by Louis Betty
The monotheistic camp is, for Comte, “retrograde and anarchic,” a domain where “God presides vaguely,” while the religion of humanity, freed from all theological fetters and from vain talk of “fanciful compensation” (i.e., personal immortality), is “organic and progressive, systematically devoted to Humanity” (398).
From his declaration in Lire that monotheism is the “act of a moron” to the Egyptian biochemist’s rant against Islam in Platform, Houellebecq has demonstrated in both fiction and nonfiction a loyalty to atheism that only finds nuance in his most recent public comments (see chapter 5). For example, in “J’ai un rêve,” a short essay describing his personal version of eternal life, Houellebecq writes,
In my dream of eternal life, nothing much happens. Perhaps I’m living in a cave. Yes, I like caves, inside they’re dark and cool and I feel safe. I often wonder if there has been any real progress since the time of cavemen. As I’m seated there, listening calmly to the sound of the sea, surrounded by friendly creatures, I think of all the things I’d like to remove from this world: fleas, birds of prey, money and work. Also probably porno films and belief in God. (2009, 179–80, my translation)
But however much Houellebecq may denigrate the notion of the one God in certain comments, he nevertheless laments God’s absence in other places.
Particularly liable to disparagement is Comte’s abstract vision of eternal life, wherein personal immortality is replaced by a theoretical perpetuation in human memory—what Comte refers to as the sacrament of “Incorporation”:
Comte [ . . . ] failed totally and miserably. A religion with no God may be possible [ . . . ]. But none of this seems to me to be conceivable without a belief in eternal life, the belief that in all monotheistic religions acts as the great introductory offer, because once you’ve conceded that, and with this as your goal, everything seems possible [ . . . ]. Comte wasn’t offering anything like that; all he proposed was one’s theoretically living on in the memory of mankind [ . . . ]. Well, that just didn’t cut it. (Houellebecq and Lévy 2011, 166)
The trouble with abstract forms of immortality, Houellebecq writes to Lévy, is that “no one gives a shit” (166). Caught up as he was in the ideological fervor surrounding the birth of socialism, Comte was able to celebrate the supposedly incipient demise of monotheism and its promise of personal immortality. The revolutionary enthusiasm of the era afforded Comte the luxury of reveling in God’s death, while in Houellebecq’s novels all that remains is a sense of postmodern fatalism, the memory of failed utopias, and a persistent, terrifying awareness of looming annihilation.7
Comte’s thought also informs much of Houellebecq’s discussion of rights. The notion of “right” for Comte is a theological construct whose only sanction is in divine will: “The word right must be separated from true political language as much as the word cause from true philosophical language. Of these two [ . . . ] notions, the first is [ . . . ] immoral and anarchic, as the other is irrational and sophistical [ . . . ]. So long as earthly powers do not emanate from supernatural will, there can exist no real rights” (1968, 361). Without a creator God to affirm them, rights are no more than a shaky human conception subject to the whims of history and human preference—what Comte calls “arbitrary wills” (368). Instead, Comte proclaims that “in the positive state, which no longer admits heavenly titles, the idea of rights disappears irrevocably. Each has his duties, and toward all; but no one has any right” (361). He even goes on to assert that “no one possesses any other right than that of always doing his duty” (361). Rights are therefore to cede to a conception of morality rooted not in metaphysical abstractions or spiritual fictions but in concrete social laws demonstrated through the process of social scientific inquiry: “The necessary superiority of demonstrated morality over revealed morality can therefore be summed up as the definitive substitution of the love of Humanity for the love of God” (356).
