15Best and Kellner, ‘Biotechnology, Ethics, and the Politics of Cloning’, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/biotechnologypoliticscloning.pdf [accessed 18 March 2008].
16Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). Haraway’s work has endured in its importance and perspicacity, not only in the areas of feminist and gender studies, but also beyond, in a wider field of cultural and philosophical critique. See also her next book Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM (London: Routledge, 1997) for a detailed set of arguments about genetic modification, particularly of animals, in this case a patented mouse purposely bred to carry the breast cancer gene.
17Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999); Eugene Hacker, ‘What is Biomedia’, Configurations, 11, 1 (2003) 47–79; Posthuman Bodies, (eds) Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1995); Rosi Braidotti, Nomad Subjects: The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and The Transhuman Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) for its influential arguments on the interface between human and artificial intelligence. On extropianism see Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005) and also his The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 2000) that has been influential in this field.
18Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: Harnessing The Gene and Remaking the World (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1998), 236–7.
19Paul Rabinov and Nikolas Rose, ‘Biopower Today’, BioSocieties, 1 (2006), 195–217.
20Felipe Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1. For a sceptical view of biotechnology and in particular of human cloning see Rifkin; for a bio-conservative view see Leon Kass’s ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’, in Flesh of My Flesh: The Ethics of Human Cloning, ed. Gregory Pence (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 13–37; and Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
21Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: The Consequences of the Biotechnical Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2002), 7; The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
22See also Fredric Jameson, ‘Progress versus utopia: Or, can we imagine the future’, Science-Fiction Studies, 27 (1982), 147–58.
23Halberstam and Livingstone, 10.
24Diken, 63.
25Ibid., 62.
26Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998), 135
27Jean and John Comaroff, ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture, 12, 2 (2000), 291–343, 322.
28See Hub Zwart, ‘From Utopia to Science: Challenges of Personalised Genomics Information for Health Management and Health Enhancement’, Medicine Studies, 1, 2 (2009), 155–66; Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27.1 (2009), 12–28, http://www.xs4all.nl/~rekveld/tech/Sloterdijk_RulesForTheHumanZoo.pdf
29Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1994), 387.
30Commenting on Houellebecq’s account of how science, and in particular, molecular biology will overtake ethics and philosophy as formative discourses, Roger K. Malina notes: ‘The sometimes purple prose is laced with scientifically accurate descriptions of human biology, psychology and anatomy […] The discussion of the impact of Einsteinian relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and molecular biology are well thought out and interesting.’ Leonardo, 32, 2 (1999), 147–8, 147.
31Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 31.
32Interventions, 118.
33Bowd, 31.
34Public Enemies, 144.
35Angela Holzer, ‘Science, Sexuality, and the Novels of Huxley and Houellebecq’, Comparative Literature and Culture, 5, 2 (2003), 1–11, 6.
36Alexander Riley, ‘In the Trenches of the War between Literature and Sociology: Exploring the Scandalous Sociology of Modernity in the Novels of Michel Houellebecq’, International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 431, 1 (2006), 104–24, 112.
37Cruickshank, 139.
38Susannah Hunnewell, ‘The Art of Fiction’, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq [accessed January 2011]. Aspect’s 1982 experiment tested the idea of quantum interconnectedness originally proposed by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in 1935.
39Hunnewell, ‘The Art of Fiction’.
40Gerald Moore, ‘Gay Science and (No) Laughing Matter: The Eternal Returns of Michel Houellebecq’, French Studies, 1 (2011), 45–60, 50, 53.
41Public Enemies, 169.
42H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1991); H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005), 32.
43Lovecraft, 29.
44Ibid., 33.
45Public Enemies, 111.
46Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1908), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/39257/39257-h/39257-h.htm [accessed 18 April 2012].
47Lovecraft, 57.
48Abecassis, 823
49Nicholas Sabloff, ‘Of Filth and Frozen Dinners’, The Common Review, 5, 3 (2006), 51.
50On the French moralistes see A. J. Krailsheimer, Studies in Self-Interest from Descartes to La Bruyère (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) and also Odette de Mourgues, Two French Moralists: La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
51Abecassis, 822.
52Ibid., 804.
53Bruno Chaouat, ‘Moroseness in Post-cold War France’, Yale French Studies, 116/117 (2009), 125–38, 127, 137.
54Moore, 53.
55Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 286.
56Abecassis, 821, 822.
57Žižek, ‘Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World’, (2008), http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=247 [accessed 18 May 2011].
58Moraru, 268.
59See Žižek; and Varsava, 160.
60Žižek.
61Studies have shown that France ‘holds the dubious distinction of being the world leader in the per capita consumption of psychotropic medications’. Jennifer Willging, ‘Another Prozac Nation: The Problem of Psychotropic Medication Consumption in Contemporary France’, Contemporary French Civilization, 33, 1 (2009), 1–22, 1.
