Michel Houellebecq on Desire and the Collapse of Western Civilization
By: Cynthia Giles
Tags: Creativity, Literature, Philosophy, Schopenhauer, Essay

Michel Houellebecq on Desire and the Collapse of Western Civilization

This famous French novelist is a student of Schopenhauer — and a controversial prophet of pessimism

Photo by Raph Howald on Unsplash

Not to worry if you don’t recognize the name Michel Houellebecq. He’s quite famous in Europe, where literary figures are often celebrities — especially if they act out in public, or write controversial novels.

And Houellebecq (pronounced “well-beck”) qualifies on both counts.

There’s more about those qualifications below. But because I’ve been writing about Arthur Schopenhauer lately(quick intro/refresher here), I’m focusing on the fact that Houellebecq has written a short, oddly confessional book titled En présence de Schopenhauer.

To appreciate why a notorious, ultra-contemporary French author is writing about his relationship with a 19th-century German philosopher, you will want to have a basic idea of Houellebecq’s work.

So . . .

Meet Monsieur Houellebecq

Over the course of seven novels written between 1994 and 2019, Michel Houellebecq has presented a dark vision of our evolving Western culture.

He maintains that the weakening of restraints on sexual behavior has led to a collapse of the family and a distortion of interpersonal relationships. This shift in moral values has been made all the more destructive, in Houellebecq’s view, by “liberal” socioeconomic forces like free-market capitalism, multinational alliances, and rampant consumerism.

Add to those problems a slow failure of traditional political structures, plus a rapid deterioration of religious institutions — and soon you have the perfect formula for a desperately bleak future.

The ambiance of every Houellebecq novel is suffused with that desperate bleakness, in which an inescapable future seems to hover just beyond a collapsing present.

The novels usually feature one or two male protagonists who suffer from various forms of depression and sexual obsession. Most plots include a suicide (or several), a nervous breakdown, and a violent death, along with a large-scale catastrophic event of some sort. There are always provocative themes, such as sex tourism, cloning, and internet pornography.

Although Houellebecq’s gloomy sensationalism may seem farfetched at times, his novels have had a kind of prophetic edge. Accidentally or otherwise, they appear to predict (or at least intersect) dramatic events in French society.

The most explicit example took place in 2015, when the publication date for Houellebecq’s Submission — a near-future tale in which Islamists take over France — happened to fall on the same day that two Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists attacked the Paris headquarters of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdot, killing twelve.

All very dark . . .

So it’s not surprising to learn that around the age of twenty-six, Houellebecq became enthralled with Arthur Schopenhauer — an influential philosopher known for his theory that “reality” is neither more nor less than the restless, insatiable energy of desire.

From that perspective, everything (literally every single thing, material or conceptual, human and otherwise), is a manifestation of desire. Most of the time most of us see only these manifestations, which we mistake for reality. But with a little effort, we can glimpse the “real” reality through our physical and emotional experiences of desire.

As he studied Schopenhauer’s two-volume masterwork, The World as Will and Representation (1845), Houellebecq saw parallels between his own vision of a dystopic future and the inevitable consequences of “desire” running rampant in a high-tech, high-speed global reality.

Since then, the Schopenhauer convergence has had a shaping influence on every Houellebecq novel — as well as his essays, poetry, painting, and even a few forays into music.

Curious to read Houellebecq? All his novels are available in English translations at Amazon.

If you’d like to get a sense of Houellebecq’s personality, ideas, and reputation, spend thirteen minutes listening to this BBC profile. Various voices and perspectives offer a short but enlightening immersion in the love/hate relationship between France’s literati and their most infamous provocateur.

“In the Presence of Schopenhauer”

Although Houellebecq’s short book on Schopenhauer is not yet available in English, a translation is forthcoming in summer of 2020. According to the publisher’s webpage, the table of contents will look like this:

Preface by Agathe Novak-Lechevalier

Leave childhood behind, my friend, and wake up!

