Michel Houellebecq Explains Himself: on Michel Houellebecq’s “Annihilation”
Michel Houellebecq, trans. Shaun Whiteside | Annihilation | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | October 2024 | 544 Pages
In his debut novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq wrote that “the novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness.” And yet, the 1994 bildungsroman—which featured an unnamed, vividly sullen, and suicidal narrator—inspired an entire youth subculture in France now known as “depressionism.” With that despondent style as a mold, Houellebecq, now 68, has since written numerous, always male, protagonists who occupy uninspiring jobs and navigate life through detached reflections on philosophy, politics, and religion, their sense of responsibility eroded by defeatist attitudes. In Annihilation—his eighth and most recent work of fiction published in English by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2024—Paul, an aide to the finance minister of France, lives in a fog of loneliness, noting that for as long as he could remember, “nothingness” had always been a part of his relationships, platonic or otherwise.
Sex, however, is the one pursuit that Houellebecq has always found capable of stirring these men’s passions, briefly lifting their malaise and reconnecting them with humanity. In The Elementary Particles (1998), Bruno, a school teacher, believes the universe to be “cold and sluggish” with only “one source of warmth—between a woman's thighs.” Houellebecq’s sex writing is graphic, leveraging precise anatomical language (the word "glans," referring to the head of the penis, appears in nearly all of his novels), and his protagonists often refer to women in a degrading and sexually objectifying manner. In Submission (2015), Francois, a Huysmans professor, laments his female colleague's age: “once upon a time a man had felt desire for this squat, stumpy, almost froglike little thing.” In Platform (2001), the aptly named Michel, a civil servant, initially fixates on the principal female character for her ejaculate-worthy mouth.
While the degree of relational maladjustment varies among his male protagonists, Houellebecq's work seems to suggest that their attitudes and behavior towards women are not entirely their fault. Rather, these men are simply victims of their sexual impulses. In The Possibility of an Island (2005), Daniel, an aging comedian, describes his body as “ravaged by desire” and the hunt for sexual pleasure as the “sole objective of human existence.” In The Map and the Territory (2010), Jed, an artist, describes an erection so powerful and “sore” that he nearly passes out. These men are not fully autonomous but, instead, constantly at the mercy of a force that overpowers reason and self-restraint.
The scholar Benjamin Boysen has, in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, likened the power that sexuality exerts on these protagonists’ lives with “priapism,” the medical diagnosis for an unwanted erection. In his explication, the enslaving agent is not pure carnality but, instead, the West’s post-industrial, neoliberal society. Houellebecq’s point is that characters experience “desire against their will” because consumer culture, mass communication, and capitalist enterprise have conditioned them to believe that pursuing pleasure is paramount. Michel, Bruno’s half-brother in The Elementary Particles, opines that “for society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more until desire fills their lives and finally devours them.” In this world, ruthless free market forces dominate every sector of life, including sexual selection, and Houellebecq’s men are often found inadequate because they lack the erotic capital of the young and beautiful.
Consequently, Houellebecq protagonists are often sexually inactive or, at least, unsatisfied. Whatever’s protagonist has no sexual partners, living in sexual frustration passed off as apathy. Seratonin’s (2019) Florent-Claude, who works for an agricultural regulatory agency, takes an anti-depressant that crushes his libido. Michel (The Elementary Particles) experiences anhedonia during coitus. Paul (Annihilation) tries to rekindle his sexual vigor by visiting a sex worker, who turns out to be his niece. But whether or not the protagonists succeed in gratifying their sexual needs is beside the point; they understand—implicitly or explicitly—that they are doomed to failure because they can’t get off the treadmill of pleasure-seeking. Thus, they believe that their despair, passivity, and sexual attitudes are justified—nothing more than a learned helplessness response to immutable laws.
