Michel Houellebecq is without a doubt the most famous living French writer. Indeed, it is often suggested that no French author has achieved such global visibility since Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Not only that, but Houellebecq is commonly regarded as the single most controversial writer France has produced since Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the notoriously fascistic author ofVoyage au bout de la nuit(1932).¹ Although Houellebecq’s significant literary output amounts, essentially, to just five novels, published in the space of a decade and a half, the secondary literature on the author is already considerable. There are, to date, over fifteen...

This chapter, concerned principally withExtension du domaine de la lutte(1994) andLes Particules élémentaires(1998), looks in detail at the focus on sex that arguably first drew attention to Houellebecq’s work and made the author so notorious. The chapter surveys the evidence for Houellebecq’s alleged sexism or misogyny but argues that, in fact, the focus in his work is largely on individuals deprived of sex or excluded from the sexual sphere and that, from this perspective, the world of sexuality appears singularly oppressive. Houellebecq’s world is populated principally by single people, but they are not so much ‘young,...

Having devoted considerable attention to the workplace inExtension du domaine de la lutte(1994), Houellebecq continued to develop a complex reflection on the place of work in our lives in his later novelsPlateforme(2001) andLa Carte et le territoire(2010). At the same time, however, he also pursued his interrogation of leisure and its relation to work in a capitalist economy, with particular reference to tourism. He did this most controversially inPlateforme, with its notorious discussion of sex tourism, and later more soberly inLa Carte et le territoire, which also includes a self-reflexive meditation on...

This chapter seeks to reconstruct the understanding of ‘life’, and human life in particular, that characterises Houellebecq’s work and that, inLa Possibilité d’une île(2005), is finally seen to necessitate humanity’s overcoming by a posthuman successor species. In doing so the chapter returns to Houellebecq’s earliest works and notes Houellebecq’s apparent identification with H. P. Lovecraft, the American author of horror fiction whose writing is marked by a hatred of life and for whom literature appears as a rejection of or opposition to life. This sense is confirmed inRester vivant(1991), which stresses failure and suffering as the...

The goal of this book has been to show that the writing of Michel Houellebecq helps us to think about what it means to be human in an era that can be considered posthumanist in two respects: first, that more than ever we have an understanding of how our own species is governed by patterns of behaviour whose causality is ultimately not that different from that found in other animals; and second, that we have within our grasp the possibility of real genetic and prosthetic modifications that could operate an ‘improvement’ upon the basic model ofHomo sapiens. In his...