Actually the philosopher Botul never existed
Our friend Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most dashing thinker, has egg on his face today after it was discovered that he had fallen for a well-known literary hoax. The story is delicious.
In his latest book, published this week amid the traditional adulation in the media, Lévy, 61, attacks Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher. He calls him “raving mad” and cites as his authority Jean-Baptiste Botul, a 20th century philosopher.
The trouble is that Botul never existed. He was invented as an elaborate joke in 1999 by Frédéric Pagès, a literary journalist, who wrote works in his name. One was titled “The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.” His school, known as Botulism, subscribes to his theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” [The metaphysics of the limp].
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