The treatment of rights and their moral corollaries follows in the same spirit in Houellebecq’s fiction. While the clone narrator of Particles derides modern concepts like “personal freedom” and “human dignity” as “confused and arbitrary” (258), the Supreme Sister of Possibility dismisses belief in human rights as a simplistic illusion: “Admit that men have neither dignity nor rights; that good and evil are simple notions, scarcely theorized forms of pleasure and pain” (31). Daniel1 takes the Supreme Sister’s observation even further, declaring, “As for human rights, quite obviously I couldn’t give a toss; I could hardly manage to be interested in the rights of my cock” (16). The absence of a discourse of rights does not, however, rule out the existence of moral absolutes, as the reader discovers in the person of young Michel Djerzinski: “reading Nietzsche provoked only a brief irritation, and Kant served only to confirm what he already knew: that perfect morality is unique and universal. Nothing is added to it and nothing changes over the course of time [ . . . ]. Not determined, it determines; not conditioned, it conditions. It is [ . . . ] an absolute” (2000a, 28). Houellebecq has recapitulated Djerzinski’s point of view in his comments to Lévy:
The rights of man, human dignity, the foundation of politics, I’m leaving all that aside, I have no theoretical ammunition, nothing that would allow me to validate such standards [ . . . ]. This leaves ethics, and there, I do have something. Only one thing, to be honest, luminously identified by Schopenhauer, and that is compassion. Rightly exalted by Schopenhauer and rightly vilified by Nietzsche as the source of all morality. I sided—and this is hardly news—with Schopenhauer. (2011, 168)
Like Comte, Houellebecq holds out the possibility of establishing a system of morality without divine or metaphysical sanction—that is, without commandments and rights, respectively. “Complete atheists,” Houellebecq explains to Lévy, “who are [ . . . ] convinced of their irremediable mortality, still go on believing in love [and] in moral law and behaving according to its tenets” (145). Following Schopenhauer in his celebration of compassion, rather than reason, as the basis of morality,8 Houellebecq affirms an innate moral sensibility that exists in the absence of a divine moral absolute.
Finally, Comte and Houellebecq show similarities in their thinking about women and female nature. Where Houellebecq declares, “[I]t seems to me desirable that we should return to a matriarchal society” (Houellebecq 1998, n.p., my translation), Comte writes of women, “This sex is certainly superior to ours regarding the most fundamental attribute of the human species, the tendency to make sociability prevail over personality. In this moral sense [ . . . ] it deserves our tender veneration, as the purest and most direct instance of Humanity” (1968, 210). Like Fourier, Comte views the ascendancy of women as a supreme indicator of progress, and the veneration of female nature as an important aspect of positivist worship. Houellebecq evokes Comte’s view in The Elementary Particles, in which Djerzinski muses that “women were indisputably better than men” (137) and that “a world of women would be immeasurably superior” (137). However, the discourse of female superiority in the novel takes an extreme turn in its embrace of the “all-female” society, a notion Houellebecq borrows from the radical feminist thinker Valerie Solanas. In his introduction to the SCUM Manifesto, Houellebecq writes,
For [Solanas] [ . . . ] woman is not only different, she is superior. Biological accident, femme manquée, man is an emotional invalid, incapable of concern, compassion, or love for others [ . . . ]. Man is a monkey armed with a machine gun. In keeping with his violent and selfish nature, in this way he has succeeded in transforming the world, to borrow Valerie’s cutting expression, into a “gigantic pile of shit.” (2009, 167, my translation)
Houellebecq extends Comte’s celebration of the feminine into a parallel condemnation of masculinity and the apparent disaster it has wrought on civilization. For a character such as Djerzinski, the question is no longer one of harmonizing male and female natures, but rather one of suppressing masculinity in order to establish an era of permanent progress.
