by Louis Betty
Amid the vile filth, the ceaseless carnage which was the lot of animals, the only glimmer of devotion and altruism was the protective maternal instinct [ . . . ]. The female squid, a pathetic little thing barely twenty centimeters long, unhesitatingly attacks the diver who comes near her eggs. [ . . . ] [W]omen were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; they were less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or self-centeredness. Moreover, they were more rational, intelligent and hardworking. (137)
In Djerzinski’s perspective, modern man is reduced to a sperm donor, a creature whose only biological utility, beyond reproducing the species, lies in his now-obsolete ability to defend women and children from bears:
What on earth were men for, Michel wondered [ . . . ]. In earlier times, when bears were more common, perhaps masculinity had served a particular and irreplaceable function, but for centuries now men clearly served no useful purpose. For the most part they assuaged their boredom playing tennis, which was a lesser evil; but from time to time they felt the need to change history—which basically meant inciting revolutions and wars [ . . . ]. A world of women would be immeasurably superior, tracing a slower but unwavering progress, with no U-turns and no chaotic insecurity, toward a general happiness. (137)
Houellebecq is in total agreement with his protagonist here. Alongside the good news that he announces in The Elementary Particles is the declaration that “women continue to be strangely capable of love, and it seems to me desirable that we should return to a matriarchal society. Men are good for nothing, with the exception, at present, of being able to reproduce the species” (Houellebecq 1998, n.p., my translation).
This view is a radicalization of Fourier’s, for the latter never advocated a matriarchal society, nor did he consider men to be useless biological anachronisms. But both authors agree that the prevalence of female nature over male nature is a prime indicator of social progress. Moreover, feminism of the sort Simone de Beauvoir advocated only pushes women to imitate the worst in men: careerism, infidelity, egotism, and so on. In “L’Humanité, second stade,” his 1998 introduction to a French translation of Valerie Solanas’s radical feminist pamphlet, the SCUM Manifesto (1968), Houellebecq writes,
For my part I’ve always considered feminists to be lovable idiots, inoffensive in principle but unfortunately made dangerous by their disarming absence of lucidity. As such one could see them struggling in the 1970s for contraception, abortion, sexual freedom, etc., all as if the “patriarchal system” was the invention of evil males, while the historical objective of men was obviously to fuck the maximum number of chicks without having to take on the burden of a family. The poor dears pushed their naïveté even to the point of imagining that lesbian love, an erotic condiment appreciated by the near-totality of active heterosexuals, was a dangerous questioning of masculine power. Finally they demonstrated [ . . . ] an incomprehensible appetite for the professional world and company life; men, who for a long time knew what to make of the “freedom” and “blossoming” offered by work, snickered gently. (2009, 165, my translation)
On this account, women-to-work feminism only casts women headlong into the jowls of the market, where their female nature is trampled and finally destroyed. If society is to move beyond the barbarity of capitalism, women must not simply be equal to men, materially and economically speaking, but rather must surpass them in virtue and intelligence by exploiting their own particularly feminine nature.
Other commonalities between Fourier and Houellebecq include the writers’ treatments of childhood and parenting, human rights, and the numerical particulars of social organization. In Fourier’s phalanx, children were to be separated from adults and made to eat and sleep in different rooms; “parents will take all the more pleasure in doting over them in that they will see them less” (Armand 1953, 29, my translation). In The Possibility of an Island, Fourier’s recommendation is radicalized in the form of “child-free zones,” which Houellebecq describes as residences created for “guiltless thirtysomethings who confessed frankly that they could no longer stand the screams, dribbles, excrement, and other environmental inconveniences that usually accompanied little brats” (46). In Fourier’s account, child-rearing is a needless imposition on adults’ happiness and should be entrusted to the care of willing professionals; parents will love their children more for having to see them less, while in Possibility the reader has the impression that certain parents do not love their children at all!
Fourier and Houellebecq also demonstrate similar incredulity toward the notion of rights. For Fourier (1996, 280), “equality is the cause that mows down three million young men,” and morality is the “fifth wheel on a cart,” the concept of which only exists because human beings have hitherto been unable to establish a natural harmony among themselves (Jones and Patterson 1996, xix–xx). Similarly, in The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island, both neohuman communities disparage the notion of human rights, with social harmony in Particles being achieved not through an evolution in mentalities or a renewed commitment to “human dignity,” but rather by breeding out those characteristics of the human species, primarily selfishness and individualism, that had necessitated the creation of the myth of natural rights during the materialist age. For Fourier, modification of social organization is the key to harmony. In Houellebecq’s fiction, such harmony depends on modification of the human genome—a shift in technological possibility rather than in philosophy. In both cases, the institution of rights is necessary only where natural harmony cannot be achieved.
