Qui est cet existentialist?

France’s most debonair philosopher, the silver fox himself, Bernard-Henri Levy, or BHL to the rive-gauche cognoscenti, has demolished Immanuel Kant in his most recent book. The great German rationalist was branded a ‘raving mad fake’. Charles Bremner reports that the book met with the usual adulation and Levy was the toast of the Left Bank.

Levy had drawn on the work of an obscure Kantian expert named Jean-Baptiste Botul. This has proved Levy’s undoing: Botul was the invention of a bored journalist.

There are clues that Botul’s origins lie in jest. A glance at his Wikipedia entry reveals a philosopher of the Athenian oral traditional who left no written work. Naturally, he was a great lover. Following a catastrophic fling with Marie Bonaparte, a psychiatrist who specialised in female frigidity, Botul shacked-up with Simone de Beauvoir. Satre was not amused. Botul was widely travelled and he and Pancho Villa became close personal friends, the two exchanged Christmas cards throughout the Mexican Revolution.

After Botul’s premature death on his 51st birthday, the Association of Friends of Jean-Baptiste Botul committed what they recalled of his work to paper, producing The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant - a seminal work. A second pamphlet expounded ‘La Metaphysique du Mou’ – the Metaphysics of the Flabby.

Lately, The Botulism Foundation inaugurated the Botul Prize, which is bestowed upon writers who reference the life and works of Botul. Levy must be a shoo-in for this year’s award, he wrote:

'Just after the Second World War, in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, he (Botul) proved that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance.'

Remind you of anyone?