Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Houellebecq, Habermas and Macron

Posted by Becca Parkinson - Monday, 14 Mar 2022

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Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was published in 2015. A work of speculative fiction, it imagines the French presidential elections of 2022, now only weeks away. Though Muhammed Ben Abbes, the candidate central to the plot, has not materialised, Houellebecq’s depiction of a charismatic newcomer upending the established party system still seems prescient, anticipating the victory of Emmanuel Macron two years after the novel’s publication in the elections of 2017.

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas addressed Macron just prior to that extraordinary juncture, sharing the stage with the presidential contender during a public discussion of the future of Europe in March 2017. Later in the year, Habermas praised the ‘rather intimate knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy of history’ displayed by the recently elected Macron. With Hegel, Macron noted the extent to which Napoleon Bonaparte could be considered an embodiment of ‘something far greater’ than himself, an instrument rather than author of his time.

Later in the interview, Macron turned to Houellebecq. Recalling both the themes of Submission and the author’s scientific interests, he offered perfectly calibrated praise: ‘I call the fears that Houllebecq so magnificently describes “sad passions.”’ His regard for the oeuvre as a whole was such that Houellebecq was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 2019.

The second edition of Habermas and European integration was published a few months after the award ceremony, in the summer of 2019. This allowed me to reference the discursive sequence recounted above. Updating my book in this way built on its initial treatment of Houellebecq as a ‘writer of social science’. With the election of Macron, the terrain it surveyed became more than conceptual.

As noted in the ‘Preface to the second edition’, Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests has a particular relevance today, seeming to elbow its way to the forefront of his oeuvre. This is not to discount the concepts developed in his later works, however. For we are drawn specifically to this early milestone in his thought as an antidote to scientific fatalism, the submission to positivism characteristic of our time. Habermas’s enduring faith in the capacity for ‘scientifically informed enlightenment’ connects, it is suggested, with the spirit of Knowledge and Human Interests, particularly as distilled in a memorable line from it: ‘That we disavow reflection is positivism.’

Houellebecq’s work also mounts a critique of positivism. However, it differs from that of Knowledge and Human Interests. Not distinguishing between reflection, on the one hand, and positivism, on the other, Houellebecq presents the contraries of human subject and natural scientific world as identical. A perspective critical of positivism is accessible, he suggests, only through ever more rarefied scientific reflection: positivism turning in on itself, perhaps becoming conscious in the process, though with a deepening of enigmas rather than self-knowledge as the consequence. The occasional scientist, mystic, philosopher or posthuman excepted, a capacity for reflection, and hence transcendence, is absent from the realm of human affairs. Only the body remains. For Houellebecq’s protagonists, suffering and eroticism hold the possibility of meaning, the notion they are other than things.

The occasional scientist, mystic, philosopher or posthuman excepted, a capacity for reflection, and hence transcendence, is absent from the realm of human affairs.

Houellebecq’s prescience is often remarked in commentaries on his work. Yet notes of wonderment soon give way to silence. To say more would mean acknowledging the aura of the uncanny that has attached itself to his oeuvre, the sense it inhabits a region beyond the scope of critical judgement, endowing it thereby with extraliterary power. The preceding reflections suggest a way forward.

If Houellebecq’s novels convey the internal monologue of positivism, they do so with popular consent: the consent to being ‘scripted’ by them, to embodying their logics. With the disavowal of reflection, life takes on the character of an algorithm, becoming the stuff of natural scientific observation (and prognostication) in the process. This is the attitude of Houellebecq’s prose, even at its most subjective. An alteration in the texture of lived experience corresponding to this attitude may be dated approximately to the turn of the millennium, those years when the plausibility of his situations became less easy to question, his protagonists less easily dismissed as caricatures (that  fatalism had become ingrained perhaps magnified astonishment at the rise of Macron).

Houellebecq as an instrument of positivism? Structured by its logics, his works may be scrutinised for the social science they enact.

Houellebecq as an instrument of positivism? Structured by its logics, his works may be scrutinised for the social science they enact. Delineated accurately, this science may one day be of interest to the historian. Submission broached uncannily the dystopias of 2015. Perhaps in 2027, when the presidential elections envisaged in Houellebecq’s latest novel are behind us, it will be time to look back and reflect.


A guest blog by Shivdeep Grewal, author of Habermas and European integration (MUP, 2019).

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