Numerous other domains e
xist in which Comte’s and Houellebecq’s thought follow each other closely, and one could write an entire book detailing the latter’s intellectual debt to the former. More generally, however, the greatest commonality between the two writers lies in their sense of historical narrative—which Houellebecq expresses explicitly in The Elementary Particles and more implicitly in other works—which identifies the decline of Christianity as the central event of Western modernity. George Chabert writes in reference to Particles,
What [ . . . ] is the immediate implication of the questioning of Christianity? This is in fact the main subject of Houellebecq’s narrative [ . . . ]. Here is how all this comes together in the course of the centuries: the Enlightenment philosophers deliver a fatal blow to a crisis-stricken Christianity, replacing Christian values with such here-and-now values as freedom and [ . . . ] equality. Man’s value, now circumscribed in his person, releases him from constraining social bonds, facilitating as such the substitution of an agricultural economy with a capitalist economy. Human rights [ . . . ] are only an alleged ruse of history. With the development of liberal society, man perceives himself more and more powerfully as an elementary particle. (2002, 194–95, my translation)
The difference, then, between Comte and Houellebecq is not in their diagnosis of Western malaise, but rather in the confidence each thinker brings to the possibility of a solution to the decline of the Christian worldview. Like other utopians of his time, Comte expresses great enthusiasm for his remedy to France’s spiritual mal de siècle: “Living for others becomes the supreme form of happiness. To incorporate oneself intimately into Humanity, find fellow feeling with past tribulations, sense new destinies, while contributing actively to their realization, will constitute the routine goal of every existence” (1968, 353). Houellebecq, on the other hand, can only mourn the naïveté of such assurance. History has vanquished Christianity, belief in eternal life has buckled beneath the pressure of materialism, and modernity’s attempts to create compelling alternatives to the Christian worldview (liberalism, socialism, etc.) have been unable to fill the epistemological breach that God’s death has opened. Houellebecq’s readers find themselves in profoundly postmodern country, with nothing to guide them except a vague notion of individual freedom that has degraded into a source of permanent anxiety.
Houellebecq can only follow Comte and his nineteenth-century cohort so far, for the fervor surrounding these thinkers’ religious or quasi-religious utopianism has vanished in the wake of the twentieth century’s great ideological catastrophes. Houellebecq may second Comte’s diagnosis of Western malaise, but the hope and excitement that fueled the utopian movements of the nineteenth century elude him. This irreconcilable difference is captured in a memorable scene from The Map and the Territory, during which Jed Martin notes the contents of Houellebecq’s personal library:
They went back into the living room to have some coffee. Houellebecq added two logs to the fire, then went away to busy himself in the kitchen. Jed went back to examining the bookcase, and was surprised by the small number of novels—classics, essentially. However, there was an astonishing number of books by social reformers of the nineteenth century: the best known, like Marx, Proudhon, and Comte, but also Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Pierre Leroux, Owen, Carlyle, as well as others whose names meant almost nothing to him. (2012, 161)
All the great utopian tomes sit peacefully on their shelves, no longer of the slightest utility or interest to contemporary man. Houellebecq has read them all, admired them, and, in the end, consigned them to the cruel verdict of history. As the fictional Houellebecq confesses to Jed, “You know what Comte asserts [ . . . ] that mankind’s dead outnumber the living. Well, I agree with him now. Above all I’m in contact with the dead” (161). The quest for man’s salvation in the absence of God is finished. All that remains is to resign oneself to suffering, death, and nothingness.
Abandoned Utopias
If anything is typical of the utopias of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte, it is their total and remarkable failure over the long term. Saint-Simonism expired not long after the death of its leader; the remainder of the sect, led by Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, was banned in 1832, with the stragglers departing for North Africa and the Middle East in search of new converts. Fourier’s influence was less marginal, especially from an intellectual and political point of view, given his affinities with Marxism. But the Fourierist movements that appeared in North America in the mid-nineteenth century, most memorably Brook Farm and the Alphadelphia Association, were some of the more short-lived curiosities of the Second Great Awakening, and what structures remain from those communities are monuments to a forgotten age. Finally, though positivism held some sway in Brazil after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1889, its vestiges linger only in the motto on the Brazilian flag: Ordem e Progresso.
