a self-portrait of insomnia from lucidity and moral confusion

There is nothing new about bad sleep, nor about confessions in the form of a work of literature, although I wonder if there is about the growing presence on the November table mountains. Recently, we have known the opinion of David Jiménez Torres, Bad sleepor the recent one On a saila comic by Ana Penyas that also explores agony, routine reversals and eternal nights without descanso.

Popular French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948) was placed in a different tradition, grander and centered in the same way, but the problem was no different: the dream as a territory in crisis.

Lévy uses insomnia as a forced narrative to become sober a mixture of exhibitionism, lucidity and moral sanction which defines much of his late work. It is neither a medical treatise nor an intimate diary self recorded written after extensionfrom this point that your thoughts are not controlled by hierarchies, not even by feverish associations.

The book is constructed as a night drift: records, reading, wars, lovers, dream theory and history. Levy don’t worry about it and don’t sleep when the whole world thinks so.

“Night Cruise” is not a medical treatise or an intimate diary to be used, but rather a self-report written after the

Insomnia appears to be a form of hypervigilance: if you don’t worry, as the author seems to suggest, you can’t stop looking. Y watching in this case meant being in Bosnia, Libya, Ukraine, Israel between 7.in scenarios where the story is concrete in tragedy.

It is no coincidence that Lévy, who has been so involved in international political discussions in recent decades, is concerned about the impossibility of sleeping with an “overdue visa”. An insistence that has something cartoonish about it, mirroring the movies we show war veterans, by Travis in Taxi driver hasta el teniente Dan de Forrest Gump. Eve will be the price he pays for living a vibrant life in the midst of the world’s moral destruction.

But Night cruise also e.g a deeply literary book full of references: Mallarmé, Proust, Kafka, Pessoa, Zweig, Leiris. Reading turns into a survival technique—reading to get bored, to improve—and at the same time a form of repeated failure. Even great literature collapses before a body that has lost its natural rhythm of relaxation.

In this sense, thought dialogues with a wider cultural interest. Although Lévy insists on identifying his case, the reader cannot help but recognize a shared experience in his case.

The book is also a radical ideological adjustment. Lévy cannot sleep because the world is developing badly, because Europe is falling apart, because the izquierda he knew is repelling it and the extreme derecha is advancing. In this respect, it is a book of French intellectuals. At this point the file is more contentious.

Moral clarity coexists with significant affirmations, sometimes with simplificationbelonging to an intellectual who never stopped controversies like him on defense with several Israeli weapons in action in Gaza.

Overall, the book reads with a mixture of fascination and effort. There are moments of brilliance and others of pure narcissism. Lévy is true to much, and it will be up to the reader to decide whether this evening is an act of past valor, vanity, or probably both.