Michel Houellebecq, the secular pope

“I have devoted myself to examining the symptoms of the West’s suicide and the rise of nihilism. But I do not recall ever taking any pleasure in any of this. We are entering a world in which it will be easier to die: I would have preferred a world in which it were possible to live.” So writes Michel Houellebecq in the essay published in early July, devoted to euthanasia and translated into several languages. Ten days ago, another essay appeared, this time in the weekly magazine Point. “The dying person is, of all people, the only one who will give nothing back: in the accounting of flows, a pure cost. Against this arithmetic, every civilisation has erected a system of exceptions: Sundays, the night, childhood, the sickbed. The sacred has never been anything else, and modernity has erased them one by one: Sundays have fallen, the night has been erased, childhood has become a market. All that remained was the bed of the dying, the last territory where utility had no place. Let us call the extinction of this final exception ‘decivilisation’. When the law is passed, nothing visible will happen; libraries will remain open (albeit empty), trains will still run, more or less. Quite simply, the last exception will have been extinguished.”

Houellebecq has written a dozen essays on euthanasia over the last three years, including a dialogue with France’s Chief Rabbi, Haïm Korsia. Four essays since January alone. No one else – not even the Popes and bishops, who are busy dispensing measured speeches and diplomatic smiles – devotes so much energy to such a lost and rearguard battle. Not because suffering does not deserve compassion, but because euthanasia turns death into an administrative service, a welfare benefit. He has done more to oppose the law championed by his friend Emmanuel Macron than the political parties have – ‘the wizard losing his teeth’, as depicted on the cover of Charlie Hebdo.

If there is such a thing as a ‘ship of fools’, Houellebecq must have been on board, smoking below deck. Instead, he has cast himself in the role of the West’s last preacher. The writer who, after toying with the void for so long, has taken the vows of a priest without an altar, capable of naming what even the ecclesiastical hierarchies prefer to shroud in measured phrases. Even a cultural critic from the “Gruppo 63” such as Angelo Guglielmi had realised this; in one of his latest articles in La Stampa, he wrote: “Perhaps the 21st century harbours for us the spectre of upheavals and definitive disasters? This century has already consumed the first twenty years of its existence without telling us who it is or what it wants. This has never happened before. In Europe, the only signs of something new come from Houellebecq, who prophesies the imminent end of Western culture.” First, an article in Le Monde following Vincent Lambert’s euthanasia. Then a very long piece for the American magazine Harper’s. Title: “The European Way to Die”. When the French National Assembly began debating the bill, Houellebecq’s anger reached new heights: “I must be very explicit: when a country, a society, a civilisation, goes so far as to legalise euthanasia, it loses, in my eyes, any right to respect. It therefore becomes not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else – another country, another society, another civilisation – may have the chance to come into being.” “Houellebecq lets me hear one of the most authentic Catholic voices of our time,” writes the Dominican friar Olivier-Thomas Venard, at the end of a brilliant analysis published in *Misère de l’homme sans Dieu*, a volume compiling the proceedings of conferences on the religious dimension in Houellebecq’s work.

It feels strange to read about the Catholicism of this chain-smoking novelist, a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, Bruno Le Maire and Gérard Depardieu, who – much like the court jesters of old – is driven to say in public what no one dares say even in private, and who gives the impression of having the time of his life playing the part of his disillusioned character. From the 1950s onwards, the figure of the Catholic writer began to fade as the churches emptied, only to disappear for good in the 1980s, the era when Tapie was preferred to God. Then came Houellebecq.

He does not don the robes of a consolatory reactionary. He is no moralist. He hurls stones at the idols of a relativism that has exhausted its promises of emancipation. He is not a believer, but something more unsettling: a bizarre agnostic who evokes what has been lost. He does not preach from a stone pulpit, but at naturist camps frequented by former ’68ers and in supermarkets where neon lights illuminate shelves of goods and souls equally on display. He does not call for conversion, does not brandish rosaries, does not take part in demonstrations and does not sign petitions: he is the last to take stock of the crisis from his flat in a 1970s skyscraper in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, light years away from the tourist postcards, a lunar neighbourhood that looks as though it has come straight out of Blade Runner, made up of budget hotels, post-modernist buildings, ring roads and Asian grocery shops (in Ireland he had made his home in a soulless estate full of roundabouts, near Shannon Airport).

“Where is the English Houellebecq?”, asks The Spectator. Neither the Germans, the Irish (they have Sally Rooney), the Spanish (they make do with Javier Cercas) nor the Italians (we subject ourselves to Scurati and Carofiglio) have one. Something strange happens every time Houellebecq publishes a book. Journalists and commentators scrutinise the novelist’s pages just as the ancients used to examine the livers of sacrificed animals. But it is not the book itself that is being discussed, so much as the revelation that is expected. Has Houellebecq ‘seen it coming’ yet? With his novels, which toy with nihilism and earn him a great deal of money, Houellebecq is always one step ahead: on Islamic attacks and sex tourism ("Platform"), on the end of art and its turn into museum pieces ("The Map and the Territory"), on Epstein’s island and transhumanism ("The Possibility of an Island"), on the Yellow Vests ("Serotonin"), on the Muslim Brotherhood and the submission of the elites ("Submission"). Our age adores prophets. Houellebecq, with his dishevelled appearance and drawling voice, has realised this and plays the part. All he has to do is say we’re in deep shit and everyone nods in agreement. Having not published a novel for six years, Houellebecq is now holding a series of concerts featuring recitals of his poems set to music composed by Frédéric Lo, who has collaborated with Pete Doherty (in Italy, the poems will be published in September by Nave di Teseo under the title Si perde sempre).

