The Eclipse of Desire: L'Affaire Houellebecq

Sous l'être humain, il y a la brute
Configurée en profondeur
Mais au fond de sa vie sans but,
L'homme attend le deuxième sauveur. ¹

The Affaire. Paris, October 1998. The routine of la rentrée littéraire breaks. Instead of the usual quarrels limited to a small circle of literati, there erupts a serious and sustained public debate in literary reviews, newspapers, radio and television. After a pause of many years, perhaps dating back to the publication of Voyage au bout de la nuit and L'Etranger, Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires becomes the focal point of a national public debate. ² On this point Le Monde's Van Renterghem is categorical: "Rarement un roman aura fait couler autant d'encre, suscité tant de passions, d'emballements ou de détestations, de gonflements incontrolés en débats et en polémiques." ³ At its heart, l'Affaire Houellebecq has little to do with literary value per se; it concerns, rather, the desecration of the regime of desire, our last idol.

Having triumphed on the economic and political level, post-1945 liberal democracy sought to expand the range of rights (and implicit duties) consistent with its underlying logic: the exponential increase in individual autonomy in all domains, including the most private and intimate. For the first time ever, the possibilities of desire availed themselves to the citizens of democracies. With its refrain--the Rolling Stones' "I can't get no satisfaction"--sexual gratification became almost a form of civic duty. In this new cultural regime, rights were no longer exclusively limited to the political and economic. Libidinal potential (love, sex, orgasms), first postulated as a possible social state by Margaret Mead, then scientifically described and explained by Master and Johnson, and finally consecrated as personal epiphany in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, now donned an urgent imperative aura. This urgency simply meant that orgasms, both in quantity and variety, were to become the focal point of a cultural project. Orgasms became a must. Obviously, except for doing away with legal barriers (i.e. laws regarding privacy), one cannot grant desire on the formally legal and political level. That is, the law may, for example, stipulate minimum wages, but the law cannot guarantee minimum sexual satisfaction. Desire nevertheless did attain the level of an implicit promise, integral to any form of genuine self-enactment. Such was, and still is perhaps, the cultural project of the post-1945 period. Yet Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires deflates desire in all its permutations, from a cultural and political project on the grand conceptual level, to the minute details of contemporary daily life on the phenomenological level. In short, Houellebecq postulates the impossibility of desire as a generalized cultural project. This polemical roman à thèse describes and analyzes the implosion of the sexual babble. By now we, as Westerners, have a huge investment in our libidinal and desiring selves; we cherish this libidinal babble, as demonstrated by the vehement polemics detonated by the deflationary Les Particules élémentaires. Houellebecq's fictional-essayistic grinder minces through our most cherished beliefs--that happiness equals sexual and romantic satisfaction, that Being equals desiring and becoming the object of desire. ⁴ As a genre, the novel accomplishes its principle task of grinding down to a pulp the very grains of ideological self-understanding to which its readers cling with comic tenacity. ⁵

The Affaire Houellebecq swept through the Parisian cultural landscape. The novel was the best seller of the rentrée and well beyond (250,000 copies sold by June 99 in France and translations by important publishing houses in all major languages). Not only was the novel wide-ranging in its devastating critique of cherished idols, but its ideological grounding was also disorienting. A critique from the right; a critique from the left--these are moves that cultural players understand and therefore discount accordingly. But a player who...