January 27, 2005
Decline of Western Sexuality
As is frequently the case with much contemporary art, the French self-proclaimed provocateur novelist Michel Houellebecq’s appraisal of the human condition often offers, in the guise of running commentary, little more than a cynical repetition of what is most empty and hopeless about living in today’s world. Houellebecq’s themes tend to center mostly on the pros and cons of western repression, the impossibility of happiness posed as the ultimate conundrum. What distinguishes these novels from the decadence of parallel artworld efforts to address similar subject matter, however, is the general surliness of the author’s schizophrenia on the merits of one approach to the problem over another; Houellebecq takes a more existential attitude preferring to recognize our very apolitical reservations to these artificial intellectual divisions. The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq’s second effort, is, for example, the story of two brothers, a sexually uptight scientist type and his equally caricatured pervy hedonist counter-number. Both, Houellebecq proposes, are extremes and, as such, are in equal and opposite ways failures. The over the top Sci-Fi finale ironically concludes that the bleak utopia Aldous Huxley so strongly warned against in Brave New World may actually be the best recourse after all. Platform, Houellebecq’s latest effort, once again takes up the theme of our sexual repression, only this time it is set on the stage of western globalization. Once again, the split personality of our relationship to pleasure is thoroughly ridiculed. Only this time it is not simply a question of the isolated sickness of western attitudes to sexuality. They are, in a post-911 world, also considered as an example of what our aggressive cultural expansion exports to the rest of the globe.