Journalists and intellectuals across the English-speaking world were today celebrating the discomforture of Bernard-Henri Lévy, French philosopher and public intellectual. "This confirms everything we've always said about the superficiality of the Gallic philosophical tradition, and the way they reduce everything to a meaningless game of words and rhetoric where rock-star showmanship and open shirts matter more than solid scholarship," said our Parisian correspondent Constantin Phlange, who writes almost-identical reports for the Times under the byline 'Charles Bremner' and for the Daily Torygraph under the byline 'Henry Samuel'.
Phlange went on to explain that "To support his description of Immanuel Kant as an unhinged 'fake', Mr Lévy cites a certain Jean-Baptiste Botul -- not realising that Botul is a fictional character and his book The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant was satire. He has stepped back on his own kumara, as you New Zealanders are wont to say."
It later emerged that the reason why Bernard-Henri Lévy so accurately confirmed Anglosaxon attitudes about grandiloquent French penseurs is that he himself is a fictitious character, dreamed up by Malcolm Bradbury as a parody of those attitudes.
"Indeed, this is central to my point," said Phlange from an undisclosed location. "Bernard-Henri Lévy may lack corporeal existence but he remains an excellent example of everything that is wrong with anything that's not English."
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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He described him as the father of a school of thought called "Botulism" and stressed that he had left a rich "oral tradition" in philosophy.
That is just awesome in so many ways.
Indeed, just as the internationally notorious "Smut Clyde" is an entirely fictitious persona, dreamt up over a weekend binge of black pudding and akavit by an unassuming New Zealand doktor as a commentary on the decline of thoughtful, educated discourse in our society and the increasing dominance of instant gratifi - Dammit, we're out of hot sauce...
Nils Runeberg had a point.
The Lévy story is getting a lot of coverage in the right-leaning bloggosphere (e.g. Reason, Free Republic, Werner Huston's various outlets) where it is universally accepted that Lévy must be left-wing -- after all he's French, and an intellectual! -- so the affair brings discredit upon liberals.
In American terms, Lévy's a neo-con. He presents himself as a Decent Leftwinger who has rejected the barbarity of Marxism, supports Pope Ratzinger, supported the Iraq invasion, and in fact has never seen an invasion that he didn't like. The whole debacle occurred because he's currently attacking the idea of constant ethical standards (as promoted by Kant).
Since Bradbury is a creation of J.G.Ballard, it's getting kind of stuffy in there.
a creation of J.G.Ballard
...Who was in turn created by J. L. Borges, the well-known theological historian.
I contain multitudes myself, but those are just the tapeworms.
We can only admire your dedication to poisoning them with amounts of alcohol that would be crippling to a lesser being.
It is better than the tapirs in my intestines, which can only be described as very uncomfortable.
One can only speculate how they pass from host to host.
Perhaps they would be more comfortable if you modified your diet to something more tapir-friendly
Tapir worms, perhaps?
This is why we can't have nice threads, it always gets intestinal. From French philosophers to Tapir worms in three posts.
I don't get your point. I have nice things...
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