Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

Widely acknowledged as an important, if highly controversial, figure in contemporary literature, French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq has elicited diverse critical responses. In this book Carole Sweeney examines his novels as a response to the advance of neoliberalism into all areas of affective human life. This historicizing study argues that le monde houellebecquien is an atomised society of banal quotidian alienation populated by quietly resentful men who are the botched subjects of late-capitalism. Addressing Houellebecqs handling of the failure of the radical thought of 68, Sweeney looks at the ways in which his fiction treats feminism, the decline of religion and the family, as well as the obsolescence of French theory and the Sartrean notion of engaged literature. Reading the world with the disappointed idealism of a contemporary moralist, Houellebecqs novels, Sweeney argues, fluctuate between despair for the world as it is and a limp utopian hope for a post-humanity.