Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  In many ways representative of a reactionary view of 1968 that began in earnest in France in the 1980s, Houellebecq’s writing suggests, indeed asserts, that May ’68 was not primarily an emancipatory and political moment but one of damaging antinomianism that emphasized transgressive desire and egotistical individualism. Arguing that 1968 marked the point at which France began its slide into moral and political decline, Houellebecq’s view of ’68 is unwaveringly negative and antagonistic, arguing at every turn that it produced nothing but selfishness and egotism and further, that it ushered in the first murmurings of neoliberal cultural capitalism which began to erode many spiritual and symbolic dimensions of everyday life. For Houellebecq, then, ’68 was the consolidation of a disenchanting, materialistic ethos that would come to define the late twentieth century, reducing everything to what Marx called the ‘universal venality’ of the market.3 Blithely disregarding any social or cultural advancements gained by the demands of the soixante-huitards and there were of course very many, he presents 1968 as l’année maudite and views its encouragement of sexual and personal liberation, far from ‘unblocking’ human subjects, as a precursor to a selfish individualism that encouraged the separation of sexuality from the confines of marriage and the family, resulting, in turn, in societal breakdown:

  It is interesting to note that the ‘sexual revolution’ is usually portrayed as a communist utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the rise of the individual. As the lovely phrase ‘heart and home’ suggests, the couple and the family were to be the last bastion of primitive communism in a liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy the last unit separating the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day. (A, 135–6)

  Dating the beginning of this sexual revolution very precisely to 14 December 1967 and the passing of the Neuwirth Act’s legislation of the contraceptive pill which was to be freely available to all, Atomised points up that this ‘offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution’ and access to a life of pleasure previously available only to ‘professionals, artists and senior management – and some small businessmen’. In short, the liberalization and democratization of sexual relations were, according to Houellebecq’s thesis repeated throughout all of his work, the crumbling of the one of the last moral defences against the ‘free market’ (A).

  If it is something of a truism to assert that 1968 inhabits an equally consecrated and contested position in French history, eliciting a long trajectory of detraction and support since the événenments themselves took place, it is nevertheless important to remember its central, if somewhat occluded, importance in French cultural and intellectual history; indeed, Philippe Sollers has suggested that ’68 remains ‘one of three poorly resolved “closets” in French politics’, the others being Vichy and Algeria .4 It is generally agreed, that the 1980s saw the emergence and consolidation of a recognisably anti-’68 rhetoric typified in many ways by the arguments in Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry’s denunciation of ’68’s ‘anti-humanism’ in La Pensée ’68 (1985) (French Philosophy of the Sixties; an Essay on Anti-Humanism) (1990). Laying many contemporary social and moral ills at the feckless feet of the soixante-huitards, Renaut and Ferry’s sentiments are clearly discernible in a speech given during the second round of the presidential elections at Bercy, Paris, more than 20 years later, on 29 April 2007, by Presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. Taking on this holy cow of French political culture before a 20,000 strong crowd, Sarkozy declared; ‘It is a question of whether the heritage of May ’68 should be perpetuated or should be liquidated once and for all. I want to turn the page on 1968’. Accusing the soixante-huitards of paving the way for not only a pervasive atmosphere of moral relativism, a climate of ‘anything goes’, and the ‘end of authority, politeness, and respect’, but also for weakening the ‘morality of capitalism’, Sarkozy claimed further that they had prepared the ground for an ‘unscrupulous capitalism’, a position ironized by Kristin Ross in this chapter’s opening epigraph. With a rhetorical fervour drawing on the ideological language of the left to frame his centre-right agenda, Sarkozy forwarded a rather confused political position veering between seemingly incompatible ethical and ideological positions demanding the ‘restoration of morality to capitalism’, claiming that the idea of morality ‘had disappeared from the political vocabulary’ in a tidal wave of relativism unleashed in 1968. Stating his abhorrence for ‘the left’s apology for communitarianism’ and tapping into a rhetoric of national decline and moral dissolution, he continued that ‘the true heirs of the events of May 1968’ had initiated an ethical disaster resulting in a pervasive ‘hatred for the family, society, state, nation and republic’ and had ‘paved the way for scavengers and speculators to triumph over honest businessmen and workers’. In ways that are strongly reminiscent of the rouge-brun demeanour seen in much of Houellebecq’s work, Sarkozy’s cataloguing of the ills of ’68 drew from the left and right in an ideological concoction typical of neoliberalism with its ideologically promiscuous appeal to both libertarianism and communitarianism. Sarkozy’s appeal was, as one journalist put it, ‘intended to prepare voters for [neo] liberal shock treatment and a break with the past’.5

