The French Condition

            Reading Bataille and Teillhard, I immediately felt some kind of an uncanny resemblance. The work of Michel Houellebecq has fascinated me for years and once our class conversation turned inwards, to the machinations of the atom, I knew at once that this connection was not a coincidence. The two Houellebecq novels most relevant to our topic are undoubtedly The Elementary Particles (sometimes called Atomised) and The Possibility of an Island. My associations began with one word, brought up at some point during discussion: atomicité. Naturally, the homophonic connection can be made with ‘Atomised,’ but there was a resonance on another level. The Elementary Particles centers around the lives of two French men, Bruno and Michel, half-brothers who could not be more disparate in their sensibilities. Bruno is a literature major (and later, teacher) with no real interests apart from sex. Michel is a molecular biologist who is almost entirely self-contained, asexual, and asocial. Houellebecq’s detached, dissociative literary style perches the reader high above these characters, and peering down, we feel no empathy for their struggles. As we watch their lives unfold what becomes clear is the hopeless alienation that Michel, Bruno, and the society they are surrounded with, feel as a result of the contemporary cultural climate. Houellebecq is particularly interested in the effects that secularism, the Sexual Revolution, and neoliberal capitalism have had on the status of the individual. Ultimately he seems to believe that the individual has undergone an atomization, mirroring the astonishing rise-to-power of the materialist discourse. However, Houellebecq sees (through his eponymous character) that the quantum discourse will once again lead us to something resembling unity. However, for Houellebecq, and us, we are not of this time, and we are doomed to the radical individualism laid out for us. Houellebecq believes we’ve hit rock-bottom on ‘the human’ and that the post-human must be right around the corner. I’m worried that I’m making the novel sound judgmental or apocalyptic or something – it really isn’t. It’s very much in the same genre of self-alienated soothsaying that Bataille and Teillhard belong to, although Houellebecq is much more Bataillean in his nature (he certainly believes Christianity holds nothing for the human race anymore).

            The Possibility of an Island is even more ambitious in its capacity for fortune-telling. In it Houellebecq jumps back and forth between present-day France and France hundreds of years in the future. In future France, the neohumans live in self-sustained biodomes (despite the pulp-esque jargon they really seem to resemble condos more than anything), completely alone except for their dogs. There is no government or social contact and they live through genetically engineered photosynthesis. Sexual reproduction is non-existent, given up in favor of cloning. Of course, my blurb doesn’t do the book justice, but hopefully you can see the ways in which Bataille or Teillhard extrapolated might lead one to envision such a future. The currents of the world have pulled humanity inside-out and that which once defined us (sex, consumption, death) are no longer necessary. In regaining, or rather, re-realizing continuity (in the sense Bataille uses the word), we are fundamentally changed forever.

            All three thinkers provide a devastating lens with which to survey the condition of humanity. An interesting component of Houellebecq in regards to Teillhard is (as we’ve discussed) the teleological component. Houellebecq posits that humanity is moving inexorably towards a breaking point, towards a future in which ‘the human’ is irrelevant. If we’d care to notice, Teillhard does not indicate that the Omega Point is The End, so to speak. It’s just the end of ‘us.’ In this way, Teillhard’s teleo-theology could be viewed more as a movement through a point, rather than to one. Houellebecq finds his central metaphor in both books in comparing the human to the atomic, but quantum theories, theories that blow away the notion of the atom as fundamentally singular, foreshadow a coming phase of humanity where the radically individual point that we now occupy is also blown away. The darker, lonelier, and more sexually frustrated side is seen through Bruno, while Michel exists largely as a conduit for ideas (ostensibly his own, though they are of crucial thematic importance). Some of the ones Houellebecq likes in particular include Griffith’s Consistent Histories, the discrediting of Bell’s inequalities, and cloning. In true post-modern form Houellebecq writes of these topics in all their technical glory, so I couldn’t honestly tell you what they meant precisely, though it was clear that he was using them as arguments against the fundamental nature of the alienated atomic unit.

            It also interests me that all these people are French. Are the French going to ascend to neohuman status before the rest of us? Have they already? What can we Americans do to appropriate these capabilities? But seriously, it is remarkable that all of the thinkers discussed are French. Some might put it down to a strong intellectual tradition, but I really think there must be more to it. Fortunately for us Houellebecq notes in his interview with the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that you possibly had an American side to you. What is your evidence for this?

HOUELLEBECQ

I have very little proof. There’s the fact that if I lived in an American context, I think I would have chosen a Lexus, which is the best quality for the price. And more obscurely, I have a dog that I know is very popular in the United States, a Welsh Corgi. One thing I don’t share is this American obsession with large breasts. That, I must admit, leaves me cold. But a two-car garage? I want one. A fridge with one of those ice-maker things? I want one too. What appeals to them appeals to me.

So maybe there’s still hope.