Chapter One: The world is my representation

Chapter Two: Look at things attentively

Chapter Three: In this way the will to live objectifies itself

Chapter Four: The theatre of the world

Chapter Five: The conduct of life: what we are

Chapter Six: The conduct of life: what we have

Notes

Reviews of the French edition have been mixed, with detractors deriding Houellebecq’s grasp of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as superficial and uninformed, while enthusiasts praise his originality — especially in relation

to Schopenhauer’s theory of creativity.

But the essential matter is not so much whether Houellebecq “really” understands Schopenhauer, but rather the way his interpretation of Schopenhauer’s ideas has shaped an influential body of work.

If you want to form your own opinion of En présence de Schopenhauer and can’t wait until summer, you are in luck. Marco Jaya van Harskamp’s graduate thesis in literary studies at Leiden University is available online — and mostly in English.

For some reason, quotations from Houellebecq’s work are in Dutch . . .

But once you get used to that, the first chapter of “Mapping Happiness in Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq” turns out to be a useful overview of the Houellebecq/Schopenhauer connection. According to van Harskap’s discussion, the topics addressed in En présence de Schopenhauer are:

the loss of individuality through selfless observation

the passive nature of the artist

the will to live

the influence of Schopenhauerian thought on Houellebecq’s own writing

the relation between individuality and happiness

A brief summary of the main ideas:

Loss of individuality comes from a deep insight into other humans, and that is achieved by transcending one’s own ego. Houellebecq argues that artists possess a very passive nature, so they can accomplish this more easily than other people. Loss of individuality can bring “happiness of mind,” which is different from the happiness that comes through the senses. But most people cannot experience happiness of mind, because they suffer under their desires and are driven by the will to live. All they can do is try to satisfy their senses.

Schopenhauer suggested seeking happiness of mind through a retreat from the demands of desire, to be achieved through self-control, meditation, and art. However — it seems that Houellebecq’s characters either didn’t read that part of The World as Will and Representation, or failed to pay attention.

The Houellebecq perspective

Those unenlightened seekers of sense-happiness have become the trademark characters of Houellebecq’s sex-soaked narrative universe. In Serotonin, his latest novel, he explains the whole dynamic of modern relationships this way: “All men want fresh, eco-friendly girls who are keen on threesomes.”

And such young women are so plentiful in Houellebecq’s fiction that the “Houellebecq girl” has become a stereotype in French popular culture.

You can order this tongue-in-cheek tee from Redbubble

Which is another reminder that Houellebecq’s novels and public statements are designed to create controversy — and they succeed. In the past few years, his rhetoric has been increasingly criticized (loudly, and by a wide variety of commentators) as Islamophobic, misogynistic, and just generally hateful.

Nor is his literary skill generally admired.

So just what is the value to be found in his work? A reviewer for Commonweal puts it this way:

Serotonin is boring, crude, sexist, shapeless, gross, troubling, and wrong. On the plus side, it’s often brilliant, and I found it sparked more serious thinking than most of the books I’ve read in the past year.

To the degree that Houellebecq succeeds, it’s because he pokes very hard at settled assumptions, and surrounds his critique of society with a patchwork philosophical structure drawn not only from Schopenhauer’s pessimism but also from the empiricist social theories of Auguste Comte (a Schopenhauer contemporary).

To reinforce the idea that his work is intellectually serious, Houellebecq provides plenty of seemingly erudite references. Serotonin, for example, mentions modern European philosophers like Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Emil Cioran, along with a diverse roster of literary icons, including Emil Zola, Thomas Mann, the Marquis de Sade, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Detractors may see these references as pretentious and superficial — included mostly to provide an excuse for reading about sensationalized sex. But even those who don’t think highly of Houellebecq’s writing will concede that he’s been persistent in trying to connect modern social problems with a longer cultural tradition, and to place individual experience in a global context.

Like it or not, Houellebecq’s fictionalized commentary on Western civilization offers us one view of what happens when a writer consciously describes (and perhaps unconsciously channels) a “reality” of ceaseless, restless, universal, insatiable desire. So the fact that his novels have had a seemingly predictive relationship with real-world events should at least spark interest.