Michel Houellebecq — the Last Existentialist?

Abstract

The French writer Michel Houellebecq is the author of six novels, and is also a poet, a director, and a musician. His literature is usually thought to be a fierce critique of contemporary society, especially of phenomena like consumerism and the sexualization of culture. In this article, I shall argue that Houellebecq’s novels share a thought that is also the basic idea of existentialism. Quoting not only Houellebecq’s novels, but also poems, essays and interviews, I will try to show that the problem he considers—which I call “the existence problem”—concerns the relation between a subjective individual and objective reality, described in terms of the natural sciences. By contrast, the main characters of his novels are representatives of different answers to that problem. If the problem does play a crucial role in existentialism—and, as I argue, this is the case—then it is legitimate to call Houellebecq probably the last of the influential existentialists.