Without God

by Louis Betty

  9. I address Houellebecq’s shift from atheism to agnosticism in my final chapter.

  Chapter 2

  1. The novel follows the lives of three Daniels, the first an aging comedian living in twenty-first-century Europe and the others the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth in a series of clones of the original. Chapters devoted to the original Daniel are titled Daniel1.1, Daniel1.2, and so on, while those concerned with the two clones are rendered Daniel24.1, Daniel25.1, and so forth, resembling the numbering of chapters and verses in the Bible. See Cuenebroeck 2011 for a discussion.

  2. This and all subsequent quotations from Comte’s work throughout this book are my own translations from the original French.

  3. See, for instance, Benthall 2008; Smart 1996; and Taylor 2007.

  4. Asad is specifically concerned with challenging the definition of religion that Clifford Geertz proposes in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973, 87–125).

  5. I imagine this suggestion would elicit howls of desecration from the men and women involved in the “singularity” movement and other such cultish organizations in Silicon Valley. For an interesting analysis of current trends, see Sam Frank’s article “Come with Us If You Want to Live: Among the Apocalyptic Libertarians of Silicon Valley,” in the January 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

  6. I nevertheless wonder if it is truly fair to use the term “Islamophobia” to condemn biases against Islam that arise in reaction to certain aspects of the religion. Certainly it makes sense to be fearful of the practices of more conservative forms of Islam, such as stoning adulterers, hanging homosexuals, or cutting off the hands of thieves. Similarly, I feel a certain alarm when I encounter fundamentalist Christians who want to outlaw abortion, reinstate mandatory school prayer, and teach creationism in schools. Do such feelings make me a bigot? It is possible that those with the greatest fear of fundamentalist Islam in the world today are women living in Taliban-occupied Pakistan and Iraq, or homosexuals in Iran; should we also condemn them as intolerant and bigoted?

  Chapter 3

  1. The phrase “the fresh ruins of France” is a quotation from Edmund Burke’s Reflections of the Revolution in France: “The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace” (Burke 1984, 41).

  2. All subsequent passages from Robespierre in this chapter are also my translation.

  3. Of the four social reformers I cite, Robespierre is perhaps of greatest interest to scholars today, given his connection not simply with religious configurations of utopia (the Cult of the Supreme Being), but also with state terror and terrorism more generally. See Žižek 2007 for a discussion. Comte also remains of contemporary interest in France. See, for instance, Bourdeau et al. 2003; and Sartori 2004.

  4. The centerpiece of Fourier’s system was the phalanstère, or phalanx, a sort of “grand hotel” in which a set number of persons—1,620 was the ideal number—would be grouped according to specific personality traits. Fourier theorized the existence of 810 distinct kinds of personality; thus, in a community of 1,620 persons, each member would have at least one person of the same personality type. Fourier was intensely systematic in his prescriptions for the ideal community, and his distaste for “civilization,” as he referred to industrial and liberal modernity, seems to have known no bounds.

  5. Subsequent passages from Fourier 1953 and 1967 also are my translation.

  6. All subsequent passages from Saint-Simon are also my translation.

  7. Apropos of his own atheism, Houellebecq complains to Lévy of “the feeling, exhausting in the long run, that one is a vague organic hodgepodge whose controls are gradually failing” (2011, 164).

  8. Schopenhauer expounds his moral philosophy in his long essay On the Basis of Morality (1995). For an analysis, especially regarding Schopenhauer’s disagreement with Kant, see Cartwright 1999.

  9. See, in particular, Coppée 1897; and Retté 1907.

  Chapter 4

  1. The hagiographic texts of Bardolle 2004 and Noguez 2003 might be said to offer two examples of such a reading.

  2. One could also say much about the Elohim here, who the Elohimites in Possibility claim are responsible for the creation of life on earth. A crucial difference is that, while creatures such as Yog-Sothoth are real enough in Lovecraft’s tales, it is never seriously considered in Possibility that the Elohim should actually exist, except by the clones who have imbibed their cult’s propaganda.

