Hi, I am Marxist de Sade, fiendishly obsessed by cultural products and their politics. You will find here my views on how cultural products, mostly books and films, make sense of the world we live in. I aim to post my provocations fortnightly.
Houellebecq's novel Submission drew much media attention on its publication in 2015. Its fictional depiction of France turning overnight into an Islamic Republic has been labelled dystopia. The idea that Submission deals with a supposed Islamic threat faced by the West was cemented by the fact that the novel’s publication coincided with an Islamist terrorist attack in France. In contrast, I will argue that Submission should be read as a “reactionary utopia”. Houellebecq, in his usual contrarian fashion, imagines Islam to be the answer to the “crisis of masculinity” in the West. His version of France as an Islamic Republic is a mixture of rigid patriarchal rules and economic liberalism which, while probably modelled on Saudi Arabia, is also the dream of populist leaders from Trump to Putin.
What makes Houellebecq’s novels compelling reading? The topics play an important part. He looks with a critical eye at the evolution of the West since the 1960s. Controversy is another important element. His novels are written from the perspective of bourgeois straight white men, the demographic that dominated modernity, but which in Houellebecq’s vision supposedly lost its hegemony after the 1960s. Houellebecq seems to be giving voice to the so called “crisis of masculinity” plaguing bourgeois straight white men. However, I will argue that what makes Houellebecq’s novels stand out is their subtle melancholic irony, which fits perfectly the idea of “the end of history” and the burnout mood that dominates the Western professional classes. His protagonists are fallen individuals on a quest for redemption in a world that does not seem to offer such a possibility. They are despicable and pitiable in equal measures. His strategy is to reveal the contemporary world’s heart of darkness by looking at what kind of villains and outcasts it creates. The bourgeois straight white male is the perfect subject for Houellebecq’s enterprise. Houellebecq might be a reactionary at heart, but he is not a self-pitying one. He knows that fallen characters are indeed fallen, and he delights in ridiculing their folly.
The irony in Submission is that Houellebecq presents the populists’ dream of a return to patriarchal values in the guise of their nightmare: Islam.
Houellebecq’s view on the current state of masculinity has been clearly outlined in his first novel Whatever (French original L’extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994). The extension of the logic of the market to the sexual body has had an unacknowledged damaging effect: it produced an underclass of undesirable bodies excluded from the sex market and deprived of sex.
The best way to understand this is via Marx. According to Marx, capitalism produces systemic unemployment by separating labour from the means of production. The labour market can absorb only part of the free labour thus created. The surplus labour is accumulated in the reserve army of the unemployed. This is not because some people do not want to work, nor because there are too many people. It is the effect of the dominance of capital over labour.
Houellebecq considers that under neoliberalism the logic of capitalism extends to the sexual body. The result is a reserve army of undesirable bodies. However, under the neoliberal ideological hegemony, this situation cannot be explained as the structural effect of the capitalist logic. Therefore, the undesirable body appears as an individual failure: it is undesirable because it is “ugly”.
Houellebecq is not interested in exploring the reality behind this phenomenon: capitalist reification and commodification of bodies. He appears to be accepting the new situation and draws the conclusions: “ugly” bodies, especially those of men, become deprived of sex. The reaction is deep resentment towards the object of desire: women. Women, their supposedly capricious nature inflamed by the market and feminism, are the reason why “ugly” men are not able to find sexual partners and enter into fulfilling relationships.
There is a massive body of work focusing on the so called “crisis of masculinity.” Besides Houellebecq one could list under this category any work that deals with the issue of men being abandoned by their female partner and thus condemned to a lonely sexless life. The incels are only the tip of the iceberg. In the anglophone world, Jordan Petersen is the most prominent figure that made “crisis of masculinity” his raison d’etre and that endorses a return to traditional gender relationships.
Houellebecq articulates the current crisis as antagonism between men and women, rather than by politicising the relationship between the body and the capitalist structure. While both men and women are affected by the capitalist enslavement of sex, the ideological responses are antagonistic. Men feel deprived of sex because women demand liberation, while women feel constantly harrassed by men. The conflict seems insurmountable.
