Wide-eyed, surprised look, “BHL” doesn’t understand the question, and it seems sincere. No, really, why when sleepless night (Grasset), his latest book, could we accuse him of any snobbery? Narrating one’s insomnia and thus presenting oneself to the world in a perpetual state of consciousness and cogitation, while others, less tormented, forget the world for a night, this is not at all arrogant.
Let his “brothers in insomnia” be called Pessoa and Lautréamont – certainly not Proust, “too voluptuous” his sleepless hours –, or even Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic, whose last light he observes from his window. goes out, has nothing to do with boasting. “It’s an illness,” he cuts us off, sternly. So, those who make fun… He doesn’t really care. Even if he will read every line written about him, because “those who do not read are bad warriors”. He will read, but he promises that it will not affect him in any way. No doubt true, otherwise he would have allowed himself, at the end of his work, what would almost seem like a provocation: “I don’t understand how one can devote one’s time to anything other than writing (on Lautréamont), think (on Ukraine and Israel), work (on Raymond Roussel or the Maharal of Prague)”?
Bernard-Henri Lévy has the calm of authors sure of having produced an essential work. Not necessarily for others but for themselves. He says: “It is perhaps the most important of my books”, he adds: “But, strangely, it is the one from which I expect the least”, he specifies: “I am not trying to convince”. And we think that there is a lot of wisdom and resilience in these last words, since that is the fashionable term. Convince on Ukraine, convince on Israel, convince on Libya, but do not try to convince that he, the philosopher in the white shirt despite his wars, is anything other than his public caricature. Reasonable.
For a long time now, he has not slept and this uninterrupted awakening fills his nights with figures that matter: his loves, the one of his life, Arielle Dombasle, his adored daughter Justine, precious friends… So much for joy. Then his deaths. Here’s the problem, comrade Philippe Sollers suggested to him, “is that you’ve seen too much.” How can we let go after observing the mass graves, the corpses, the wounded? Everyone persecutes him, he insists on it: “Defending Israel and its strategy does not prevent you from being upset by what is happening in Gaza unless you are a barbarian, a brute.” He insists: “People think I’m being smart when I say I’ve seen too much. But no. Not that much. […] But if there is one who knows, who has seen and heard, I unfortunately believe that it is me, and it is not easy to get back to sleep after that.” We grimace. Barely 20 pages and already BHLism does not always have this temptation to stay at the center of the event, at the center of the wars, at the center of the image…
We continue reading, and throughout his restless nights we come across other, more intimate characters. Here the father, André Lévy, who sleeps little and emerges in the middle of the night to read the pages crossed out by his son before the ink has finished drying. Alongside “this secret king who reigned over most of those who approached him, I witnessed reversals of ascendancy with considerable figures who had every reason to have the ascendancy,” confides BHL . I remember François Mitterrand, for example, in front of him, in five minutes the authority had been turned around, a very strange chemical phenomenon. Serene admiration for this man or narcissistic anxiety of not following him? Bernard-Henri Lévy says nothing about it, not a word, and suddenly the reader thinks back with more compassion to the beautiful role he has created for himself.
Finally, death appears. His. “Does not sleeping kill you? God knows I’ve asked myself that question! But I don’t have an answer,” he murmurs. Would he be worried? Of course not, he who has experienced so much that he “tends to feel out of reach”. He relates “the reckless risks” taken on his shoots, he hopes, he calls for a conscious death, haunted by these people who dream of dying in their sleep. We think: “Another BHLian bravado.” He clarifies: “I would like to inhabit my own death. If only to transmit it. Isn’t this one of the moments when we have the most to say to those close to us?” Then everything becomes clear. The cause of his insomnia, of this excitement, of these excesses… The fear of leaving without noise, without a trace.
sleepless nightby Bernard-Henri Lévy. Grasset, 190 p., €18.50.
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