The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.

Bernard-Henri Lévy. Photo Thierry Dudoit/L’Express/Editing.

Had never met him before our recent breakfast in New York. Had heard from both my French and American friends many hints about his whirlwind, celebrity-driven, less-than-profound intellectual nature. “He has an agenda,” an editor told me, without naming the agenda. “So do you, so do I,” I answered. “He wants to be famous,” a writer told me. “So do you, I said, and so does everyone else we know.”

What is at the bottom of all the suspicion and calumny, I wondered, and now having read his book, American Vertigo, still wonder. Maybe the problem is that Bernard-Henri Lévy is tireless and broad-ranged in his interests and finally, and worst of all, that he is so passionate and elegant—dreariness being the hallmark of the serious intellectual, Left and Right.

Let him here speak for himself.

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Issue 95 Spring 2006