62Moore, 45.
63Jefferey, 60.
64Attridge, 25–6.
65Ibid., 27.
66Jørgen Kalckar, Niels Bohr, Léon Rosenfeld, Erik Rüdinger, Finn Aaserud, Foundations of Quantum Physics II (1933–1958) (Amsterdam: Elsevier Press, 1996), 210.
67Angela Holzer, ‘Science, Sexuality, and The Novels of Huxley and Houellebecq’, CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture, 5, 2 (2003),1–11, 6, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol5/iss2 [accessed 23 April 2011].
68Auguste de Comte, An Appeal to Conservatives, 75.
69Of course, the idea that such a simple causality exists between genes and the variegated terrains of human sexuality is a rather untrustworthy interpretation of genome science as it erroneously conflates sexuality and sexual desire, reducing both to a matter of tinkering with DNA.
70Bowd, 35.
71Abecassis, 807.
72Moore, 58.
73The Elohimites are actually a disguised version of the actual sect of the ‘UFO religion’ the Raëlians. Set up by ex-racing driver Claude Vorilhon in 1974, Raëlism is difficult to define as a movement as it comprises a motley mixture of New Age thinking, a belief in the existence of extraterrestrials, eschatology and a strong advocation of scientific cloning through nanotechnology. Houellebecq undertook extensive research on the sect in preparation for The Possibility of an Island.
74Brinkmann, 1387.
75Moraru, 276.
76Moore, 45.
77Atomised, 100.
78Houellebecq himself has a dog, his beloved Pembroke Corgi, Clément, with whom he has been frequently photographed. He has made several comments to interviewers conveying his deep affection for Clément: ‘It is always hard to abandon him’, he told Andrew Hussey, a reporter from The Observer, Sunday 6 November 2005. See Delphine Grass, ‘Domesticating Hierarchies, Eugenic Hygiene and Exclusion Zones: The Dogs and Clones of Houellebecq’: La Possibilité d’une île’, L’Esprit créateur, 52, 2 (2012), 127–40.
Conclusion
You could quibble forever whether men were more or less happy in previous centuries. You could comment on the disappearance of religions, of the feeling of love […] the loss of our sense of the sacred, the crumbling of social ties […] But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the pre-eminence of the twentieth century was indisputable.1
‘It has now become easier’, writes Jameson, ‘to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.2 The end of the world, or more accurately the end of humanity, is precisely what is finally imagined in Houellebecq’s novels that have been considered here. This, then, is the literature of despair. Unable to conceive of anything that might be outside of capitalism or any point of meaningful or effective resistance to it, Houellebecq’s writing demonstrates what Susan Buck-Morss argues is neoliberalism’s capacity to eliminate ‘the very possibility of critical thinking’, central to which is a continuing human openness to the idea and possibility of otherness and alterity.3 The end of the human world imagined in these novels is reached through a brief period of libertine participation that produces an irreversible cauterization of affect leading to social and sexual atomization and then to a total sloughing off of all human attachments and affiliations. This process of detachment reaches its apotheosis in The Possibility of an Island where there is an absolute separation from any recognizably human world. With every sense of the political discounted, the only solution offered to the affective misery wreaked by capitalism is a biogenetic one enabling the anaesthetizing of all feeling and the stilling of all thought and, most crucially, removing the need for any kind of otherness or alterity.
The difficulty of encountering alterity, anything outside of the citadel of the self, is central to all of Houellebecq’s writing. Both Atomised and Possibility trace humanity’s retreat from the contingency and potentiality of everyday affective life into the perfectly functioning technical existence of clones who are no longer buffeted by the whims of affect, as every trace of organic, creaturely feeling has been bioengineered out of their biological schema. With affect gone, there is no interrelatedness or connection, as there is no longer a social body to which these new entities belong. There is no more culture, no society to speak of, no more sex and above all, no more sense of otherness. Eating, secreting and existing in complete isolation, the neohumans have only the faintest trace of the memory of human laughter and happiness in the shape of Daniel1’s writing, read by his Daniel25 incarnation as a ghostly archive of the ruins of ‘real’ humanity. This life-story of the original Daniel speaks of the frictionless, affectless, undifferentiated world-without-desire to come two millennia later: ‘I no longer feel any hate in me, nothing to cling to any more, no more landmarks or clues […] There is no longer any real world, no world, no human world, I am outside time, I no longer have a past or future, I have no more sadness, plans, nostalgia, loss or hope … ’ (PI, 304). Unable, and eventually unwilling, to connect to any other body, Houellebecq’s protagonists retreat from affective potentiality into almost total somatic isolation where all human life is identical; ‘corrected’ human entities exist painlessly in vanishingly small physical and phenomenological spaces with no flux, flow and transformation – existence is reduced to what might be called ‘bare life’.