  Trickles of anti-’68 sentiment had begun to emerge very quickly after the events themselves, slowly gathering momentum over the ensuing years, growing ever more robust with each decennial anniversary, so by the time Sarkozy made this Bercy speech the parameters of la pensée anti-’68 were well-established in a set of reactionary discourses holding the era culpable for the breakdown of authority and the family, as well as for the spread of moral relativism and anti-rationalism. The thrust of Sarkozy’s homily had strong continuities with one of the most voluble purveyors of anti-1968 rhetoric, Gilles Lipovetsky, whose Tocquevillean approach suggested that May ’68 was a ‘“soft” revolution’ that had at its heart the ‘gradual softening of social mores’. With scant regard for any of its serious radical politics, Lipovetsky regarded ’68 as primarily a ludic event ‘emphasizing permissiveness, humor, and fun’; ‘the spirit of May recaptured what had historically been the central tenet of consumer society: hedonism’ and was characterized by the ‘very thing that it denounced in politics’ and that was the ‘euphoria of the consumer age’.6 The sentiments expressed in this essay are similar to, indeed in very many places identical with, a preoccupation with the negative consequences of ’68 so evident in Atomised and Platform. In Houellebecq’s work the fixation on the deleterious effects of May ’68 centres for the most part on sex and desire, targeting most vehemently feminism and its politicization of sex. These accusations situate Houellebecq within, if not the generation of new reactionaries as Lindenberg claims, then certainly on the rouge-brun spectrum, part of the ideologically nebulous ‘moral re-arming’ of French politics that took place from the 1980s onwards and rekindled in Sarkozy’s speech.7

  Houellebecq’s virulent and sustained attack on the legacy of ’68 not only exemplifies Lipovetsky’s anti-’68 stance, it is part of a more pervasive droitisation in French intellectual culture, a rightwards ideological shift that began around the middle of the 1980s. Renaut and Ferry’s work, then, joined a steadily growing body of writing bemoaning the perceived decline of Western civilization and incriminating, to a greater or lesser degree, May ’68.8 According to François Noudlemann, this turn to the right has been ‘twenty-five years in the making’ and forms part of a wider ‘paradigm shift’ in French political culture that involves not only an ideological reorientation but a tension ‘at the heart of French society between a conservative penchant for continuity and a new mode of becoming that threatens national identities’.9 However, as the editors of a special issue of Yale French Studies on droitisation point up, it is important to distinguish between two outwardly identical gestures: one is ‘the yearning of conservative or reactionary discourses’ and the other a ‘melancholic opposition to the “neoliberal, capitalistic status quo”’ that originates from a disillusioned left
ist context.10 The broad-range appeal of Houellebecq’s work is that it may be read on both of these ideological levels simultaneously; that is, both conservatively and progressively. Thus, when we read his novels we experience a sharp jolt of recognition, finding ourselves, even perhaps if we are female readers, empathizing with the beleaguered anti-heroes battling away against the odds to get laid and find love in a world that values only the most crass signifiers of physical and personal worth. We might even be persuaded to recognize the extremities of his critique of neoliberal capitalism, but then we are pulled up short as, on closer view, his satire is tinged with the moral idealism characteristic, not of a disappointed leftism, but of a profoundly conservative vision. The difficulty is, of course, that these two positions appear, from the outside at least, almost indistinguishable.

  Published in 1998, the year of the thirtieth anniversary of les événements, Atomised explicitly attacks much, if not all, of what both Houellebecq and Lipovetsky regard as its lasting legacies: individualism, sexual narcissism and social anomie all of which first became apparent in France in 1974–5, the real beginning, according to the novel, of the ‘atomised society’ (A, 184). This chapter, then, considers la pensée anti-’68 rehearsed in Atomised and Platform and suggests that Houellebecq’s work forms part of what might be called a ‘backlash’ generation; writers who may once have had broadly leftist political sympathies, ex-gauchistes, but who moved from the left to the right between the 1970s and the 1990s.

