ABSTRACT
No doubt that to his euphoric readers Michel Houellebecq is a prophetic writer, a visionary diagnostician of the contemporary ills, including the misery caused by commodification processes and the consequent breakdown of the social bonds. At the same time, however, many despise his sexism, racist jokes, perversions and fascistic tendencies. ‘Like Céline, he’s a right-wing misanthrope who has produced a genuinely perceptive and resonant picture of French society – obscenified and isolating’ (Tait 2006). Houellebecq’s secret is perhaps playing these two extremes against each other: a best-selling writer/star whom many love to hate. Thus, in his work, the object of desire and the abject fully coincide. Indeed, there is a
striking parallel between the spectacle of Houellebecq as an ‘abject hero’ (Bernstein 1992) and other contemporary spectacles such as the Big Brother TV Show that deliberately erase the distinctions between inside and outside, city and jungle, politics and biology, and so on. Thus, Houellebecq’s characters often oscillate between an animal-like nakedness and humanness.