The asexual, posthuman space that culminates in The Possibility of an Island has been in the making across all four novels considered here and is the conclusion of the working through of the hypothesis set out in Whatever; namely, that the extension of the domain of neoliberal capitalism produces irreversibly ruinous effects on human affective life. This ruination is seen most particularly in the sexual domain as it is in sexuality and its attendant potential for intimacy and feeling that it is most keenly registered. With its sphere of emotional attachment and affective belonging, sexuality is, as we have seen, the site at which capital most acutely meets biopolitical life and, as such, is one of the most vulnerable spaces to the affective reach of neoliberal capitalism, where emotional sensibilities are transformed into resources to form an integral part of human capital. This incursion of capital into the innermost worlds of our subjectivity – our desires, dreams and fears – leaves nothing untouched in its subsuming wake and increasingly, Houellebecq suggests in his oeuvre, there is no outside to this subsumption. The transformation of the myriad nuances and singular fragilities of the affective human world into a material one defined by exchange and profit is on its way to full totality and part of this is the gradual writing out of any possibility of resistance to this system. For the subject who is sensitive to this lack of outside, living produces almost unbearable suffering as it becomes acutely aware of itself as an increasingly deprived consciousness. Incrementally then, the novels shut off any possibility of any alterity to this vision, choosing instead complete disaffiliation from the social and withdrawal into an ontological similitude that requires no outside or difference; a post-philosophical world where the rational determinism of science and technology contours human life. The posthuman world presented in The Possibility of an Island has given up on ‘real’ human communion and collectivity. Living in carefully managed isolation in a state of supreme reason and indifference, the neohuman entities are the products of Houellebecq’s ‘cold revolution’, one in which ‘sociability had had its day’. ‘Perhaps that crude imbecile Hegel’, Daniel1 says, ‘had, at the end of the day, seen things correctly’ and that all humans were merely the ‘servant[s] of the cunning of reason’ (PI, 299, 300). Possibility is, then, the end point of Houellebecq’s recurring thesis of an escalating anomie in which the number of possibilities in human life are inexorably on the wane in a process of shrivelling up and contraction, and which are finally brought to a standstill in the monadic entities of the neohumans.
Whether Houellebecq’s vision of ‘bare life’ is to be understood as warning or as resignation gives rise to several questions, of course. Does this posthuman vision suggest that acquiescence to the neoliberal state of affairs is inevitable and unavoidable? Or is Houellebecq rather warning us, using the debased register of the world we inhabit, of the dangers we surely face? Is the suggestion that there really is no alternative to this metaphysical and affective desubjectification finally a deeply conservative one? Or, is the peaceful existence of the neohumans desirable, even utopian? On the face of it at least, their existence might appear something of a utopian space; free from individuation and narcissism and thus from any sense of economic, sexual, or metaphysical struggle, there is a strict equivalence and egalitarianism between the posthuman entities. In this way, the vagaries of humanity will disappear and in its place an improved, technically corrected, post-ideological posthumanism will be created in which all human affect and striving is replaced by serene indifference and ontological similitude. This is, however, a vision that teeters on the line between utopia and dystopia and might be regarded as a rather cagey, but in ma
ny ways typically Houellebecquian, manoeuvre.
Seen positively, Houellebecq’s work demonstrates what might happen to humanity if we continue down the current ideological road and, for many readers, this warning is an important part of the allure of le monde houellebecquien. Attracted to his novels by their urgent engagement with their subject, that of the total subsumption of the human life world into the desymbolizing circuits of exchange and competition, we are continually waiting, even if we are not fully conscious of this, for something resembling a ‘solution’ to become visible. Undeterred perhaps even by his ‘modest proposal’ of sex tourism, misogyny and anti-Islamic comments, we are persuaded by the conviction of his vision to go along with many of the controversies and outrages in the work in the persistent hope that we might be offered some kind of workable critique of the world described. In other words, we hope that Houellebecq’s work is all a timely caution that, if left unchecked, capitalism will continue to swallow up our lives, loves and feelings and feed them into the machine of exchange.
However, the solution we are offered is no solution at all as what we end up with is a post-ideological, posthumanism that points up the lack of conceivable ethical or political alternatives to the rationalization of the lifeworld. There is only more of the same to come, Houellebecq suggests, and the only way out of this is the creation of a post-historical, non-human world that is, in the end, no world at all and offers us only a vision of an endlessly regressive humanity. In its failure to imagine another possibility for the world other than an affectless posthumanity, Houellebecq’s work may be said to exemplify that which is most at risk under the reign of neoliberalism: progressive and creative critical thinking itself. ‘To be truly radical’, as Raymond Williams said, ‘is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable’. Despair is not only inevitable in Houellebecq’s work, it is without anticipation of either hope or redemption.
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 29