Whatever - Michel Houellebecq

[Anonymous No.20321031]

What do you think of the concept of the Extension of the Domain of Struggle?

and do you think that the domain of the struggle truly extend? or has this social ill remain static?

[Anonymous No.20321045]

Reading this again today for the 3rd time. I still don't really understand what he's talking about. Life is a genetic lottery and too much information has ruined us beyond redemption. That's about it. Great writer, great book.

[Anonymous No.20321077]

How did the 60s political revolution capitalize the sexual market?

[Anonymous No.20321087]

>>20321077
i don´t remember the book making an implication that the present struggle was because of the 60s, i might be wrong

[Anonymous No.20321101]

Its a weirdly comfy book. Despite the awful corporate bullshit and dreary setting, I wish I could go on a month long business trip with some loser like Tisserand and just eat out every night, smoke and stare at girls. Those guys had a pretty good life, all things considered.

[Anonymous No.20321120]

>>20321101
yeah, this book helped me go through my current job which i don´t hate it now but at the time i was feeling dreadful because it wasn´t the job i wanted, and the whole sexual dissatisfaction speaks to me, even if i´m the type of person who never had a gf but i´m optimist about getting a gf through trial and error

social alienation too

[Anonymous No.20321442]

>>20321101
I thought the job sounded pretty awful. Iirc he wasn't a programmer, more like a consultant who had to go on these trips and explain the software/hardware in like training courses.

[Anonymous No.20321511]

>>20321077
Formerly rigid and codified sexual relations (as by marriage, resistance to divorce, sexual mores) were broken down and turned into a market eventually steered by monopolies, like Feudal relations were by early capitalism.

[Anonymous No.20321607]

Great book and also a great movie. Probably the best Houellebecq imo, a shame its so hard to buy in the US

[Anonymous No.20321614]

>>20321077
>>20321087
The 68'er revolution was ostensibly communist / left-leaning, and had the stated ambition of tearing down traditions and conservative ideologies which had, for example, held women back and produced unfair economic conditions etc. Houellebecq argues that these same people are now the middle or senior management execs of the kind of parasitic global corporations they once railed against and have also, by destroying traditions regarding sex and marriage, allowed neoliberalism to apply its ruthless "minority winners prosper, majority losers suffer" mentality to the dating market. With nothing in the society or culture to encourage one person to bind romantically to another, it does not "liberate" people to date etc whoever, but instead creates the romantic equivalent of the economic situation under neoliberalism, i.e., one in which the state is undermined as an out-of-date old institution, and replaced by a society in which financial and economic competition dominates all aspects of life. Houellebecq writes for example that the family unit was the last example of primitive communism in society, and even that has been destroyed by the celebration of divorce, the growth of pop-psychiatry and its insistence on the irredeemably "evil" spouse, the hierarchy of parents then children.

People are no longer bound together by any shared duty or responsibility, nor is society structured such that people feel any desire or obligation to voluntarily restrict their own freedoms for the benefit of something other than themselves (e.g., a family unit, marriage, their community). The handsome men are free to do as they please and recklessly pursue as many women as they want, e.g., the co-worker who the narrator meets early on who takes a random girl out on a date and ends up killing her by crashing his car in which she was a passenger. The pretty young women are free to pursue whoever they want solely for the sake of novel sexual experiences, e.g., the young woman who seduces the narrator's priest friend solely for the novelty of corrupting him. The elderly - unproductive and out-of-place in a competitive, libido-orientated culture - are abandoned and left to be picked off or to rot away, e.g., the man in the supermarket who has a heart attack and who nobody will touch and try to resuscitate because he's just some random old guy, and the elderly woman from Breton who lives alone in an area of Paris which has been swamped by blacks and moors and who ends up being robbed and murdered.

[Anonymous No.20321621]

>>20321607
I was gonna get the Kindle version eventually

[Anonymous No.20321642]

>>20321614
what about the courtship phase? Tisserrand gets rejected by an attractive woman and the same women ends up with an ugly nigger, what´s up with that?

[Anonymous No.20321643]

>>20321031
Should I read this guy? Seen him memed here, still ballsdeep in Paradise Lost atm, whereto?

[Anonymous No.20321646]

>>20321614
tldr putain

[Anonymous No.20321649]

>>20321607
There's a movie?

[Anonymous No.20321662]

>>20321642
He prospers financially from neoliberalism (comfy software job) but since both the cultural and economic traditions have been swept away (hence the "extension of the domain of the struggle") this success does not mean he is able to become a husband, father etc. And even if he does manage to find a girl who will put the long-term desire for a stable family and marriage ahead of brief libidinal impulses, he may also just end up like the narrator whose wife becomes dissatisfied and ends up being convinced by her psychoanalyst that the narrator is some kind of evil guy she needs to get rid of asap.

[Anonymous No.20321673]

>>20321662
>brief libidinal impulses

so that´s the reason she rejects him? he isn´t cool and attractive enough?

[Anonymous No.20321685]

>>20321077
Relationships have become purely transactional.

