Horizon

BHL's Prose

I think that Bernard Henri-Lévi's prose is giving me vertigo. I'm not sure if it's French idiom — he also uses French punctuation when he's quoting — or a result of too many debates with post-structuralists, but sentences like this make me long for the simplicity of scientific German:

This form of absurd, pathological memory, this memory that is both anxious and lazy, febrile and idle, this memory that is, at bottom, "un-American" since, by a singular reversal of roles, it is in the process of turning that great America of the Enlightenment, the America about which Goethe wrote that it had freed itself both from its European past and from the European obsession with the past, into a country even more enslaved to the past than the most past-obsessed European countries: this memory, then, is a memory that, if the world resembled what philosophers say of it, if we followed Nietzsche to the conclusion of his most somber premonitions, would turn into not the stimulus but the grave digger of the present time, and would be, for the American nation of today, a harbinger of identity crises at least as formidable as those actualy symmetrical crises that stem from absolute nonmemory and from a settling into that "vegetative present" that Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations also speaks of, and which hypnotize peoples just as powerfully.

Whew!