Interventions 2020

by Michel Houellebecq

Overview

The death of God in the West was the prelude to a metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity’s masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these attempts is advertising, which seeks to arouse desire and transform the subject into a docile phantom, doomed to follow advertising’s every whim. But, like all previous attempts, this superficial participation in the world fails, and unhappiness and depression continue to spread. 

We can all produce a cold revolution in ourselves, however, by stepping outside the flow of information and advertising. We need to take some time out, unplug the television, turn off our smartphones, stop buying stuff and adopt an aesthetic attitude to the world. We just need to stay still for a few seconds.

This is one of the key themes developed by Michel Houellebecq in this collection of his texts and interviews from the last three decades. Here he explains and elaborates his point of view, discusses his novels and addresses a wide range of topics from politics, religion and literature to suicide, euthanasia and paedophilia. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the work of one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509549955
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	05/23/2022
Pages:	314
Sales rank:	1,122,631
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michel Houellebecq is a French writer, poet and essayist.  His many bestselling books include Platform, The Possibility of an Island, Submission and Serotonin.  He won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2010 and, in 2019, he was awarded the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest order of merit.

Table of Contents

1. Jacques Prévert is a jerk
  
2. The Mirage by Jean-Claude Guiguet

3. Approaches to distress

4. Staring into the distance: in praise of silent cinema

5. Interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais and Christophe Duchâtel

6. Art as peeling

7. Creative absurdity

8. The party

9. Time out

10. Opera bianca

11. Letter to Lakis Proguidis

12. The question of paedophilia

13. Humanity, the second stage
   
14. Empty heavens

15. I have a dream

16. Neil Young

17. Interview with Christian Authier

18. I don’t love myself

19. Sky, earth, sun

20. Leaving the twentieth century

21. Philippe Muray in 2002

22. Towards a semi-rehabilitation of the hick

23. Conservatism, a source of progress

24. Prolegomena to positivism

25. I’m normal. A normal writer

26. I have read my whole life long

27. Soil cutting

28. The lost text

29. Interview with Frédéric Beigbeder

30. A remedy for the exhaustion of being

31. Interview with Marin De Viry and Valérie Toranian

32. Interview with Agathe Novak-Lechevalier

33. Emmanuel Carrère and the problem of goodness

34. Donald Trump is a good president

35. Conversation with Geoffroy Lejeune

36. A bit worse. A response to a few friends

37. The Vincent Lambert affair should not have taken place

Sources

Notes

Editorial Reviews

03/28/2022

France’s notorious novelist of caustic alienation hurls more firebombs in this provocative collection. Houellebecq (Submission) gathers over two decades of essays, reviews, criticism, and interviews that coldly diagnose the sicknesses of contemporary life; his great theme is the depersonalization of society that turns modern architecture into a soulless showcase for advertising, causes “a real loathing for the flesh in our societies,” and drives the creeping dissolution of all human connection, now further advanced by the Covid lockdowns. While scabrously critical of capitalism, Houellebecq also takes aim at woke verities, leveling sharp imprecations at Islam of the sort that got him tried for hate speech; labeling feminists “amiable dimwits... made dangerous by their disarming lack of lucidity,” and calling Donald Trump “a good president” because of his isolationism and protectionism (while also judging him a “disgusting” man). Houellebecq’s writing is deeply philosophical, but it’s also incisive, pugnacious (poet Jacques Prévert “has something to say... unfortunately, what he has to say is boundlessly stupid”), and suffused with bleak intellectualism: “The purpose of the party is to make us forget that we are lonely, miserable and doomed to death; in other words, to transform us into animals.” The result is a thicket of barbed, nihilistic yet earnestly serious pensées that are as often infuriating as stimulating. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2022-03-16
Editorials, occasional pieces, and interviews by and with the prickly French writer.

“The logical consequences of individualism are murder and unhappiness,” Houellebecq tells an interlocutor, going on to spin out a soliloquy that takes in quantum physics, the abandonment of psychoanalysis, the molecular basis of consciousness, and the ecological disasters we’re careening toward. The author’s sententious writings are of a piece, if often more personal: He doesn’t like going to parties, for instance, and though they can be made more tolerable with a “nice dose of hallucinogenic plants,” the question still stands, “What the hell am I doing with these jerks?” Houellebecq has been deemed a reactionary, but the political stance here is a sort of Cartesian socialism with a strong dash of religion—religion not necessarily for any reason other than that it “offers the feeling of being connected to the world,” and not just any old religion, especially not Islam. It’s to that faith that Houellebecq cheerfully admits a profound hostility, and one of his best-known literary works is his 2015 novel, Submission, which depicts a France under Islamist domination thanks to colluding politicians. The author defends the right to Islamophobia, which would seem less likely to get a person cancelled in France than in the U.S., but he’s not afraid of adding fuel to that particular fire. He’s also one of the few European intellectuals to openly praise Donald Trump, though for subtle reasons: “Unlike liberals (as fanatical as Communists, in their own way), President Trump does not see free global trade as the alpha and omega of human progress.” Moreover, he adds, Trump’s weakening of ties to NATO and his isolationism leave the world stage open for France to reassert its influence. Houellebecq closes with a suitably slippery view of the Covid-19 pandemic, featuring a dour summation: “We won’t wake up, after lockdown, in a new world; it will be the same world, but a bit worse.”

For readers with an interest in Francocentric views of current events.

Kirkus Reviews

"The most famous French novelist of his generation."
The New Yorker

"An author who captures the times like no other."
Evening Standard

"Fascinating"
Euro News

"The author has a rare power: the ability to predict at least the general form of the future."
Foreign Policy

"these essays are a good place to get acquainted with that voice, acidic, pitiless, but too full of humor and awareness to shy from"
The Local Voice

"boasts an array of subjects of great depth and provocation."
Washington Examiner

From the Publisher