  3. This observation also helps to distinguish Houellebecq’s fiction from science fiction. Houellebecq certainly engages themes that are beholden to science fiction (posthumanism, cloning, etc.), but he does so in service of religious and existential concerns. The goal of Houellebecq’s treatment of science is not to explore the social, ethical, or religious questions that advances in science pose (a typical trope in science fiction writing), but rather to ask what the value we place in science as “progress” tells us about our religious and existential assumptions today.

  Chapter 5

  1. All translations from Soumission are my own from the original French. I have chosen to render the title as Submission in the main text.

  2. For instance, Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, said after the attacks, “La France n’est pas Michel Houellebecq. [ . . . ] ça n’est pas l’intolérance, la haine, la peur” (France is not Michel Houellebecq. [ . . . ] it is not intolerance, hatred, and fear; Leyris 2015, n.p.). It is also worth noting that Soumission was unfairly conflated with Éric Zemmour’s Le suicide français (2014), a very long essay on the “decline of France” that much more polemically, ideologically, and, of course, negatively engages the question of the “great replacement” that Islam allegedly represents. For a discussion of Pegida’s reaction to Soumission, see Trierweiler 2015.

  3. It may be that Houellebecq is conjuring up Bruno from The Elementary Particles, whose wife’s name is Anne (so similar to Annelise). The marriage between Bruno and Anne is predictably unhappy, ending in divorce after Bruno commits an act of pedophilia.

  4. See, for example, Helen Smith’s Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream—and Why It Matters (2014); Kay S. Hymowitz’s Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys (2012); and Christina Hoff Summer’s The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men (2013). It is worth noting that all three authors are women.

  5. In the original French version, “fuck autonomy” is rendered in English.

  6. For a discussion of Huysmans’s aesthetic considerations in relation to his conversion, see Hanson 1997, 108–68, esp. 126–37.

  7. This is a paraphrase of Barbey D’Aurevilly, who wrote apropos of À rebours in Le roman contemporain (the original essay appeared elsewhere in 1884): “Je serais bien capable de porter à l’auteur d’À rebours le même défi: ‘Après Les Fleurs du mal,—dis-je à Baudelaire,—il ne vous reste plus, logiquement, que la bouche d’un pistolet ou les pieds de la croix.’ Baudelaire choisit les pieds de la croix. Mais l’auteur d’À rebours les choisira-t-il?” (I could very well make a similar challenge to the author of À rebours: “After Les Fleurs du mal, I said to Baudelaire, the only logical choice you have left is between the mouth of a pistol and the feet of the cross.” Baudelaire chose the feet of the cross. But will the author of À rebours choose them?) D’Aurevilly 1902, 281–82.

  8. Houellebecq’s treatment of academic upheaval in the French university scene is accompanied by some waggish critiques of professorial psychology. He writes, “Those who become university professors never even imagine that a political development could have the slightest effect on their career; they feel absolutely untouchable” (79). With growing calls from the American right to reform tenure and to roll back shared governance (a call that has already become reality in the state of Wisconsin, where I hold a faculty position), I wonder—and worry—how pr
escient Houellebecq’s comments will be!

  9. I am speaking, of course, of the western Roman Empire; the eastern empire, centered in Constantinople, survived well into the fifteenth century, although it is more commonly referred to as Byzantium.

  10. Works published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade are broadly considered to represent the authoritative scholarly editions of work by major French authors. For a scholar to be asked to edit a Pléiade book is thus understood as a recognition by the French intellectual community that he or she is the preeminent expert on a given subject.

  11. It is telling that François’s decision to convert appears linked to a desire to reaffirm his threatened virility. However, to reduce his motivation to the need for sex—and thus in some respects to portray Islam’s attractiveness in the novel as predicated not on spirituality but rather on sexuality—is unwarranted. François visits numerous prostitutes in Submission, making it clear that in converting to Islam he is in search of something more than just carnal adventure. Moreover, there is nothing surprising or transgressive in the idea that religions should regulate sexual practices; since these are tied to and determine domestic and family life, religion, as a socially-structuring institution grounded in divine sanction, naturally seeks to exert control over them.

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