File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-11-23.164, message 41


Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 22:36:43 +0200
From: jgautero-AT-hermes.unice.fr (Jean-Luc Gautero)
Subject: M-TH: Levy and Glucksmann (was Pipes)


Justin Schwartz wrote, about Barbarism With A Human Face, by Bernard-Henri Lévy

> It was fairly lightweight

Sorry, I should have write after the question

>did he ever wrote philosophical books?

a :-)

(I hope it is this one), because what you write is exactly what I intended
with my question.
He wrote other bad books, not long after Barbarism With a Human Face:
L'ideologie francaise (French ideology), where he explained that nearly all
french intellectuals before him were either fascist or stalinian, and
sometimes both;
Eloge des intellectuels (Praise of intellectuals): the title, strangely if
we put it near the former book, was not, I think, ironical; he spoke, I
suppose, of new intellectuals, whose best instance he was in his opinion;
this book was prepublished in a fashion magazine, and I did not read it.
As for Andre Glucksmann, you write

>He had a brain in his head once upon a time.

You agree with my colleagues of the department of Philosophy in my
university, but what I read by him seemed me as bad as Bernard-Henri Levy:
your abstract of Barbarism with an Human Face seems me to be also a good
abstract for his La cuisini=E8re et le mangeur d'hommes (The cook and the
men-eater). Then he wrote Les maitres penseurs (The masters thinkers),
where he explained that Fichte, Hegel, Marx and Nietzche were all potential
dictators, because none of them was interested by the real people, who
speak by the mouth of Andre Glucksmann; then he wrote La betise
(Stupidity), a critic from the right of the french socialist government of
the beginning of the eighties (I did not read the book, but I heard the
author presenting it on television: he said socialists were stupid because
they named communists in the french government, and thus opened the way for
a transformation of France into a dictatorship; he also said that the
demonstrations in Europ at that time whose motto was Neither Pershings nor
SS20 were stupid, because american Pershings are good atombombs, but
russian SS20 are bad); a few years ago, at last, he wrote Descartes, c'est
la France (Descartes, it's France), which, I have been told, was rather
bad; but now we do no longer hear about him, perhaps he is doing good and
serious work.
(I have forgotten: the first book by Glucksmann that I read, Le discours de
la guerre, Discourse of the War, was in my opinion rather good, except for
a little caricatural maoism; but I think he wrote it after having been a
student of Raymond Aron, and what was good in the book came probably from
Aron).


------------------------------------------------------------
Jean-Luc Gautero - Centre de Recherches d'Histoire des Idées
=46aculté des Lettres - Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis
98 Boulevard Edouard Herriot - BP 209 - 06204 Nice Cedex 3
Email: jgautero-AT-hermes.unice.fr
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