Michel Houellebecq is France's most famous and controversial living novelist. Since his first novel in 1994, Houellebecq's work has been called pornographic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and vulgar. His caricature appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day that Islamist militants killed twelve people in an attack on their offices and also the day that his most recent novel, Soumissionthe story of France in 2022 under a Muslim presidentappeared in bookstores. Without God uses religion as a lens to examine how Houellebecq gives voice to the underside of the progressive ethos that has animated French and Western social, political, and religious thought since the 1960s.
Focusing on Houellebecq's complicated relationship with religion, Louis Betty shows that the novelist, who is at best agnostic, is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer. In exploring the religious, theological, and philosophical aspects of Houellebecq's work, Betty situates the author within the broader context of a French and Anglo-American history of ideasideas such as utopian socialism, the sociology of secularization, and quantum physics. Materialism, Betty contends, is the true destroyer of human intimacy and spirituality in Houellebecq's work; the prevailing worldview it conveys is one of nihilism and hedonism in a postmodern, post-Christian Europe. In Betty's analysis, materialist horror emerges as a philosophical and aesthetic concept that describes and amplifies contemporary moral and social decadence in Houellebecq's fiction.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE HOUELLEBECQUIAN WORLDVIEW
Materialist Horror and the Question of Capitalism
Chapter Summaries
Houellebecq as Character: A Brief Consideration
CHAPTER ONE: MATERIALISM AND SECULARISM
Houellebecquian Materialism: A Qualified Case?
Quantum Uncertainties
Lifting the Sacred Canopy
Materialism and Suicide: Logical Consequences of the Death of God
Materialist Horror and Moral Secularization
CHAPTER TWO: THE FUTURE OF RELIGION
The Return of Religion
Can a Cloning Cult Be a Religion?
Elohimism, Islam, and the Question of Religious Discipline
CHAPTER THREE: RELIGION AND UTOPIA
The Fresh Ruins of France
Abandoned Utopias
CHAPTER FOUR: MATERIALIST HORROR
Dangerous Credibility
Lovecraft, Pascal, Houellebecq
CHAPTER FIVE: LIBERALISM IS GOD AND THE WEST IS ITS PROPHET
The Modern Western Woman: A 200-Year Disaster in the Making
As Goes France, So Goes François
A Conversion au conditionnel
Reaction, Romanticism, or Something Else?
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
“Michel Houellebecq is the most important novelist writing about religion today, and Louis Betty has written the first book to explore Houellebecq’s views on religion. Betty guides the reader through Houellebecq’s oeuvre, makes French discussions of Houellebecq accessible to English-speaking audiences, and situates Houellebecq’s work in the context of recent scholarly discussions about the secular. This book should be of broad interest to scholars of religion and literature as well as to those interested in contemporary French thought.”