  Houellebecq’s assault on ’68 begins with the breakdown of moral and social authority and the promotion of sexual liberation which is, he thinks, but a short step to sadism and finally leads to something darker and altogether more brutal at its Sadean extremes: ‘A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society during 1974 and 1975 […] Western society had tipped towards something dangerous […] the supreme manifestation of this focus on the individual, was once again about to flare up in the West’ (A, 184). Houellebecq’s attack on ’68 has another target of contempt: that of a perceived harmful moral relativism imposed by the Nietzschean critical establishment of ‘high’ French theory, chief among whom were Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, and on the German side Marx, Heidegger and Freud. Ferry and Renaut argue that in the 1960s the ‘pure’ domain of philosophy was replaced by the irrationalism of literary ‘theory’, described by them as a ‘hyperbolic repetition of German philosophy’, centred on the destruction of the idea of truth, reason and universality. As they state:

  … French philosophy of the ’68 period resolutely chose the antihumanist position. From Foucault’s declaration of the ‘death of man’ at the end of The Order of Things to Lacan’s affirmation of the radically antihumanist nature of psychoanalysis since ‘Freud’s discovery’ that ‘the true center of the human being is no longer in the same place assigned to it by whole humanist tradition,’ the same conviction is upheld: the autonomy of the subject is an illusion.11

  Part of this anti-humanist programme was, according to Houellebecq’s work at least, the systematic separation of women from the idea of the ‘natural’, a task carried out by the feminist movement as they began to unpick the cultural construction of gender identity. In Houellebecq’s novels, feminism has robbed women of a ‘natural’ sensuality and coerced them into doctrinaire positions on sexual difference and equality thereby producing a generation of self-centred women unwilling and unable to care for their children and who treat sexuality as they might a business transaction. Ignoring the momentous legal, social and cultural progress that feminism brought for women, not least of which was effective contraception, access to safe medical abortion and political parity, in Atomised and Platform feminism is presented as simply an egotistical outcrop of a kind of sexual neoliberalism, a form of sexual privatization, and merely ‘another stage in the rise of the individual’, sweeping way older kinship relations (A, 135–6). While the antipathy directed towards 1968 in Atomised is frequently humorous in the caricature of the New Age camps with their chakra chanting and so on, when the novel’s attention is directed towards feminism the tone becomes positively vicious. Women who discovered sexual and personal liberation in the sixties are represented as pitiful and deluded leftovers of sexual liberation; victims of their own feminist rhetoric of self-realization and empowerment, they now find themselves unwanted in the sexual marketplace, destined to live out their middle-age ‘ugly’, ‘ageing’ and ‘alone’ with ‘cobwebs in their cunts’ (A, 174, 184). Feminism, then, is blamed unconditionally for ushering in the commodification of sexuality and for making the conditions required for love, altruism and compassion, impossible.

  La pensée anti-’68

  That critical opinions in France have been divided over the legacies and meanings of May 1968 is incontrovertible and demonstrable by the large number of works analysing, defending, attacking and rehabilitating the events.12 In the 40 or so years that have passed since the barricades went up in the Quartier Latin, critical opinion has resolved itself into a complex affair crossing back and forth over ideological boundaries.13 Noting these ideological crossings, Serge Audier observes quite correctly that ‘On both the right and the left you often hear a similar paradoxical theory – that the ’68 generation played a key role in the development of capitalism at the end of the 1970s, by lifting the last barrier to unfettered commercialism: traditional values … ’. It is precisely this indictment – that is to say, that the libertarian aspects of ’68 paved the way for a newly energized version of capitalism drawing upon hedonism, individualism and particularly on sexual liberation – that concerns me here. The perceived nihilism, hedonism, disdain for state and family as well as the focus on play and pleasure, is summed up in one of the more famous of the numerous slogans of the time, ‘Vivre sans contraintes et jouer sans entraves’ (Live without limits and enjoy without restraint). It is precisely this idea of untrammelled desire that has been blamed for the ‘perversion’ of the French society by destroying, according to Sarkozy, the boundaries between binary terms; good and evil, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness. In short, then, the anti-’68 view holds that the destruction of all hierarchies that had kept society in check in de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic started to collapse irretrievably in 1968.