[Anonymous No.20321692]

>>20321673
Yeah, isn't that made clear in the book? He's a middle-aged loser with a decent social standing but a poor standing in the dating market. The young girl can't feel romantic love for him, and older women in Paris tend to be either dating Chads (like the girl who is killed in the car accident), are men haters, or are career women like that one woman who spends every weekend travelling for hours away from Paris so she doesn't have to be in such a depressing city.

[Anonymous No.20321720]

>>20321692
>poor standing in the dating market

standing in the dating market = social status and how well you can socialize with the opposite sex, and considering how women are the most social of the two sexes, it makes her considering only that aspect when choosing a mate, am i right?

[Anonymous No.20321743]

>>20321720
I'm not talking about the real world or whatever, just what is discussed in the book. One of the most important quotations in the book is the one about how how in traditional societies people tend to be able to find work at any age etc, but in neoliberal societies companies fawn over a handful of extremely ambitious young men, and such is the state of the "neoliberal" dating market. People are out for themselves in a ruthless competitive atmosphere with no collective bond etc, hence the rather scathing portrayal of the tech nerd (who is a real person that Houellebecq doesn't even bother to allow a pseudonym in the book) who describes the wonders of technology and how it is like a complex brain in that it allows more and more people to connect etc, while overlooking the fact that a brain functions best when all these atomised nodes are all working towards a collective purpose.

[Anonymous No.20321746]

>>20321031
You'd get much the same but with more enjoyable polemics from Lasch, and as I have only read Houllebecq in translation, I can't speak for whether he is particularly artful in prose. I do agree with his assessment about the extension of the domain, and I think this anon >>20321614 is bang on the money.
I don't care all that much for Houllebecq. There is an interesting paradox in how one can be so utterly, derangedly horny on the one hand, possessed by a profoundly strong drive and desire, and at the same time so completely depressed and inert.

>>20321614
Are you familiar with the concept of luxury beliefs? It's a term used by a sociologist, Rob Henderson, to analyze exactly the sort of ostensibly leftist ideas one sees propagated by so-called "progressives", one of which would be loose sexual mores. Some quotes from it:

>When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or anti-vaccination policies, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or uses the term “white privilege,” they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.”

>Affluent people promote open borders or the decriminalization of drugs because it advances their social standing, not least because they know that the adoption of those policies will cost them less than others. The logic is akin to conspicuous consumption—if you’re a student who has a large subsidy from your parents and I do not, you can afford to waste $900 and I can’t, so wearing a Canada Goose jacket is a good way of advertising your superior wealth and status. Proposing policies that will cost you as a member of the upper class less than they would cost me serve the same function. Advocating for open borders and drug experimentation are good ways of advertising your membership of the elite because, thanks to your wealth and social connections, they will cost you less than me.

>Take polyamory. I had a revealing conversation recently with a student at an elite university. He said that when he sets his Tinder radius to five miles, about half of the women, mostly other students, said they were “polyamorous” in their bios. Then, when he extended the radius to 15 miles to include the rest of the city and its outskirts, about half of the women were single mothers. The costs created by the luxury beliefs of the former are borne by the latter. Polyamory is the latest expression of sexual freedom championed by the affluent. They are in a better position to manage the complications of novel relationship arrangements. And if these relationships don’t work out, they can recover thanks to their financial capability and social capital. The less fortunate suffer by adopting the beliefs of the upper class.

It's a fine essay, short, very useful in coming to grips with a lot of the wacky shit coming out of Ivy-tier educational institutions these days: https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/

[Anonymous No.20321778]

>>20321746
Thanks, will check out that article.

[Anonymous No.20321845]

>>20321614
Has Houellebecq ever spoken about what he thinks the future will look like because of these customs or lack thereof? If we think of the dating market as its own little eco-system poised to either collapse or exhaust itself, how would that play out in reality?

[Anonymous No.20321858]

>>20321031
What was Houellebecq's prediction for the French elections?

[Anonymous No.20321873]

>>20321845
I don't want to impose personal interpretations on his work, but each of his works deal in some aspect about a proposed future or alternative, either on a widescale or a personal level.

He mentions potential consequences on a personal level (e.g., madness, suicide, jadedness, religious conversion) and also widescale societal consequences (ethnic conflict, Islamic domination, the genetic alteration of human beings, revolt etc). Each book really focuses on a different aspect.

[Anonymous No.20321939]

wow! just wow.

So, I read this back in the early 2000s and at that time the prevailing critique was that he was making fun of the embrace of capitalism by his generation, NOT defending tradition or the right wing, nor making fun of the left wing, neither of which would have been defined as you define them today.

You millennials and zoomers are all GROSSLY wrong, and are adding into a work what is clearly not there, nor ever would have been thought to be there at a time when the right wing had hardly codified their talking points of globalization or neoliberalism, and when the divide of right wing and left wing most certainly would not have allowed for a definition of the right wing what amounts to fascism, having parents who clearly remember ww2, and themselves immersed in the cold war for all of their lives.