Finally, we find in Fourier and Houellebecq’s utopian scenarios a curious preoccupation with numbers. Fourier identifies 810 personality types and insists that each phalanx be composed of approximately 1,600 members, the ideal number being 1,620 (1953, 136). In Particles Djerzinski proposes that the number of neohumans always be a prime number, divisible only by itself and one—a symbolic warning against subgroups: “the number of individuals in the new species must always be a prime number; it is therefore necessary to create one person, then two, then three, then five [ . . . ]. The purpose of having a population divisible only by itself and one was meant to draw symbolic attention to the dangers which subgroups constitute in any society” (261). Houellebecq and Fourier only differ significantly on the question of Providence. God is absent from the utopias of Particles and Possibility, whereas he has a role to play in Harmony. If Houellebecq has more openly aligned himself with the atheistic positivism of Auguste Comte, it is no doubt due to this fundamental difference.
Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. Like Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon envisions his utopia in religious terms. In Saint-Simon’s case, however, bringing about earthly paradise depends not on the arcane metaphysical abstractions of Fourier’s theories of harmony and passionate attraction, but rather on a concerted “detheologizing” of the Christian faith. The connection between Houellebecq and Saint-Simon is more analogical than literal, for never in Houellebecq’s novels does one discover any interest in rejuvenating Christianity, and, like Comte, Houellebecq does not hold out a hope of eternal life. Rather, the comparison to be drawn between the two writers relates to their broader attitudes toward metaphysics and individualism, both symptoms of the collapse of medieval civilization and the ensuing epistemological confusion of modernity.
Central to Saint-Simon’s criticism of contemporary Christianity was his assertion that both its Catholic and Protestant versions were heresies. Catholicism had allowed itself to become obsessed with theological and doctrinal minutiae (Saint-Simon 1997, 126), while Protestantism had diminished the social importance of Christianity by placing the personal relationship between human and God above the good of society (158). Gaining eternal life is no more a matter of reciting prayers in Latin, eating fish on Fridays, or self-flagellation than it is of professing the proper creed (153–54). Instead, admittance to God’s eternal kingdom hinges on one’s commitment to bettering the human species, especially its poore
st classes: “True Christianity commands all men to behave as brothers to each other; Jesus Christ has promised eternal life to those who shall have most contributed to the amelioration of the existence of the poorest class on the moral and physical level” (115, my translation).6 Saint-Simon’s gospel, which he calls “Nouveau Christianisme,” is more social than theological: once the “purification” of Christianity is complete—that is, once the religion has been freed from its theological fetters and social morality has become the principal duty and concern of the believer—Christianity could be employed to combat political powers that privilege personal and private interests at the expense of the general good (163). The Catholic Church had promoted dogma over social justice and was concerned with a heavenly paradise at the expense of the kingdom of God on earth (163). Reformed Christianity, on the other hand, had placed one’s relationship with God above one’s duty to society, putting Christianity “outside the bounds of social organization” (158). Both traditions depart from the humanistic, worldly message of the Gospels, and thus Saint-Simon considers them heretical.
For Houellebecq, the dangers of metaphysics lie not in ecclesiastical obscurantism but rather in the ontology of materialism pervading modernity. Saint-Simon preaches that the only sure path to salvation is service to humanity’s most downtrodden classes; accordingly, he presents his doctrine as “called upon [ . . . ] to anathematize theology, to classify as impious any doctrine whose object it is to teach men means of gaining eternal life other than that of working with all their strength for the betterment of their fellow man’s existence” (1997, 154). In The Elementary Particles, the entry into eternal life—that is, into the life of the new clone society—requires a repudiation of the “metaphysics of materialism” in favor of a new understanding of reality in which the notions of matter and separation are replaced by new concepts of interweaving and infinite belonging. Djerzinski writes in his fictitious Meditations on Interweaving,
Uneducated man [ . . . ] is terrified of the idea of space; he imagines it to be vast, dark and yawning. He imagines beings in the elementary forms of spheres, isolated in space, curled up in space, crushed by the eternal presence of three dimensions [ . . . ]. In this space of which they are so afraid, human beings learn how to live and die; in their mental space, separation, distance and suffering are born [ . . . ]. Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds, while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal. (251)
By repudiating supposedly metaphysical notions, such as matter, dimensionality, and space, the human being realizes his or her absolute interconnectivity with the rest of the human world. The metaphysics of materialism, inherited from Newtonian conceptions of matter but superseded by the revelations of quantum physics, do no more than stand in the way of an honest appraisal of human ontology and the means of improving it. For Saint-Simon, the metaphysics of church dogma distract the believer’s attention from social justice and draw it toward his or her reward in the world to come. In Particles, the belief in matter must be abandoned if humanity is to overcome the forces of social atomization and be born anew in an era of infinite intersubjectivity.
