The Houellebecq Cure. All Malady Will End in the Neohuman
David Vella, University of Cardiff, Wales
1Subjectivity in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction is constituted through experiences of its own failure. As seen especially in his major novels Atomised and The Possibility of an Island, the suffering of its helplessness invests subjectivity with its self-referential existence and its logic. “It is in failure, and through failure, that the subject constitutes itself […]” (Houellebecq, Island 118). Subjectivity is defined as a compulsive reactivity to its prior impotence. It seems to arise only inasmuch as it is a resistance to its own failure, a mechanism that is the force of a self-preservation. In Houellebecq, this obdurate self-assertion that is man, finds its most powerful instrument, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the scientific worldview, “the arbiter of unique, irrefutable truth” (Houellebecq, Atomised 377).
2 The nature of this spokesman for subjectivity’s self-assertion, its ruthlessly rationalistic outlook where God is absent and death final, is seen, however, to be ultimately incapable in sustaining humanity. At its heart is the irredeemability of death, the prospect of which is an occasion for the most agonizing distress in the subject, its reentry into the suffering of its impotence. “In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with an occasional clang” (95).
3This in turn inspires the subject’s irrational and unrelenting search to affirm itself through the intimacy of love: “Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated” (I 162). On the other hand is the sexual drive which is creating “an artificial mankind, a frivolous one that will no longer be open to seriousness or to humour, which, until it dies will engage in an increasingly desperate quest for fun and sex; a generation of definitive kids” (26).
4The intense experiences of love and sexuality however are defined by their fleetingness inasmuch as the subject’s will is always falling short of them. The brief taste of such experiences serves only to render their elusiveness ever more agonizing. The subject is again and again brought to face its own insufficiency. That suffering that instigates the crazed monomania of love and sexual pleasures is finally also what subverts this monomania. For Houellebecq, humanity is led straight into its suffering by the same movement of escape from it.
5In what follows, I will attempt to address this suffering as an obsessive thought of death, and trace its intrinsic relationship with the sexual-love instinct. Moreover, in this light, I will examine closely the particular nature of Houllebecq’s neohuman and its similarity to the ageing human.