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If people know anything about Houellebecq beyond his gloomy characters, it’s his talent for embroiling himself in public scandals. Infamously, he referred to Islam as “the dumbest religion” in a 2002 interview, a remark that earned him a reputation as a reactionary. Though, none of the author’s controversies have been as bizarre as the one he finds himself in presently, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, circles back to his preoccupation with sex.
For nearly two years, Houellebecq has been waging a legal battle to prevent the release of an experimental, erotic film in which he is the central subject. The defendant is the 42-year-old filmmaker Stefan Ruitenbeek, who leads KIRAC, a Dutch art collective known for surreal and provocative documentaries. In “Honeypot,” his best-known film, a young, progressive female philosophy student attempts to seduce a right-wing thinker.
At the heart of Houellebecq and Ruitenbeek’s disagreement is whether the author consented to the project’s current trajectory. In November of 2022, Houellebecq allowed himself to be filmed having sex with Jini van Rooijen, the same woman who starred in “Honeypot,” with the understanding that the film would be posted on her OnlyFans channel. The agreement was originally brokered through Houellebecq’s wife, who, court records indicate, said she wanted to get her husband “in a pornographic film to counteract his gloom.” Houellebecq wore a mask during the shoot, which took place in Paris. But the footage was never published because the author withheld his passport, a required to upload to OnlyFans, and made further stipulations about how he wanted his identity obscured.
The project began moving in a different direction when Houellebecq and Ruitenbeek negotiated a new set of terms that involved a subsequent shoot in Amsterdam, where the author could engage in sex acts with new women. They agreed that this film would be a “work of art”’ in which Houellebecq’s participation would remain ambiguous enough to claim that a doppelganger had been used during the intimate scenes. Ruitenbeek, however, denied the author’s request for creative input, noting that he should be familiar with “Honeypot” and, thus, KIRAC’s independent operating style.
Soon after Houellebecq and his wife arrived in Amsterdam in December 2022, he signed a contract that guaranteed that his face and genitals would never appear in the same scene. The terms also relinquished the author’s right to review the end product and granted KIRAC full use of all footage, including material already shot in Paris. New footage was filmed, featuring at least one additional woman, though the intimate scene was cut short. After that, relations between the filmmaker and author broke down, and Houellebecq and his wife returned to Paris.
In January 2023, Ruitenbeek published a trailer for the film, set to debut on KIRAC’s principal online channels, that characterized the aim of Houellebecq’s trip to Amsterdam as having sex with women intrigued by the idea of going to bed with a famous author. A week later, Ruitenbeek told VICE France that the project hoped to show that a “writer at the end of his life [could become] a porn star.” At that point, Houellebecq began legal action, requesting, among other measures, that Ruitenbeek take the trailer (which he did) and be prohibited from using any recorded footage. Among other claims, Houellebecq argued that he was drunk and deeply depressed when he signed a contract laden with excessively burdensome terms. He also contended that Ruitenbeek broke their agreement by portraying him as an unsavory porn star.
While the Amsterdam-based court acknowledged the agreement was “far from balanced,” it largely rejected Houellebecq’s assertions. Because there was no final film to review, the court found no reason to believe that Ruitenbeek would not honor the original agreement. It also declared that it was “incomprehensible why [Houellebecq would participate] in the recordings if he really found the agreement problematic.” An appeals court later issued a slightly more sympathetic judgment, granting the author the ability to review the film before distribution but only to decide if he would like to pursue further legal action. The film remains unfinished.
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In May 2023, Houellebecq published Quelques mois dans ma vie, a memoir detailing the KIRAC affair, where he casts himself as the victim of a cunning scheme—a claim that, in part, feels justified. “Honeypot” is a genuinely discomfiting film because the central conceit—van Rooijen’s desire to seduce and thus humiliate the right-wing philosopher Sid Lukkassen—is evident from the start. While the production team awaits Lukkassen’s arrival, Kate Sinha, Ruitenbeek’s life partner and chief collaborator, compares the philosopher to a fat animal ripe for hunting.
