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[...]dramatic increases in housing costs have enabled, and in turn been enabled by, massive interventions by private equity into the housing market, which have drastically furthered inequality, ballooned household debt, and caused exponential growth in homeless populations, with countries like Canada and New Zealand leading the way in terms of extremity, but with the United States, France, Australia, and Ireland trailing not far behind. France, in particular, has seen a shift away from social housing, and subsidised construction, a strategy of \"national embedding of so-called 'free-market players'\" who aim to maximize profits as part of a broader \"'financialization' of everyday life\" (Pollard, 2009, 173, 171). [...]these recent novels, produced by authors of very different political orientations, Michel Houellebecq and Francois Roux, offer insight into the cultural understanding and representation of an economic reality that appears to be \"everywhere\" (Peck & Tickell, 2002, 380) and \"nowhere\" (Venugopal, 2015, 165). Through the articulations of characters, as well as the economic situations in which the authors place them, inductive analysis can contribute to an understanding of these effects, both broad and deep.

Drawing on recent theories of neo-feudalism and evolutionary psychology, we employ the concept of hierarchy to understand the human impulse to participate in a societal organization that leads to competition for status and resources, as well as showing how money underpins the creation and maintenance of the neo-feudal hierarchies in both works. Cnossen et al. assert that \"the very function of his novels is to analyse the current society we live in and this social scientific approach is clearly rooted in [an] economic worldview\" (2017, 301). Highlighting the incompatibility of economic liberalism with human need and, more so, the brutality underpinning this system, Maris argues that Houellebecq's authorial success can be attributed to his ability to depict the suffering of living under capitalism \"[qui] naÎt de la violence perpétuelle du marché\" (2014, 29). [...]with reference to Houellebecq's fictional projections into future life, we show the natural culmination of this hierarchization to be a stratification of society into the two tiers of an all-powerful new aristocracy and an indigent underclass: in other words, an emergent neo-feudal society.

This article starts from the observation that in La Carte et le territoire and Soumission, Houellebecq thematizes the current state of France more directly than he had done in previous novels. Focussing on La Carte et le territoire as the site where this development begins, the article examines how this novel represents France: not just what vision it offers of the country, but in particular, the techniques it employs to present this. Through detailed textual analysis, the article builds a picture of Houellebecq's referential protocol as composed of invitations to synecdochic extrapolation punctured by moments of literal reproduction, and shows that the meaning of La Carte et le territoire resides in the relation between these two techniques.

This article studies mediated erotic content, especially pornography, as a form of worlding in Michel Houellebecq’s work. Whereas love creates a space of alterity, pornography paradoxically combines the most intimate spatiality of the body with ever-expanding technological systems and global forms of mediation. This short-circuiting of space points to a new sense of being in the world, which is studied in selected passages from the novels La Possibilité d’une île and Soumission, as well as in the essay “Prise de contrôle sur Numéris.” With reference to Ulrich Beck’s description of “banal cosmopolitanism,” I argue that otherness is either reduced to free-floating objects of consumption or to an experience of absence in these texts. Furthermore, this duality is refracted as two “reflexively” interwoven discourses or voices in the work. One is associated with prose and with the bringing of the world to the body of the subject, and the other with poetry and the dissolution of the body into the space of the world.

Michel Houellebecq has gained a reputation for combining left-wing critiques of neo-liberal capitalism with reactionary laments at the decline of nation, religion, honest labour, and the patriarchal family. Critics thus typically declare the novelist either to be unclassifiable in political terms or to be a 'rouge-brun'. Surveying Houellebecq's novels, from Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) to Sérotonine (2019), I argue that there is nothing unclassifiable, 'rouge', or left-wing about the author's political world-view. On the contrary, his work needs to be understood as belonging to a tradition of French counter-revolutionary thought, personified by Auguste Comte and Charles Maurras.

In his article, \"The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq\" James Dutton \"reads\" identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally \"Eurocentric\" authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of \"lost time.\" This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of Proust and Houellebecq which read atavism as narrative--that is, all that could be reconstructed from the marks of any, or all, human history. In doing so, these texts emphasize how inscription--which comprises and \"gives\" all of culture, identity, and race--is bound to the interpretive futurity of reading, collapsing all sense of racial survival and extinction into the writing of remains.

This article examines the role of family in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. It argues that homodiegetic narration and analepsis are ways for the French author to convey the political shifts protagonist François confronts as a tumultuous election sees the rise of a new, nonsecular government. These narrative devices underscore François’s yearning for kinship amid Western decline. Ultimately, the article shows the inextricable interrelations of the macro (political) and the micro (domestic) spheres.

Michel Houellebecq has always been a contested person. Throughout his career the identity of the author relative to the works has been under scrutiny. In 2014 this tendency reached a peak, when no less than two works entitled The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq claimed to have seized the author, both taking their cue from the author's disappearance during the promotion tour of La Carte et le territoire. This article explores the relationship between Houellebecq's literary and artistic strategies and these peripheral adaptations, asking whether works like these are the result of a new relationship between art forms in an intermedial world and/or if they are the offspring of a particular performative form of writing developed through Houellebecq's Œuvre.

In the last decade of his life, Jacques Derrida articulated \"autoimmunity\" as the safeguarding mechanism with which an entity believing it has been infiltrated with a threatening \"other\" reacts against itself. Using Derrida's analysis of politically reactionary forms of autoimmunity, this essay analyses how Houellebecq's most recent extra-textual reactionary provocations are embedded in the techno-scientific and posthuman vision of his early fictions. Extending Derrida's metaphor of autoimmunity to Houellebecq's literary and authorial strategies, I argue that Houellebecq's willingness to destroy the very channels of his literary and extra-textual provocations is rooted in the extension of neoliberalism to the private and biological spheres of life described in his fictions.