Iconic French Philosopher Falls for Literary Hoax

NICE, France (Feb. 9) – France's most famous celebrity philosopher, the flashy Bernard-Henri Lévy, likes to be at the center of intellectual discourse in Paris, where he can count on at least some people greeting his every pensée with fawning admiration.

But this week Lévy, known throughout France simply as BHL, is the national laughingstock after he went hook, line and sinker for a literary hoax so obvious it wasn't even meant to fool anyone.

In his new book, "On War in Philosophy," Lévy invokes the work of an obscure French philosopher named Jean-Baptiste Botul as part of a savage attack on the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Unfortunately for Lévy, Jean-Baptiste Botul does not exist. He's an imaginary character invented by a French journalist at a satirical weekly. Had Lévy done even a bit of fact-checking, he could have avoided a scholarly faux pas of epic proportions.

Botul, for example, has a Wikipedia entry that makes clear his thought has only been written down in one book, "The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant." There one can also read that his work inspired a school of philosophy called Botulism – better known as a deadly illness – and has his own theory called "La Metaphysique du Mou," or the Metaphysics of the Flabby.

Mindless of those broad winks, Lévy cites Botul as a postwar authority on Kant and uses his arguments to bolster his thesis that Kant was a "fake." Lévy even quotes a series of the imaginary Botul's postwar lectures to the "neo-Kantians of Paraguay" in which he told his audience that "their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance."

Aude Lancelin, the journalist at Le Nouvel Observateur who discovered the Botul references in Lévy's new book, said he had made a "nuclear gaffe."

Botul's creator, Frédéric Pagès of the weekly Canard Enchaîné, said he was both "startled and thrilled" when he heard that Levy was citing the fictitious Botul.

"We weren't trying to fool anyone," Pagès said. "What's astonishing is that (Lévy) didn't see that it was obviously made up."

The mediagenic and supersuccessful Lévy, who was one of the leaders of the "New Philosophy" movement in the 1970s, is no stranger to controversy and jealousy among the Left Bank literati.

His investigation into the killing of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl – called "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" – was criticized for mixing fact and fiction even as it illustrated the central role of Pakistan in Islamist terror. He was an early supporter of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s and a strong advocate of intervention in the Bosnian war in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, BHL bashing is a popular Parisian sport, whether critics are mocking his signature unbuttoned white shirt or suggesting that his work is too narcissistic and sometimes suspect. He is married to his third wife, French actress Arielle Dombasle.

Pagès said he was incredulous that Lévy didn't see through the "ridiculous story" supposedly recounted in "The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant" about a group of Germans who fled to Paraguay so they could live in a settlement strictly ruled by Kantian philosophy.

"That alone should have alerted him," said Pages. "It begs the question of his methods of working."

Lévy, for his part, toughed it out Monday night when he made the rounds of some TV talk shows. His very Lévy-like strategy was to praise Pagès for his fictional creation.

"Hats off to this invented but truer-than-real-life Kant whose portrait, whether signed by Botul or Pagès, still seems in line with my idea of (the philosopher)," he told the daily Libération.

He pointed out that he was not alone in falling for the hoax; so did many critics who lavished Lévy's new book with praise. "So I was caught, as were the critics who reviewed the book when it came out," he said. "The only thing left to say, with no hard feelings, is kudos to the artist!"