Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

In his lecture ‘On Some of the Affects of Capitalism’, given in Copenhagen in February 2014, Bruno Latour emphasized our sense of powerlessness when we imagine capitalism as a set of market laws beyond our control and as the only possible socio-economic system available to us. This is the sentiment that Carole Sweeney explores in her carefully researched and well-written analysis of Michel Houellebecq’s fiction as a ‘literature of despair’. She begins by examining Houellebecq’s provocative authorial posture, which has played an important role in the reception of his novels: the cigarette-smoking, controversy-creating shadow that infiltrates the pages of his fiction. Tracing the outlines of this shadow, Sweeney draws on Foucault’s biopolitics to explain the effects of ‘unfettered capitalism’ as it extends into all areas of life including sex and sexuality. She asserts that, for Houellebecq, there are only two possible responses to this hostile takeover: hedonistic participation or ascetic withdrawal. In her study of Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Sweeney highlights the narrator’s inability to engage in the capitalist drive to consume. The narrator is a ‘(bad) subject of neoliberalism’, but this does not mean that he escapes the ‘biopolitical regime’ (p. 88), for there is no outside from which to construct identity. In her study of Les Particules e´le´mentaires (1998), Sweeney explores Houellebecq’s critique of contemporary society in light of the intellectual backlash against May 1968. For Houellebecq and others, la pense´e ’68 played into capitalism’s call for more individual freedom, breaking down the ties of family and kinship even further. This leads Sweeney to a much-needed critique of Houellebecq’s anti-feminism, which idealizes women who ‘naturally’ want to provide pleasure to males. She carefully teases out the contradictions in Houellebecq’s representation of sex and sexuality, contrasting the narrator’s ‘hedonist participation’ in sexual tourism in Plateforme (2001) with Michel’s ascetic withdrawal from sex in Les Particules e´le´mentaires. Sweeney’s final chapter asks whether there is any way out of this deterministic universe. In La Possibilite´ d’une ıˆle (2005), Houellebecq imagines a futuristic world where the human species dies away and a new cloned species takes its place. According to Sweeney, this new world holds no promise for humanity, as feelings such as joy, love, and happiness are erased from the clones’ genetic make-up. Sweeney concludes that a biotechnical, post-human solution to capitalism’s stranglehold is ‘no world at all’ (p. 190). In short, Sweeney does not stray from her main thesis that despair permeates Houellebecq’s fictional universe. My critique is simply this: Houellebecq’s novels give rise to many other emotions as well, including laughter, surprise, fascination, excitement, and expectation. By emphasizing despair, Sweeney forecloses the possibility of literature — and poetry — acting as an island from which to view capitalism. At the end of La Possibilite´ d’une ıˆle, Daniel describes his encounter with the physical, material world. He has known life as real. To imagine what is outside of capitalism we desperately need literature to continue to explore the contradictions and paradoxes of real life, giving rise to a whole host of emotions and not just powerlessness and despair.

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