We honest-to-God had thought we finished with M. Zidane and Sr. Materazzi and le coup de boule. -- the whole Mondial business. We said our peace. Good night. But we came late to this hyperbolic gush of purple apologia by none other than France's FHM philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Written to sound intelligent, erudite, it is riddled with schoolboy errors. Meant as an apotheosis, its laughable bombast reads instead like the Apocolocyntosis.

ZIDANE
The French Hero Who Was, Ultimately, Just A Man.

PARIS July 11, 2006 (WSJ) - Here is one of the greatest players of all time, a legend, a myth for the entire planet [!], and universally acclaimed. Here is a champion who, in front of two billion people, was putting the final touches on one of the most extraordinary sagas in soccer's history.

Here is a man of providence, a savior, who was sought out, like Achilles in his tent of grudge and rage, because he was believed to be the only one who could avert his countrymen's fated decline. Better yet, he's a super-Achilles who--unlike Homer's--did not wait for an Agamemnon* (in the guise of coach Raymond Domenech) to come begging him to re-enlist; rather, he decided himself, spontaneously, after having "heard" a voice** calling him, to come back from his Spanish exile and--putting his luminous armor back on, and flanked by his faithful Myrmidons (Makelele, Vieira, Thuram)--reverse the new Achaeans' ill fortune and allow them to successfully pull together.

And then this valiant knight who is a hair's breadth from victory and just minutes from the end of a historic match (and of a career that will carry him into the Pantheon of stadium-gods after Pelé, Platini and Maradona); this giant who, like the Titans*** of the ancient world, has known Glory, then Exile, then Return and Redemption; this redeemer, this blue angel dressed in white, who had only the very last steps to scale to enter Olympus for good, commits a crazy incomprehensible act that amounts to disqualification from the soccer ritual [It is actually a game.]--the final image of him that will go down in history and, in lieu of apotheosis, will cast him into hell.

[N]o provocation, no nasty remark, will ever tell us why the planetary icon that Zinedine Zidane had become, a man more admired than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela put together [NB], a demigod, a chosen one, this great priest-by-consensus of the new religion [a soccer religion?] and the new empire [a soccer empire?] in the making, chose to explode right there, rather than wait a few minutes to settle the quarrel on the sidelines.

No. The truth is that it is perhaps not so easy to stay in the skin of an icon, demigod, hero, legend.

The man's insurrection against the saint. A refusal of the halo that had been put on his head and that he then, quite logically, pulverized with a head-butt, as though saying: I am a living being not a fetish; a man of flesh and blood and passion, not this idiotic empty hologram, this guru, this universal psychoanalyst [Huh?], natural child of Abbé Pierre [!] and Sister Emanuelle [This. Not this.], which soccer-mania was trying to turn me into.

It was as though he were repeating, in parody, the title of one of the very great books of the last century, before the triumph of this liturgy of the body, performance and commodity: Ecce Homo,† This is a Man.‡ Yes, a man, a true man, not one of these absurd monsters or synthetic stars who are made by the money of brand names in combination with the sighs of the globalized crowd.

[Italics in original. Coup de boule hat tip: Carine]

Must be read in its entirety for the full intended effect of intellectual bulimia.

* B(s)-HL must try actually reading the classics before shoehorning them into his thumping metaphors. It is Odysseus who seeks out Achilles on the island Skyros. Thetis has hidden Achilles at the court of Lycomedes among the king's daughters disguised as a girl. Odysseus uses a ruse to expose Achilles and then convinces him to join the Achean war on Troy. Or does B(s)-HL refer to Bk XI of the Iliad? But there simply is no congruence between Agamemnon and Raymond Domenech. Agamemnon never personally entreats Achilles to "re-enlist" and, in any case, the Achean embassy (Phoenix, Odysseus, Ajax, Odius, and Eurybates) is spurned.

*** B(s)-HL appears to be re-inventing myths for his metaphors. The primary source here is Hesiod's Theogony, in which the warring Titans are defeated by the Olympians and imprisoned in Tartarus, where they remain to this day. No source to our knowledge presents B(s)-HL's Titans formulary of "Glory, then Exile, then Return and Redemption".

† Our guess is that B(s)-HL is referring to Ecce Homo: Wie Man wird Was Man Ist (Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is) by Friedrich Nietzsche, actually written in 1888 but published in 1908, which gets in under the wire for "last century". The phrase itself is sufficent for B(s)-HL's fustian purpose. The reference to Nietzsche's autobiography is a pompous irrelevance.

‡ More correctly, "Behold the Man!", which suits its original context. Latin ecce, behold + Latin hom, man.

PFFT (What is this?): Parisian deep think ¼ | Rayonnement français 0