Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Bernard-Henri Levy. Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century. London: The Harvill Press, 1995. xi + 433 pp. £20.00 (cloth). Bernard-Henri Levy, one of the principal "nouveaux philosophes" of post-1968 French thought, began his most renowned book—Barbarism with a Human Face of 1977— with the dramatic line, "I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism." The line sums up the ongoing project of Bernard-Henry Levy in style, form, and content, and this remains the preface to the cultural situation he wishes to elucidate as well as to some of the problems with his own work. The present work begins as one breezy book; cool and vaguely impious. One might capitulate almost immediately to Levy's carnivalesque view of the often nasty ideological contortions of 20th-century French intellectuals, and then go along for the ride. Allow the tale (the "commedia dell'arte," as Levy sometimes refers to it) its tragi-comic adventure, the long introduction appears to ask seductively. Once beyond the introduction, however, it is clear that this is a book about ideology—the "adventures" of the title—and the continued attempt to come to terms with the complex and contradictory intellectual legacy to which Levy finds himself inextricably indebted: but "[tjhere again, one cannot choose one's family" (146). Lesser-known names drop quite casually throughout this book so it may read more smoothly for those familiar with the French intellectual and political milieu. It is nonetheless a contemporary history of ideas with Levy's swashbuckling stylistic flair for viewing history in all its "seething and cataclysmic chaos" (294): "the history of ideas is dreadful, like being in a quagmire . . . like watching the movements of an eel. It lunges forward, retracts, coils round on itself, stretches out, and then draws back again" (347). This book— although we might say it is not a "book," as Levy asserts of Althusser's works—is comprised of the more public form of interviews (with Claude Simon, Klossowski, LévyStrauss , Barthes, Foucault, and others), occasionally fascinating historical anecdotes, and often astute interpretations of research and experience. Levy's story encompasses the "adventures" of the Dreyfus Affair, Stalinism, Nazism, Vichy, the war in Algeria, and the after-effects of May 1968, as well as the silly vituperation of the surrealists, the bizarrely contradicting versions of Althusser's character supplied by Jean Guitton and Stanislas Breton, and other tales of the absurd or at least of hypotheses that have the "great merit" of "the plausibility of fiction" (240). Levy is alternately clever (quoting Roland Gary: "The only thing that counts is whether or not one is quoted, and I'm one of the truly damned who isn't" [95]), self-critical, and self-inflating. The book is perhaps best read for its interviews and the insights gleaned from its informally biographical aspects. And yet, it is a rather strangely convoluted book with the melancholy aesthetic of a fin-de-siècle spirit, especially given the ongoing tragedies of the century and perhaps given the not uncommon French inquietude regarding cultural stagnation in its years of waning socialism. Levy's brief discussion of writers and the Dreyfus Affair serves to outline the antisemitism -versus-integrity (neither of which is monopolized by the Right nor the Left) that will inform much of French thought throughout the century and define the meaning of "intellectual." For the first time, he claims, the conditions were such that "it was necessary for individuals to find the courage to proclaim themselves intermediaries between universal values and the everyday world" (56). Many of these mediators or "priests" will transform themselves throughout the century, André Malraux being perhaps the paradigmatic case of those whose writing eventually takes secondary status to the near religious commitment to 90 Summer 1997 Book Reviews adventures of the political and the heroic. As Levy repeats in various contexts, "what we desperately need are theologians who can interpret this phenomenon" (358). Most particularly, however, this book is an attempt to elicit the various extents to which intellectuals themselves have been compliantly blinkered ideologically, and how "the God of the history of ideas...