Houellebecq deals with this issue in most of his work. In Submission, however, he does something different. The novel has been categorised as dystopia: overnight France turns into an Islamic Republic. In contrast, I will argue that in this novel Houellebecq proposes a reactionary solution to the problem of the crisis of masculinity: the return to traditional patriarchal gender relationships. I would call Submission a ‘reactionary utopia,’ and I am sure that the irony of such a contradictory term would not be lost on Houellebecq.
We must remember that utopia and dystopia are distinct literary genres. They are not the exact opposite of each other. In utopia we usually have a visitor from an imperfect world discovering a perfect one. In dystopia, however, we have a world where one individual subject wakes up from ideologic manipulation and becomes aware of the corrupt state of the world. This is the case of Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451, among others.
Houellebecq’s novel is about the decay of Catholicism and the dissolution of patriarchal gender relationships in France. The central character is a lapsed Catholic who becomes aware that patriarchal Catholicism was a way of regulating the pleasures of the body in the search for happiness. Houellebecq’s thesis seems to be that sexual enjoyment, and more broadly happiness, depend on a framework of restrictive practices which paradoxically makes pleasure possible. However, neoliberalism has destroyed all such frameworks. The central character concludes that there is no way back because today Catholicism is a spent force. Therefore, the only way out of the current sexual crisis in the West is the adoption of Islam: the only religion that supposedly has retained its patriarchal disciplinary vitality. Despite this realisation and in contrast to most other men in the novel, the protagonist is hesitant in embracing the new utopia.
From this summary it is clear that Houellebecq uses the plot structure of classical utopia. The protagonist comes from a fallen world and discovers a utopia, to be precise, a reactionary utopia where men are again offered domination over women.
The labelling of Houellebecq’s novel as dystopia seems strange, even hypocritical, considering that the "crisis of masculinity" and the dissolution of traditional family values are permanent features of populist leaders’ discourse across the globe. Submission proposes exactly what the conservative ideologues demand: the return to patriarchal gender relations and traditional values. The reasons why the media has labelled the novel a “dystopia,” despite the clear evidence to the contrary, is something that should be critiqued rather than simply accepted as truth. Is it racism? Partly, yes. The imagined threat of Islam seems to unite Western conservatives and liberals albeit for different reasons. But more importantly, both the nostalgia for traditional values and islamophobia, while not threats to neoliberalism, are in fact perfect ways of deflecting the attention from the real causes of identity crisis: the commodification of sex and gender relationships. The Western mindset perceives Submission as dystopia because it reveals the hidden logic of liberalism: the capitalist enslavement and commodification of female bodies hidden behind the liberal veil. At the same time, the nostalgia for patriarchy functions as a disciplinary framework for men’s bodies: be a “real man” and work harder.
I will conclude that perhaps there is a different solution to the problem of sexual relationships under neoliberalism than the reactionary utopia proposed by Houellebecq.
Lacan stipulates that there are no sexual relationships, meaning that human sexual relationships do not have a given form. They must be symbolically/socially created. In the past this was the role of religions. Today, neoliberalism tells us that it is up to the individual to create them in accordance to their inclination and beliefs. Neoliberalism presents itself as a form of liberation from authoritarian structures which repress sexuality. However, neoliberalism also subjugates sexuality to its market logic. Therefore, rather than freeing people to construct relationships in which sexuality could flourish, neoliberalism enslaves sexuality to the logic of profit making and discriminates between “beautiful” sellable and “ugly” unsellable bodies.
One alternative solution to this problem is proposed by the movement against “body shaming” which argues that all bodies are equally beautiful and desirable. However, this does not change the logic of the market. It simply asks us to be ethical consumers of sex and not discriminate.
A different proposition is offered by Kristen R. Ghodsee in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. The argument is that women have more and better sex in an economically egalitarian society, where they do not depend on men. The book does not address the issue of men’s sex as such, but it can be implied that men’s sex-life would benefit from economically independent women. Rather than being organised by market laws (pornography), sexuality would develop into a libidinal economy of free relationships.