“I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve done in my life. Yet accustomed to controversy, the author of Elementary particlesinterviewed at The big bookstore (France 5), did not seem to lack lucidity about what must now be called the “Houellebecq porn” affair.
Saying he was tricked in the fall of 2022 by a Dutch videographer, Houellebecq agreed to shoot amateur porn with a young woman who was introduced to him as a philosophy student who was a fan of his work.
Artisan of his misfortune, the star writer would not have read all the clauses of the “retroactive” contract he signed, and the images could be legally made public. Don’t they say the devil is in the details?
This story, Michel Houellebecq explains it today in length and breadth in A few months in my life, a short autobiographical story in which he settles a number of scores. He also takes the opportunity to rectify, black on white, some of his controversial statements concerning Islam, put down to his “perpetual bickering with Muslims”.
In November 2022, in a long face-to-face with Michel Onfray, he had thus prophesied a civil war in France, imagining “Bataclan upside down”. But for the repentant, after what one dares to imagine to be a long and mature reflection, “the problem is not Islam, it is delinquency”.
Having become public, carried by “the usual pack of media cretins” which revolves around it, he writes, the porn affair gives us the dizzying impression that Michel Houellebecq has himself become, through the effect of a strange twist, the character of one of his own novels. But without overhang, without the slightest trace of chilling irony, without literature. Just a novelist trying to clear his reputation and protect his superstar cash cow in European sales.
A writer out of his element, stark naked. “For the first time in my life, I felt treated, absolutely, like the subject of a wildlife documentary,” writes Houellebecq. It’s a bit, in short, the story of the watered sprinkler.
Houellebecq, he explains some of his previous statements, sometimes as muddy as they are untimely, by saying he is “someone who thinks slowly”, a poor victim of the staircase spirit.
A few months in my life is also an opportunity to talk about amateur porn (in his eyes, “the obvious extension of a couple’s life”), to explain his conception of threesomes or successful fellatio. Too much information?
Out of his lair, in a long interview published in the magazine Point, he gave it back. Lucide: “I am a romantic macho, with a grunge tendency. Rebel: “The fact that my sexual organs are potentially worth money accentuates my reservations about liberalism. Even better: “My real contact with the real world is going to the Monoprix, I’m very keen on that. »
Pearls, it’s raining. Just as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the “great writer” continues to amaze us: “Ukraine was the victim of an unjust attack, but has the whole world the duty to help him? I personally don’t feel obligated to it. »