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After 27 years in the public eye, Bernard-Henri Lévy is France's iconic postmodern intellectual. A writer, director, philosopher and humanitarian activist, he has been called everything but shy. Since he burst into public view in 1977 as a founding member of the "new philosopher" movement — which urged action over purely conceptual thought, and broke leftist ranks by denouncing Soviet communism as fascism — the mediagenic BHL (as he's usually known) has been relentless. He has published countless essays and more than 30 books, including his 2003 "investi-novel" Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, a partly fictionalized investigation of the people and places that led to the Wall Street Journal reporter's 2002 beheading by Islamic extremists in Pakistan. When not typing, BHL is a frequent guest on chat shows, a staple of celebrity magazines and a durable symbol of the Parisian high life with his wife, actress/singer Arielle Dombasle.

In other words, he's used to being a big target. But with five mostly scathing books about Lévy and his work recently published or on the way, even Lévy may finally be feeling overexposed. The most unflattering light was cast last week with the publication of investigative journalist Philippe Cohen's BHL: A Biography. It argues that Lévy's career was built upon contrarian posing, relentless grandstanding, lying, and connivance with politicians and the media, and — much worse — that it is devoid of any real intellectual contribution. "His irrepressible desire to express himself about everything and nothing renders his point of view incoherent," writes Cohen, who co-authored a 2003 book bashing another French institution, Le Monde. "BHL has not invented a single concept; hasn't formulated a theory."

That's rough treatment of an author who has long reveled in his talent for switching literary gears — from philosophy to investigation to fiction to screenwriting. But his detractors say his desire to weave between genres and disciplines, and his need to crusade from Bosnia to Darfur, is precisely the problem. They argue that Lévy has failed to do the mental work of constructing and defending philosophical systems the way earlier titans like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre did. "Previous generations of French intellectuals justified their entire careers on their conceptual work," says philosopher François Cusset, author of French Theory. "Before, the ideas came first and the thinker second; now it's reversed. BHL and the others are moralists who take up crusades on various issues, and rely on the media to advertise them — and themselves." The fury over BHL raises a question: if Lévy is the perfect French intellectual for the media age, what's become of intellectualism? Can the philosopher's rarefied habit of mind survive in the spotlight?

The criticism is not entirely new; BHL's earlier works were widely denounced by late, great French intellectuals like Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Aron, who labeled his positions hyperbolic and rash. By contrast, Cohen laments, books like Who Killed Daniel Pearl? don't get a single bad review despite what he calls their unremarkable writing and problematic ethics. The reason, he argues, is that instead of breaking new intellectual ground, Lévy and his modern peers rework existing ideas to justify media-hyped, crowd-pleasing moralism. "BHL has taken up all the great causes of our time," Cohen writes. "BHL is a bit to literature what Mondavi is to wine."

Asked to respond to Cohen's book, Lévy quotes Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran ("I've always asked myself how it is the mere risk of having a biographer doesn't dissuade us from having a life"), then says he's content to let people decide for themselves. He also argues that modern French thinkers aren't so different from past generations. "The great intellectuals of the '50s and '60s, the structuralists, kept a certain distance, but often also became engaged — as Foucault did about prison conditions, and Derrida on capital punishment," he says. And he's unapologetic about his use of the media to promote his work. "When I returned from Bangladesh in 1971 and wrote of the horrors I saw there, I obeyed all the rules back then for [an] intellectual with a book: the university circuit, stayed low-key, scholarly, no noise. The result: no readers, no critics, no attention drawn to the drama I had addressed. Since then, I've vowed to do whatever necessary to get people reading about burning issues and crises."

The attacks on Lévy are unlikely to have much effect on general readers — except to push his profile still higher. Since the days of the philosopher-architects of the Revolution, France has had a need both to elevate its thinkers and to follow their lead. The only thing that will displace BHL will be another school of thought that the public likes even better.

• BRUCE CRUMLEY | Paris
• An attack on France's most prominent philosopher