in psychiatry in France.

Besides, by describing psychoanalysis as the last rampart of the protection of the individual against the powers that be, Roland Gori is betting on the untenable proposition that people wouldn’t have read Michel Foucault’s very 1st volume of “The History of Sexuality” where this travesty is dissected and discarded. He’s also betting that all the current of “deconstruction” (which had all its excesses no doubt, but which actually operates like an intellectual “No Spin Zone” machine) had not happened in the interim.

And, btw, it is all the more telling that Roland Gori places the break from what he calls “humanist traditional capitalism” in the 1980s—around the peak of productivity of both Foucault (“The History of Sexuality” was published in 1984 if I’m not mistaken) and deconstruction (the French edition of Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” was published in 1979). Incidentally, it was also around 1980 that a madman called Jacques Lacan was about to end his seminars begun in 1950; seminars that were nothing more than a long-lasting con, as Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont convincingly demonstrated.

It’s worth noting that Roland Gori’s attack against Michel Onfray doesn’t tackle or dispute the facts of the arguments developed in the monumental book, it targets instead its author.

And it is at this juncture and in this register of personal attacks that the now diminished public philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) shows up. Whereas Roland Gori’s personal attack was only confined to the motives of Michel Onfray in destroying Freud and the centrality of Oedipus and other related fairy-tales in his work, BHL chooses to punch his formidable rival below the belt line.

BHL started his attacks against Michel Onfray in the media way before he read even one single sentence of the book. But Onfray counterattacked by brushing aside baseless attacks not grounded in the actual reading of the book and mocked in the media this novel method of “reading” without actually reading—thus refreshing the memory of the literary public about the “botulism” debacle.

BHL then dashed off on his blog a post entitled “For Sigmund Freud” that shows that the man might have become intellectually unhinged—a real disgrace to the tradition of rigorous and reasoned intellectual exercise that has made the pride of France from Descartes onward.

Here’s how BHL starts his libelous post:

“Michel Onfray complained of being criticized without being read?

Well, then, I read it.

I did it by striving, as best as it is possible, to set aside our old camaraderie, common friendships as well as, but this goes without saying, the fact that we are, both of us, published by the same publishing house.

And, truth be told, I came out of that reading even more appalled than could have been anticipated by the few reviews of the book that I, like everyone else, could might have read.”

The philosopher thus admits unashamedly that he never read the book before launching his nasty attacks on TV. More importantly, both authors are published by the same publisher, Grasset. And rumors had it before Onfray’s book came out that BHL was pressuring the Parisian publisher to drop his rival… or else. BHL has all the reasons in the world to be jealous. Each time Michel Onfray comes up with a book it’s an instant hit. And by yesterday, his book on Freud had shot up at the second place of France’s 10 Top bestsellers, having sold close to 700 000 copies within a few weeks.

From the pitiable opening of the blog post, BHL then squarely descends into the gutter: the book, according to his fatwa, is “banal, simplistic, puerile, pedantic.” He then goes on to elaborate with insults on each one of these points and adds new ones. The book is “ridiculous,” he screams, it reads like the “Da Vinci Code,” etc.

BHL then comes to a screeching and weird conclusion—considering his own “Botulism” debacle:

“All this is distressing.

I have trouble (…) finding in this web of platitudes, more idiotic than malicious, the author of some books—among others, “Le ventre des philosophes” [the philosopher’s belly]—that had appeared so promising to me twenty years ago. 

Psychoanalysis, which has seen its share of ups and downs, will recover. As for Michel Onfray, I’m not so certain.”

Well, it seems instead that both psychoanalysis and BHL will never recover from their irrelevance. Not even the lame attempt by BHL at selling to the American television audiences the discredited shamanism of psychoanalysis by attempting to explain the actions of the Times Square bomber and other terrorists with the dysfunction of the “libido.”

The book will be available in June at Schoenof's in Cambridge, MA, for $53.95