From the Shenanigans Files: Literary Hoax Alert!

Okay. Jean Baptiste Botul is a clearly fictional philosopher created by a French journalist named Frédéric Pagès, who writes for a clearly satirical weekly called the Le Canard Enchaîné. Mr. Botul has a wikipedia page and a fan club that meets monthly in salons throughout Paris to discuss Mr. Botul’s “ideas”. He has given rise to a school of philosophical thought called Botulism – a play on words with the bovine disease and key ingredient in Botox. His followers are “botuliennes” who debate such clearly parodic theories as the metaphysics of flab, ( “La Metaphysique du Mou”), the phenomenology to cheese, sausages, women’s breasts and the transport of valises during the 1930s.

La Vie Sexuelle d’ Emmanual Kant is one of several very conspicuously tongue-in- cheek pieces penned under the nom de plume “Botul”. Even if you’re not familiar with Botul’s “body of work”, the title alone would alert anyone even mildly acquainted with Mr. Kants. A pietist and lifelong bachelor with a delicate constitution who never travelled more than a few miles outside his hometown, sex played a very little part in his life and even less in his work.

Bernard-Henri Levy, on the other hand, is all sexed up, a windswept, card carrying Silver Fox. A technical “French intellectual” (I think he’s actually neither), media darling, defender of causes, provocateur. Referred to as “BHL” by the media, he favors velvet jackets and shirts largely unbuttoned to his navel. A self-described “Baudelairean,” he has been refereed to as a “Parisian amalgam of Susan Sontag and Warren Beatty”, and compared to Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and King David. Adamantly libertine, with a long history of mistresses from around the globe, he is married to the psychotically beautiful actress Arielle Dombasle, (Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach) who once said on TV that the first time she saw a picture of him she thought he was “Jesus Christ”.  

Before he became the mincing capon he is now, Mr Lévy led a group of disenchanted young lefties who called themselves the nouveaux philosophes. These guys had extensive media coverage in Europe in the 1970’s, appearing on television and in nonacademic magazines like Paris-Match and Playboy, giving them pop star status in France and abroad. Gilles Deleuze called them “TV buffoons”. Vidal-Naquet went as far as saying: “BHL’s intellectual dishonesty is properly unfathomable”.

Comment incroyablement stupide! In his essay De la guerre en philosophie last month, BHL thoroughly and publicly embarrassed himself when he used, as a central point of his refutation of Kant, the writings of French “philosopher” Jean-Baptiste Botul. Mr. Lévy attacked the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as a madman, and in support cited the Paraguayan lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul to his 20th-century followers. He cites a “series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay” he supposedly gave after the war, in which he said that “their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance”. Hence we have the laughing stock of the Left Bank.

Mr. Levy seemingly missed the joke, but is it really plausible that BHL cited Jean-Baptiste Botul as a serious work of scholarship? It seems that something is amiss. Perhaps an act of sabotage by a bitter underling? Either way, it’s pretty hilarious.

What’s French for “Google”?