  In his survey of the body of anti-’68 thought, La Pensée anti-’68 (2008), Audier itemizes the charges levelled against ’68 which include narcissism, debauchery, the destruction of authority, the desecration of the family and the education system, relativism, a destructive egalitarianism and postmodernism.14 Elsewhere, and from a quite different standpoint, Jean-Pierre Le Goff states that May ’68 was the end of important social and cultural boundaries that had hitherto marked human life: gone were the ‘distinctions between rationality and irrationality’, as well as the ‘distinctions between public and private’ and ‘normal and pathological’.15 Unequivocal in his admiration for Lipovetsky’s L ’ ère du vide, whose ideas bear a striking similarity to those in Atomised, Le Goff based his own arguments on Lipovetsky’s central hypothesis which asserted that May ’68 was ‘the wellspring of modern individualism’. Encouraged by what Lipovetsky calls the ‘narcissistic cult of the Ego’, the spirit of May ’68 very quickly began to contradict its own revolutionary rhetoric and became marked, not only by an erosion of ‘collective engagement’ but also more generally by a disaffection for any real sense of the political.16 In his ‘Modest Contribution to the Tenth Anniversary’ (1978), Régis Debray argued that the libertarian nature of the uprising was the ‘the cradle of a new bourgeois society’ that would replace ‘The France of stone and rye, of apéritif and the institution, of oui papa, oui patron, oui cherie, was ordered out of the way so that the France of software and super-markets, of news and planning, of know-how and brain-storming could show off its vitality to the full’.17

  By the time the twentieth and thirtieth anniversaries came around the characterization of ’68 as the catalyst for a new, more affectively nuanced capitalism was well-established. As Ross notes
in May ’68 and its Afterlives, the trajectory of thinking, what she calls the ‘narrative labor’, on ’68 has ‘in the last 30 years has been buried, raked over the coals, trivialized, or represented as a monstrosity’18 to the point that the charge that ‘some of May’s more radical ideas and practices came to be recuperated or recycled in the service of Capital’ has become something of an orthodoxy in the ‘official story’.19 This narrative of ’68 as an essentially libertarian moment reached its apogee in the 1980s, at a point where Houellebecq would have been very conscious of its circulation and currency in intellectual thought. Arguing against the increasingly ‘deterritorialized’ 1980s version of ’68, Ross resists a reading which understands it as devoid of meaningful political import and at ‘one with a stage of capitalism that itself denies any succeeding historical stages’.20 Boltanski and Chiapello take up a similar, if differently focused, view when they argue that the iconoclastic cultural and ethical concerns of May 1968, what they term ‘artistic critique’, have undergone a ‘well-nigh reversal’ and, in some cases have morphed into their direct antithesis.21 This reversal is not, they argue, due to any particular failure of the internal mechanisms of the critique itself but rather to the fact that many of the ideals promulgated by the artistic critique, as opposed to the social critique, were actually used to disarm and diffuse the very opposition to capitalism thrown up by ’68’s anti-establishment stance. This artistic critique criticized capitalism for its rigidity and repression of the individual at the level of creativity and authenticity. The demand was for more feeling, less standardization and above all, for an expansion of individual freedom. The ways in which capitalism recuperated this artistic critique is summed up in the following:

  Capitalism […] has always relied on critiques of the status quo to alert it to dangers in any untrammelled development of its current forms, and to discover the antidotes required to neutralize opposition to the system and increase the level of profitability within it. Ready to take advantage of hospitable conditions, firms began to reorganize the production process and wage contracts. systems, sub-contracting, team-working, multi-tasking and multi-skilling, ‘flat’ management – all the features of a so-called ‘lean capitalism’ or ‘post-Fordism’ – were the result. For Boltanski and Chiapello, these molecular changes were not simply reactions to a crisis of authority within the enterprise, and of profitability within the economy, although they were that too. They were also responses to demands implicit in the artistic critique of the system, incorporating them in ways compatible with accumulation, and disarming a potentially subversive challenge that had touched even a younger generation of managers who had imbibed elements of the ‘spirit of ’68’.22