By Russell A. Berman · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following comments refer to Robert Redeker’s piece from Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, published in English translation on TelosScope here.
In a notable comment in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud compares Oedipus Rex with Hamlet in order to describe what he calls “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.” Between Sophocles and Shakespeare, civilization underwent an enormous increase in the control of affect and a withering away of the formerly unmanaged space of some original freedom. Of course Freud was talking about widely separated historical moments, ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Today, through hyper-acceleration in a much shorter period, we are undergoing a comparable quantum leap of control (see: surveillance) accompanied by restrictions on free speech and free thought unthinkable only a few decades ago.
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By Robert Redeker · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following text originally appeared in Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, and is published here in English translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
In 1793, the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte discovered what the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris does not know today, if one can judge by the complaint that he filed against the author Michel Houellebecq, i.e., that freedom of thought is divine. Let us listen to Fichte: “It is both a human and divine truth that man has inalienable rights and that freedom of thought is one of these rights.” What does that mean? It means that denouncing and opposing freedom of thought is blasphemous; that this sort of anger simultaneously offends the divine part of humanity and, indirectly, God himself; and that this sort of attack is dehumanizing because it attempts to tear out of the human conscience what God himself gave it.
Through its legal action, the Grand Mosque of Paris poses two risks, for the writer and our country: the risk of forcing the writer, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, to live under close police protection or, in other words, to become a sort of prisoner of conscience in his own country, and the risk of inciting a fanatic ready to spill the blood of the man targeted as an “Islamophobe.” Let us recall that since Islam is not the state religion of France, one has the right to speculate, perhaps erroneously, that it is wrong and alien to the soul of French civilization. One similarly has the right to discuss this idea, as long as one stays at the level of general ideas and refrains from defamations or direct calls for violence.
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By Ellis Hanson · Wednesday, December 30, 2015 However improbably, Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission returns continually to the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans for inspiration, if one can call it inspiration, this exercise in disillusionment seeking its literary echo. All the more surprising is Houellebecq’s insistence on a view of Huysmans that scarcely anyone, even those who have read his best work, will recognize, despite its being scrupulously accurate in its biographical and literary detail. When Huysmans is read today, it is almost invariably as the quintessential Decadent of À rebours, which Houellebecq touches upon only lightly when he declares it a masterpiece and then declines to discuss it in any meaningful way except to ask where one goes, where Huysmans went, where Houellebecq’s protagonist François might go, when his best work, his greatest inspirations, and his greatest dissipations are behind him. “In the case of Joris-Karl Huysmans,” the protagonist worries, “the obvious problem was what to do with À rebours. Once you’ve written a book of such powerful originality, unrivaled even today in all of literature, how do you go on writing?” Houellebecq even seems to be inviting us to contemplate his own midlife crisis as a novelist and wonder if, after writing the great novel of cynicism in our time, after exploring in painful detail better than anyone else all the great whatevers of modern anomie, he has simply run out of fresh disillusionments to anatomize in prose. His answer to his own question is quite simply Durtal, Huysmans’ other great literary accomplishment, the autobiographical alter ego around whom he focalized a series of somewhat mystical, somewhat Naturalistic, somewhat Decadent novels of Catholic conversion that occupied him for much of the two decades that followed the success of À rebours.
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By Giuseppina Mecchia · Wednesday, December 23, 2015 Reading the latest novel by Michel Houellebecq, I remembered an essay by Maurice Blanchot that appeared in 1964, entitled “L’Apocalypse déçoit,” roughly translatable as “The Apocalypse Disappoints.” Originally devoted to the intellectual failure on the part of the French intelligentsia to deal with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the title of that essay seems the perfect commentary to a plot that would sound nothing less than apocalyptic to a very sizable part of contemporary French society: the election of a Muslim president of the French Republic and the Islamization of its civil code. This disastrous occurrence, currently treated in the Western media as nothing less than a catastrophic finis Europae, is narrated by Houellebecq in his increasingly understated voice, now mostly situated halfway between deadpan satire, melancholic brooding, and a touch of occasional melodrama. Gone are the violent Islamic terrorists of Plateforme, the 2001 novel that ended with terrorist attack on European sexual tourists in Thailand. No more spectacular explosions of the 9/11 kind: if the Western way of life will go, it won’t be with a bang, but with a merely audible whimper.
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By Alex Dubilet · Friday, December 18, 2015 A miasma of exhaustion and obsolescence pervades Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. It is occasionally punctured by explicit expressions of a pornographic libidinality, but these, in the end, serve only as desperate manifestations of increasingly temporary respites. The end is nigh, if it didn’t already happen. Houellebecq’s universe remains what it has been repeatedly—a universe of male libidinal desire, its intensifying frustrations and anxieties monumentally projected onto the background of the specters of the civilizational decline of the West. Houellebecq is at the tired end of the secular liberal dream of possessive individualism and sexual freedom, or, as the narrator puts it rather succinctly: “In the end, my cock was all I had” (81).
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By Michael Allan · Friday, December 11, 2015 For scholars of religion and literature, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission glimmers like a shiny lure. The storyline contains the sorts of details that appeal to an easy and seductive journalistic gloss. The year is 2022. A charismatic Muslim prime minister is elected in France, and an almost caricatured series of events follows: men and women are separated; the university president converts to Islam and weds a young wife; professors are coerced to convert or retire early; and so on. Add to the plot Houellebecq’s professed Islamophobia and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, and you have the ingredients of a newsworthy book to be addressed by critics, journalists, and readers across the world. Like a number of reviewers, I initially found myself lured to consider religion, secularism, and contemporary French politics against the backdrop of the newly published English translation. But as I began reading, I was confronted with a challenge of a different sort.
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