Houellebecq has just performed in a famous venue that has had several incarnations and seems to have stepped straight out of one of his novels: a café-théâtre frequented by Marcel Proust until the 1920s, an Art Deco cinema where Godard and Buñuel screened their films, a porn multiplex, a Brazilian Baptist church from the late 1990s onwards, before finally returning to its role as a performance venue. His latest piece, ‘Combat Toujours Perdant’, tackles the themes that have earned Houellebecq both admiration and hatred in equal measure: the decline of the West in the face of immigration and Islam, loneliness, and the escape into sexual escapades. Left-wing critics, taken aback by his attacks on humanitarianism (“those with humanitarian ideas are dangerous”, he told the Financial Times), are less enthusiastic. The reviewer for *Libération* calls Houellebecq a “crypto-fascist”. The novelist of “old, misogynistic white men”: that is how *Mediapart* describes him. “Houellebecq will never win the Nobel Prize,” said Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux to Robison of *La Repubblica*. “He is a far-right writer who peddles hate speech against women and minorities.” Because Houellebecq describes, anticipates and amplifies the cracks in liberal society, of which Ernaux is the stepmother (for her, being a mother means losing one’s freedom).

In Houellebecq’s view, the Western individual appears as an organism that has ceased to metabolise the future and which, having digested progress, sexual freedom, mobility, science and democracy, is now fasting. Fasting not by choice, but through saturation. When everything is available, nothing is necessary. ‘Souvenez-vous de l’homme, remember man,’ says Houellebecq, who writes: “Westerners who wish to live, your time is running out.” He does not offer solutions; he records symptoms. He reiterates that a secularised society cannot survive on self-care, ‘woke’ culture, end-of-life issues or quality of life alone. Houellebecq speaks of religion not because he believes in it. He speaks of it because he knows that religion has been the great mechanism for containing nihilism. It has given form to desire, measure to time and dignity to death. Whilst everyone, including bishops, was talking about the pandemic as an opportunity to regenerate the West (degrowth, environmentalism, slowing down), Houellebecq wrote the only sentence that made sense: “Everything will be as it was before, only a little worse.”

He neither blesses glaciers nor proclaims ecological rebirths. It is Jerusalem that challenges him; monasteries draw him in; young Catholics inspire paternal affection in him. He has not found God (“I do not believe Christianity has a future in Europe,” he tells the Danish website Information), but he does not wish to attend its funeral. The Church itself, in his view, is “engaged in a long process of suicide”, incapable of stemming the tide of its own dissolution. “The mark of monotheistic religions is upon me,” said Houellebecq from Jerusalem, one of the few writers to describe himself as pro-Israel. “Every Western writer, whether they like it or not, bears the mark of monotheistic religions. No writer – and above all, no Western writer – can be indifferent to Jerusalem.” When the Israelis present in Jerusalem were given the opportunity to ask Houellebecq questions, a woman asked him whether he saw Israel’s affirmation of life in the face of war as something positive. “That is positive,” replies Houellebecq. “In the West, people are afraid of everything and everyone, and are more concerned with counting their steps on apps than with actually living. It’s very unpleasant to say, but perhaps a ‘good’ war is necessary to rediscover life. But at this stage, I don’t even know if that would be enough.” He stayed at the monastery of Ligugé to write "Submission", which was originally to be called "Conversion" (and thankfully he chose the former title).

He said as much in another interview with La Revue des deux mondes: “I feel very attached to the countries where I’ve lived: the two most Catholic countries in Europe. In Spain, as is well known, there’s the nightlife; people are very interested in sex. In Ireland, it’s not like that at all; they’re only interested in money… Yet the collapse is the same, happening at the same pace. It frightens me.” Bureaucratised euthanasia is his greatest fear. “Deep down, we all know it, even if it’s hard to admit: the game is over.” He is fighting a battle that is already lost. “I feel as though I’ve played all the cards I had in my hand and now, perhaps, I’m starting to cheat. But for one last time, I don’t think it’s pointless to urge those whose votes will have the force of law to reflect on the very small number of philosophers who, over the centuries, have approved of suicide. Go ahead and defend the West, but only as long as it deserves to be defended.” Unlike the Panglossians in Voltaire’s Candide, he writes: “For some time now, the West has produced nothing of interest beyond its science.” In The Possibility of an Island, euthanasia is advocated as a remedy for the “miseries” of old age. It reads as if it were written today. “It was the heatwave of summer 2003, which was particularly deadly in France, that sparked the first global awareness of the phenomenon.” In The Map and the Territory, he explained that “the market value of suffering and death will be greater than that of pleasure and sex”. Death is a lucrative business, which is why he is opposed to it: “Euthanasia was billed at an average of five thousand euros, whilst a lethal dose of sodium pentobarbital cost twenty euros and a low-cost cremation probably not much more”.

Whilst literary figures seek to bombard us with rubbish, this literary character reveals the void to us. And the void, when named with such precision, is more powerful than a thousand sermons. We are reaching the final stage of self-determination: self-destruction. We are drawing a line under it.