Michel Houellebecq embarrasses me. I don’t really know if I should feed on it or be wary of it. I first saw him in an interview on TV, about twenty years ago. It didn’t make me want to read it. His attitude of a dilapidated, prostrate dandy, irritated by all the questions that were asked of him and tempted by provocation, displeased me.
My brother reader, aficionado of the writer, ended up convincing me to read at least his poetry, which, he told me, revealed another Houellebecq, delicate, romantic and focused on metaphysics. I was seduced by the poet, so I continued with some of his novels — Extension of the domain of struggle, Submission and Serotonin – and Interventions 2020, his collection of essays. I remain skeptical about the man and the work, but I fully recognize the literary and philosophical value of the latter.
Does that make me a right-winger or a left-winger? What does it mean to love Houellebecq, from a political point of view? The French journalist and writer Christian Authier examines the question in Political Houellebecq (Flammarion, 2022, 192 pages), a luminous essay on the novelist’s thought.
How to grasp, in fact, the political scope of a work both hailed and abhorred, in France and elsewhere, by the “moral left” and by the “uninhibited right”? To achieve this, Authier, critical of the notions of left and right, but closer to the second than to the first, rereads Houellebecq’s work and interviews to extract opinions and thoughts in order to “d ‘grasp their permanence or paradoxes’ and to ‘situate them in their time and in current debates’.
There is, in Houellebecq, a caustic criticism of economic liberalism and the consumer society, in which even human and sexual relations become a market, which delights people on the left. In Houellebecq economist (Flammarion, 2014), the late Bernard Maris noted that no novelist “had, until him, so well perceived the essence of capitalism, based on uncertainty and anxiety”.
However, when he accuses the libertarian May 68 of having paved the way for this nihilistic capitalism by destroying the “ordinary moral constraints” as well as the family and the couple, the last ramparts against the logic of the market, Houellebecq is less enchanting on the left.
Contender of the “French moral left”, which would despise the “average Frenchman” by nourishing “anti-white racism”, by ignoring the problem of insecurity and by sacrificing the national interest on the altar of the European Union, Houellebecq, obviously, is in the camp of the conservatives who reject a liberal modernity subscribed, on the left as on the right, to perpetual motion.
“Faced with individualism and the dilution of the common good, against the temptation of a clean slate of a modernity drunk on itself, against the excesses of technology and science making possible a transhumanist horizon, [ces conservateurs], explains Authier, notably advocate the values of heritage and transmission, the preservation of an ancient culture and ways of life that escape the imperatives of the present time. »
In 2021, Houellebecq even affirmed that “the inevitable consequence of what is called progress […], it is self-destruction”. In Public enemies, interviews with Bernard-Henri Lévy published in 2008, he defines himself as a curator who “will always consider that it is better to keep what exists, and which works somehow, rather than embarking on a new experiment” . His radical opposition to medical assistance in dying is also part of this conservative logic.
A religious obsession haunts Houellebecquian work, which, according to its author, “expresses the horror of the world without God”. The writer affirms that religion is “the last bulwark against liberalism” and is the only one able “to provide a meaning, a path to the reconciliation of the individual with his fellow man in a community that could be described as human”. However, he himself cannot believe in God and often talks about religion, especially Islam, about which he has very harsh words, right and wrong.
“Failing to believe in collective emancipation, notes Christian Authier, the writer here advocates an individual response”, a sort of side step out of the “huge market” that the West has become. Frédéric Beigbeder concluded, in 2014, that Houellebecq was “an almost Christian moralistic romantic whom everyone takes for a decadent and atheistic nihilist”.
Authier adds that “Houellebecq remains intrinsically unrecoverable in the political and [que] his incredible freedom also explains his success”. We are not done with him.