More difficult to accept, however, are the excuses Houellebecq provides for taking the bait, as they rest on a foundation of naivety, vanity, and indolence. Had Houellebecq watched even a few minutes of “Honeypot” before engaging with the KIRAC team, he would have recognized the possibility that he might become both participant and prey. And yet, the author defends his failure to do so thusly: “Is [Ruitenbeek] really so convinced of the value of his achievements that he imagines I've been eagerly awaiting each and every one of his submissions?” Houellebecq also notes that he believed the project’s original ethos to be akin to amateur pornography and was unaware of the commercial nature of OnlyFans—a fact easily discoverable with a quick Google search.
Houellebecq further strains credulity when claiming his trip to Amsterdam was driven by a desire to visit the city, and he was determined not to engage with the women offered by Ruitenbeek for fear of sexually transmitted diseases. When accounting for why he then signed documents specified related to the film project, he falls back on an argument made in court—that he was in a depressed, vulnerable state. Having consumed alcohol and anxiolytic drugs, his judgment was compromised. (The Dutch court rejected this argument after reviewing Ruitenbeek’s footage of the moment). He paid only distracted attention to the specific terms in the contract because he had resolved to avoid any further sexual activity. And yet, the following day, he found himself shooting a scene with a new woman.
The author also observes that when he engages in a sexual situation, he feels an overwhelming surrender, as though all cognitive functions come to a halt. His overall attitude toward the KIRAC affair—a blend of detached apathy, sexual preoccupation, and self-justification—mirrors that of one of his own protagonists—a man to whom life merely happens, his sense of responsibility diminished by forces beyond his control.
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In Public Enemies, an exchange of letters between Houellebecq and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, published in English in 2011 by Random House, the author expressed disdain for those who interpreted his work through “reductio biographica.” “I hold a mirror up to the world, but the world does not find its reflection beautiful,” he wrote. When critics claimed the reflection was not of the world but Houellebecq himself, they were merely “revealing [their] shortcomings and [their] lies.”
While Houellebecq’s eight novels address various provocative topics—politics, religion, philosophy, transhumanism, economics, art, euthanasia—their emotional core has remained unchanged. Primarily driven by their sexual fixations, his protagonists experience fleeting moments of happiness that quickly dissolve or are willingly forfeited due to their inability to act. Francois (Submission), Jed (The Map and the Territory), and Florent-Claude (Serotonin) are left resigned to their isolated and hollow existence. Bruno (The Elementary Particles) suffers a mental breakdown. Daniel (The Possibility of an Island) and Michel (The Elementary Particles) commit suicide. Paul (Annihilation) contracts mouth cancer, a condition potentially curable through surgery, and opts for death over disfigurement.
And despite three decades of writing about sexuality, Houellebecq appears to have revealed more about his orientation to the topic through his response to the KIRAC affair. In Quelques mois dans ma vie, the author also notes that “Honeypot,” which he finally watched after the KIRAC trailer was released, reminded of the “suicidal stupidity that can befall the male…when it comes to disseminating his sperm.” It was only after considering how the KIRAC film could reduce his sexual legacy to “mediocre coitus with an inert sow, filmed by a degenerate cockroach” that the author developed a sense of agency, lurching into action because he could “no longer allow [himself] to be pushed around.”
Houellebecq is pessimistic about the future outcome of the case, comparing his predicament to “The Trial,” a Kafka short story about a man facing an opaque and inescapable legal system. And yet, a sliver of positivity shines through. In 2010, Houellebecq told The Paris Review he wasn’t sure love still exists. But he now feels “the most important component of sexuality is love.” If believed, it completes an interesting authorial arc, away from a man whose depictions of sex hold a mirror up to the world’s ugliness to one who tentatively gestures toward the possibility of hope and connection. At the very least, the statement seems pivotal to exploring whether the naked Houellebecq is a man using the veil of art to justify his indulgences or a once-in-a-generation author from whom hypocrisy is the point.