Both Houellebecq and Saint-Simon trace the rise of modern individualism to the decline of Christianity at the end of the medieval period. Saint-Simon argues that the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity represented a gradual relinquishment of social concerns in favor of individual rights:
From the establishment of Christianity until the fifteenth century, the human species concerned itself principally with the harmonization of its general sentiments [ . . . ]. Since the fifteenth century, the human mind has broken loose of the most general views; it has given itself over to specialties, it has concerned itself with the analysis of the personal matters, the private interests of the different classes of society [ . . . ] and, during this second period, the opinion has been established that considerations about general facts, about the general principles and general interests of the human species, were only vague and metaphysical considerations, unable to contribute to the progress of enlightenment [ . . . ]. (1997, 184)
Houellebecq renders the phenomenon somewhat more obliquely, though like Saint-Simon he marks the beginning of the decline in the fifteenth century:
Though it may be difficult for us to understand this now, it is important to remember how central the notions of “personal freedom,” “human dignity” and “progress” were to people in the age of materialism (defined as the centuries between the decline of medieval Christianity and the publication of Djerzinski’s work). The confused and arbitrary nature of these ideas meant, of course, that they had little practical or social function—which might explain why human history from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries was characterized by progressive decline and disintegration. (2000a, 258–59)
The transition to our era of individual concerns is thus a process of moral and social deterioration. As it has moved away from medieval Christianity, Western civilization has become progressively atomized, attempting to grant attention to the limited concerns of individual parties. Human rights are an ad hoc replacement for divine sanction, and their failure to have any “practical or social function” lies in the problem of their legitimation. The difference between Houellebecq and Saint-Simon is merely in their choice of terms: where Saint-Simon speaks of secondary principles, Houellebecq invokes the concept of rights. Both are unsatisfactory alternatives to a divine power capable of commanding the social order.
Fourier’s and Saint-Simon’s prescriptions for social progress and reorganization are accompanied by theological elements that, though not always formulated in explicit creedal statements, make both thinkers’ utopianism religious and dualistic in character. For Fourier, human relationships are to be harmonized according to the laws of passionate attraction, which God set forth in his design of the universe. In Saint-Simon’s case, the improvement of the condition of the poor requires maintaining allegiance to the original intent of the Gospels and focusing Christianity on social justice rather than on theological abstractions. Fourier and Saint-Simon also hold out hope for nonabstract forms of eternal life, which distinguishes them significantly from the utopian and social theory of Comte. In Fourier’s case, the earth’s departed hover about their home planet in the hope that their incarnate brethren will achieve harmony; for Saint-Simon, and especially for the explicitly religious Saint-Simonian movement that followed his death, the rewards of the world to come are linked to one’s treatment of this world’s poor. Houellebecq may follow these thinkers in their worries over capitalism and metaphysics, their celebration of the feminine, and their critique of individualism, but he cannot embellish his representations of utopia with allusions to the will of a creator God or with a promise of eternal life beyond the physical body. It is only in Comte, whose thought shares so much with his utopian predecessors yet whose atheism and physicalism represent an evolution toward the secular socialism of Marxism, that Houellebecq finds a true ally.
Auguste Comte. Widely credited with having invented the field of sociology, Comte is today known principally as the originator of the loi des trois étapes, or law of the three stages. Comte’s vast philosophy, presented in his massive Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–42) and the more succinct General View of Positivism (1848), holds that civilization has progressed through three stages of historical development: the theological, the metaphysical, and finally the scientific or “positive.” The theological stage was the pre-Enlightenment and prerevolutionary period of European history, when the will of God (refracted, to be sure, through the policies of the church) was the final word in matters of justice and morality.
In the subsequent metaphysical stage, which Comte associates with postrevolutionary France, the notion of “rights” began to emerge as a replacement for divine sanction. Comte considers the doctrine of human rights set forth during the revolution to represent a groping for a
new principle in which to root notions of morality and social order; rights are necessarily vague and abstract in character, having no divine sanction from which to derive their authority, but they nonetheless reveal an effort on the part of postrevolutionary society to escape the arbitrariness of divine will. Thus, in Comte’s perspective, the striving for clarity and emancipation inherent in the metaphysical stage leads to a positive era in which the notion of rights disappears in favor of a system of morality based on a “science of society.”
The positive stage culminates in the religion of humanity, a secular-religious system centered on the worship of the social body and intended, much like Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, to offer an alternative to what Comte perceives to be a defunct Catholicism. Comte embellishes his religion with a positivist calendar and creates a “positivist catechism” that mimics Catholicism in its inclusion of seven sacraments and a “holy trinity,” replacing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with Altruism, Order, and Progress. Comte’s new religion met with some success in France and Brazil, but like other secular alternatives to religion that emerged during the nineteenth century, its social significance today is all but nonexistent.
Comte views monotheism as nothing less than social poison. Not only does it represent the vestiges of “initial theologism” (the primitive worldview of both the prepositive and premetaphysical eras; 1968, 330), but monotheism’s continuing influence also directly impedes progress. Comte is unsparing in his condemnation:
Their God has become the [ . . . ] leader of a hypocritical conspiracy, now more ridiculous than odious, which is trying hard to distract the people from all great social improvements by preaching to them a fanciful compensation [ . . . ]. Every theological trend, Catholic, Protestant, or deist, leads in reality to the prolongation and aggravation of moral anarchy, while impeding the decisive influence of social sentiment and collective spirit [ . . . ]. There is now no subversive utopia that does not take root or sanction in monotheism. (398)