He is clearly making fun of his own generation, as "cuspers" (those born to the end of the baby boom are called) often do, having none of the benefits of their older siblings but all of the detriment that generation has wrought upon the world. That is the only valid critique of this work that does not add what could not have been there.

I can't imagine Michel Houellebecq considering himself anything but an artist, and as such, rejecting any constraints of politics.

Really. Unless you are all going to shitty schools where they let you cite wikipeadia and cut an paste your assignments, try not to rewrite your critiques outside of the authors environment. It is okay to frame the effects of a work from contemporary views, but to use the work itself to criticize what did not exist at the time does the work an injustice.

[Anonymous No.20321953]

>>20321939
Is this pasta?

[Anonymous No.20322118]

>>20321873
not that guy but thank you for your excellent analysis
i'm slowly going through houllebecq's works, the last one i've read is "lanzarote", what do you think of it? i found it mid tier at best, the touristic descriptions were shit and mostly padding, plus the work is basically unfinished

[Anonymous No.20322202]

>>20321873
>>20321614
Excellent writeup. Maybe /lit/ isn't dead yet.

[Anonymous No.20322238]

>>20321746
>luxury beliefs
I've read the confession of a british (wealthy) guy who used to be an open-border leftist activist in the 70s and 80s. He openly admitted that the only reasons he and his friends fought so hard to flood their own country with immigrants were:
>because they wanted to feel and appear as rebels, so anything against the status quo was automatically desirable,
>because they knew THEY wouldn't bear the consequences of it, since they lived in the wealthy parts of the country.
Think of it the next time some posh twat starts acting the radical chic.

[Anonymous No.20322294]

>>20321939
Read Carole Sweeney's "Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair"; there is ample evidence that Houellebecq was writing within the context of a France which was rapidly adopting neoliberalism. Why do you think he mentions directly "unrestrained economic liberalism" in this exact novel?

Also how he is not attacking the left-wing? Houellebecq was celebrated by his left-wing "comrades" when he first wrote poetry, but soon became their enemy when he criticised the May 68 fanatics, moreover Houellebecq was writing in a period when several other critics of the 68 Generation were starting to emerge, e.g., Alain Renault (La Pensee '68 - 1985).

[Anonymous No.20322302]

>>20322118
I haven't read Lanzarote I'm afraid.

[Anonymous No.20323137]

>>20322294

Because it is clear from the writing that he was making fun of his own character. "Our hero" was obviously an unreliable narrator. He doesn't have the answers, and so is lashing out at everything. I am not saying his character is not critical of everything. Shit, the guy masturbates all the time!

I am saying that Houellebecq doesn't fucking care about left or right so pans them both, and makes his arguments whatever was coming out of the mouths of the politics of the time.
Look, neoliberalism wasn't a common term at that time except among those protesting the WEF. It hadn't been picked up by the right yet because the right's handlers ARE the capitalists that were becoming fat under the new finance, exploitation of the break up of the soviet union, the raid of the pension funds, the exportation of industry, and the whole Clinton era world government vibe.
The movements of the Koch Brothers and those pushing for the EU were in sync back then. Even the libertarians were on board. Populism wasn't even on their radar until you got people like Newt Gingrich and Fox news and those radio talk hosts.

So to even think that MH has a political view is a little striking.
In my opinion, he sees everyone of his generation as idiots, including his own characters.

[Anonymous No.20323534]

>>20321845
Sex tourism and prostitution. Which is the interchange of the pecuniary and the sexual market (see: Platform).

The collective and consensual extinction of mankind and its transision to a man-made successor race which isn't much happier (see: Atomized and Possibility of an Island).

Going back to a pre-68 state by reestablishing a religious social system (see: Submission).

He doesn't seem too happy with any of these "solutions".

[Anonymous No.20324672]

>>20323137
The self-insert protagonist mockery is especially apparent in retrospect after reading the map and the territory where houellebecq is himself a character and really comically pathetic. He's very self aware. I think the humor in his work is overlooked and is made opaque by the bleakness for a lot of his readers. The extreme hopelessness is in itself kind of funny.

[Anonymous No.20324682]

Can a non-brainlet explain the meaning behind the final essay with the chimp getting killed by the stork saying "Tat tvam asi" etc?

[Anonymous No.20324801]

>>20321077
pussy pussy dick dicl pussy pussy dick

[Anonymous No.20325311]

>>20324682
>"Essayistic explications of the contrast between the natural and the cultural, these crude fables point up the 'natural' evolutionary violence of sex and natural selection, implying that, under the completely liberated forces of free market sexual competition, humanity is returned, in a counter-revolutionary manouvere, to the 'all pervasive agonistic modality of the natural state'. These curious tales are counter-narratives to the ones that dominate in culture as they strip away what Abecassis calls the 'sleek appearance' of his glittering advertising machine that exhorts us to be seductive and to seduce freely whomever we desire, to reveal the 'baboon-like hierarchies and symbolic violence' beneath."

[Anonymous No.20325648]

>>20322118
It's a good companion to the Possibility of an Island.