The attempts of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte to reform society on religious terms were part of a broader movement to rationalize religion—that is, to make it consonant with the scientific knowledge and social needs of the day. Fourier’s system included a virulent reproach of capitalism, and his discourse of “attraction” was clearly linked, however haphazardly, to mechanical principles that had emerged with the birth of modern physics. Saint-Simon and Comte identified theology with social and political corruption and saw it as the product of a primitive, prerational age. Whatever the merit of these judgments, they reflected a broad intuition, born out of the deism of the Enlightenment, that religious knowledge needed to be made consonant with scientific, philosophical, and other advances that occurred in the modern period.
The utopian programs that Houellebecq has embedded in his work can be assigned a place, though with nearly two hundred years of hindsight, in the effort, typical of the French utopian socialists, to elaborate a rational system of religious belief. With this hindsight, however, Houellebecq is forced to take a markedly different tack, and it is no surprise that at the end of Possibility (a novel to be read in many respects as the sequel to Particles) the reader is led to realize, as Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte could not, the futility of this multi-novel utopian program. The narrator of Particles has nothing but glowing praise for the clone society encountered at the novel’s end: the neohumans, having conquered egotism, cruelty, and anger, are no longer tortured by individual vanity and live the lives of gods in the eyes of their human predecessors (263). Humanity in its former state has all but disappeared, but Houellebecq indicates that this is a happy ending. In Platform, however, the robust utopianism of Particles begins to wane. The sexual utopia of Eldorador Aphrodite is literally blown to bits by Islamic terrorists, and Michel’s lover, Valérie, dies in the attack. Inconsolably bereaved in the wake of this personal apocalypse, Michel can only await death, lamenting having been “a mediocre individual in every possible sense” who does not “deserve anything of [himself] to survive” (258). Subsequently, in Possibility, certain neohumans begin to abandon their lives of isolated asceticism, defecting from their compounds in search of a “hypothetical neohuman community” (299) in the Canary Islands. Soon after leaving his compound in Andalusia, Daniel25 remarks,
My enterprise seemed to me more and more starkly unreasonable, and destined for certain failure [ . . . ]. I could return, but I had no intention of it: that solitary routine [ . . . ] which had constituted my life [ . . . ] now seemed unbearable. Happiness should have come, the happiness felt by good children, guaranteed by the respect of small procedures, by the security that flowed from them [ . . . ] but happiness had not come, and equanimity had led to torpor [ . . . ]. The most patent indicator of failure was that I had ended up envying the destiny of Daniel1, his violent and contradictory journey, the amorous passions that had shaken it—whatever his suffering and tragic end. (304–5)
Unlike his preceding incarnations, Daniel25 chooses to abandon a life of asceticism from which there is no foreseeable benefit. Having made a study of Daniel1’s life story, he prefers to suffer the misery and despair of his forebear rather tha
n endure the absurdity of an isolated existence. Thus, aware of the dangers of departure but unwilling to return to his previous solitude, he sets out in search of a neohuman community rumored to exist on Lanzarote, the birthplace of Elohimism, where “radical separation [ . . . ] could be abolished immediately, without waiting for [ . . . ] the Future Ones” (299).
In the end, however, Daniel25 balks. Having reached the sea after an exhausting journey across the “Great Gray Space” (a flat, featureless desert that was once the ocean floor), Daniel25, “desiccated” (335) on the inside, realizes that neither human nor neohuman life promises him any possibility of happiness. “Organic life [ . . . ] could not, even if it managed to be reborn, do other than repeat the same patterns: constitution of isolated individuals, predation, selective transmission of the genetic code; nothing new could be expected from it” (334–35). So long as organic life exists, happiness is impossible—hence the neohumans’ attempt to transform themselves into biological machines as impervious to suffering as they are to joy. Ultimately, however, biology is to have the last word: “The life of man had been [ . . . ] dominated by suffering [ . . . ]. The life of the neohumans was intended to be peaceful, rational, remote from pleasure as well as suffering, and my departure would bear witness to its failure” (329–30).