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Michel Houellebecq, Meet Maximilien Robespierre”: a Study in Social Religion

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Michel Houellebecq, Meet Maximilien Robespierre”: a Study in Social Religion L’É RUDIT FRANCO -ESPAGNOL , VOLUME 1, SPRING 2012 “Michel Houellebecq, Meet Maximilien Robespierre”: A Study in Social Religion Louis Betty University of San Francisco Since the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles in 1998, his fiction has inspired an array of critical responses. Many of these responses have drawn comparisons between the author’s writings and the work of various key figures in the Western literary and philosophical canons. For example, Houellebecq’s fiction has been likened to the novels of Camus, Zola, Balzac, and Céline, and his poetry has evoked associations with the poetry of Baudelaire. Scholars have pointed out Houellebecq’s philosophical debts to figures such as Schopenhauer, Comte, and Nietzsche, and to French non-conformist writers like Emmanuel Mounier and Robert Aron. 1 Insufficient attention may have been given to Kant, whom Houellebecq often refers to in his writing, or to utopian thinkers such as Fourier and Saint-Simon, who inform much of the utopian discourse in Houellebecq’s fiction. Even so, given the rapidly expanding nature of what we might call Houellebecq Studies , these stones will not remain unturned for long. Within this quickly growing body of critical literature, one figure remains unaddressed: Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, the great republican ideologue, the foremost instigator of the Reign of Terror, and the eventual victim of decapitation. This is initially surprising when we consider how Robespierre and Houellebecq show agreement on the social value of religion in times of perceived growing atheism. Robespierre invoked this theme most memorably in his address to the Convention of 7 May 1794, in which he unveiled his plans for the creation of the Cult of the Supreme Being. Houellebecq, whose treatment of religion has received little attention from scholars, returns at numerous points in his writing to the question of religion’s social function, often to lament religion’s decline in an “age of materialism” (Particles 246). Crucially, Robespierre and Houellebecq both offer sustained criticism of the materialisms of their day. Robespierre viewed the atheistic and deterministic materialism of certain aspects of the Enlightenment as poisonous to the republican project. Houellebecq, in his fiction and non-fiction, bemoans the materialism produced and perpetuated by the West’s culture of consumerism and 1 Much of the scholarly writing on Houellebecq can be found in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael’s edited volumes Michel Houellebecq à la une and Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe . For Comte and Nietzsche see, respectively, George Chabert and Gerald Moore. For a discussion of the French non-conformist writers, see Seth Armus. 19 L’É RUDIT FRANCO -ESPAGNOL , VOLUME 1, SPRING 2012 modern advertising. He blames the rise of the “market society” (Interventions 2 27) and the atomization of human relationships on this materialism. In this article, our purpose is to show the similarities between Houellebecq and Robespierre’s views on three topics: (1) materialism, (2) secularism, and (3) religion’s social role. Crucially, we will argue that the “materialisms” that each figure condemns, respectively, can be linked to radical enlightenment elements. These elements attempt to dissociate divine will from human action (a feature of virtually all enlightenment thinking) and to erect a conception of human existence from which all divine and immaterial predicates are absent. 2 The materialistic legacy of particular aspects of the Enlightenment forms the basis for the complaints of both figures, even though the historical manifestations of that legacy appear markedly different (atheism and anti-clericalism for Robespierre’s society and consumerism for Houellebecq’s society). Finally, as our conclusion will bear out, Robespierre and Houellebecq, although united in their denunciation of materialism, do not to share the same confidence in the solutions to the dilemmas they spell out. As a figure of tremendous revolutionary enthusiasm, Robespierre believed that his Cult of the Supreme Being could be an effective replacement for the Catholic Church. In contrast, Houellebecq’s proposed “solutions” (i.e. cloning cults, neo- humans, etc.) offer very little hope. Houellebecq’s positioning in a post-modern context forbids him the means of radical and revolutionary social change that were, or at least appeared to be, available to Robespierre. Houellebecq on Religion Before directly tackling the question of Houellebecq’s affinities with Robespierre, we will first discuss the parameters of Houellebecq’s view on religion. This view is manifested both in his fiction and non-fiction. Houellebecq’s treatment of theology, philosophy, and related subjects is not programmatic in the way of a theological treatise. Nonetheless, a number of clear tendencies run the gamut of the author’s work: (1) materialism, (2) secularization, and (3) new religious movements. Materialism In Public Enemies , his co-authored exchange of letters with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Houellebecq writes, “Maybe, like Lovecraft, all I have ever written are materialist horror stories ; and given them a dangerous credibility into the bargain” (275). Just as naturalism was the guiding principle of Zola’s fiction, the ontological ambiance of Houellebecq’s novels is one of strict physicalism. In this view, human existence is reduced to a finite set of physical parameters while the domain of “spirit” (gods, souls, and other such entities) is explained away as the superstition of a pre-scientific and “pre-positivist” age. 3 Houellebecq explores the psychic consequences of this worldview in the following passage in The Elementary Particles : Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. Never in any other time, or any other civilization, have people thought so much or so constantly about 2 My use of the terms “radical enlightenment” comes from Jonathan Israel’s book Radical Enlightenment . 3 We are referring here to the “law of the three stages,” which formed the basis of Comte’s sociological theory. 20 L’É RUDIT FRANCO -ESPAGNOL , VOLUME 1, SPRING 2012 aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually hear the meter ticking, and it ticks always in the same direction). This weighing up of pleasure and pain, which everyone if forced to make sooner or later, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide. (204) Virtually all of Houellebecq’s characters are tormented in one way or another by their physicalist outlook. Many, including Bruno, Michel in Platform , and Daniel1 in The Possibility of an Island , resort to sex as a means of subverting (albeit failingly) the pressing awareness of their own mortality. Others, such as Annabelle in The Elementary Particles and, again, Daniel1, commit suicide once their bodies become a source of suffering, or when they can no longer count on them to be a source of pleasure due to illness or old age. 4 Characters such as Djerzinski in The Elementary Particles and Vincent in The Possibility of an Island , although their journeys do not end as tragically as those of Daniel1 or Bruno, nonetheless cannot conceive of human salvation, or even human progress, in anything other than physicalist terms. Djerzinski, for example, understands “the practical possibility of human relationships” ( Particles 249)—that is, the defragmenting of the atomized society envisioned in The Elementary Particles —to depend not on some spiritual, metaphysical, or psychic renewal, but on the manipulation of the human genome in order to breed out native tendencies toward “egotism, cruelty and anger” (263). Vincent, prophet of the Elohimite cloning cult in The Possibility of an Island , contends that human love is only possible in the context of physical immortality. He tells Daniel1, Man has never been able to love, apart from in immortality; it was undoubtedly why women were closer to love when their mission was to give life. We have discovered immortality, and presence in the world; the world no longer has the power to destroy us, it is we, rather, who have the power to create through the power of our vision. (286) The only catch in this case is that immortality is limited to the physical body. Whereas the survival of human consciousness in a spiritual form was the natural consequence of physical death in the Christian universe, immortality in The Possibility of an Island has to be produced in vitro through vague processes of memory transfer that Houellebecq, for obvious reasons, never fully explains (92). Unsurprisingly, the “materialist horror stories” recounted in these novels are not the product of mere philosophical imagination. Instead, they stem from Houellebecq’s explicit diagnosis of prevailing Western mentalities. For example, in the Lettre à Lakis Proguidis , a non-fiction work, Houellebecq writes, “Without a doubt, the twentieth century will remain as the age of triumph in the mind of the general public of a scientific explanation of the world, associated by it with a materialist worldview and the principle of local determinism” (Interventions 2 152, personal translation). In the Houellebecquian view, Western civilization has yielded almost completely to atheism and materialism, while traditional religious explanations of the world have been undermined by broad secularizing forces unleashed by the scientific revolution in the early-modern period. Within this framework, the ills that plague Houellebecq’s characters (sexual pauperization, old age, the capitalist system of production, etc.) can be understood as developments linked with the supposed 4 See Particles (231) and Possibility (272-73, 291). 21 L’É RUDIT FRANCO -ESPAGNOL , VOLUME 1, SPRING 2012 move toward materialism that the West has taken in the period following the emergence of the scientific method and the concomitant dissolution of the “medieval synthesis.”5 Secularization Until recently, most sociologists of religion worked under the assumption that religion and modernity were mutually exclusive.
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