Mandatory Credit: Photo by Agencia Efe/Shutterstock (4734777b)
Michel Houellebecq
Author Michel Houellebecq photoshoot, Barcelona, Spain - 28 Apr 2015
The presentation of his latest book, 'Soumission
From Atomised:
42 Comments
When I hear the word “happiness” I reach for my gun
That’s so funny. I thought the same thing. For me, I figured you were either very promiscuous, or very drunk. Otherwise, how could a person not know that?
My grandmother was a virgin when she married. I know that is true because I read her diary after she died.
I was neither very promiscous nor very drunk, I just do not remember which woman was my first, I forgot the timing
Michel Houellebecq (i’m not sure i wrote it correctly, lol) is probably the most significant contemporary European novelist!
They often compare him to Dostoevsky, and I think the comparison makes justice to both.
I can’t praise enough RR for delving in his work…
I read his wikipedia entry, and the most entertaining part was the story about how they fucked him with sexuality. Made him drunk and filmed it without saying him he was filmed.
I think his power comes from being multiphrene like me. But he don’t has it under control, so they can fuck him again and again.
This is what happens with the self-centered model of self that the modern world subscribes to. Yes having children is risky and hard and expensive. Yes marrying in your 20’s is risky and hard and expensive. But it gives a man and a woman a chance at having a second half of life not characterized by loneliness and ennui.
Is it for everyone? No, of course not. But the physical world is in many ways a game of numbers. Traditions were formed over millennia by the brutal percentages imposed from without.
To each their own, but modernity thinks it can recalculate those percentages, and it cannot.
Loneliness and ennui are biochemical. About 40 percent of Americans are lonely all the time. It has nothing to do with their social situation, or whether they had kids. People who are naturally happy have kids, and then they attribute their happiness to their kids, but they would have been equally happy if they hadn’t had kids. People who are naturally miserable have kids, and they think their kids made them miserable, but they would have been miserable anyway. There’s just tons of data pointing to people having a personal happiness set point.
My niece is 16 or 17 years old; she has no interest in boys at all. She’s not gay, and she is smart and as sane as someone raised by my (now deceased) brother and his wife could be (she was adopted from overseas as an infant), and she is pretty and kindly. There are a couple of boys from her high school who would die to marry her and take care of her for life, but I doubt she will ever be interested. She and my sister in law are pretty much entirely focused on horseback riding competitions, and their two little dogs, and their guinea pigs. If it weren’t for covid I would be a little sad about this but I think that because of covid it is likely for the best. I was just talking with someone who has seen generation unto generation of cohorts of young people (mid 20s) and he said that in the latest cohort a startling number had had life threatening illnesses over the past few years. I know a young lady with two toddlers; one seems okay but the other does not. My neighbors two sons who are in their early 20s, who in another generation would be robust, are sick all the time. All of these people (including my niece) are ultra vaxxed, and they are all catching covid over and over again.
I don’t know what this text is from Atomized, but it looks like wishful thinking written by a man. From everything I see, women get happier as they get older; old ladies love sitting around eating treats and gabbing with other old ladies, and traveling to interesting places with other old ladies when their husbands expire. If they have kids that is a nice distraction but if they don’t that is okay, too; they pay attention to the neighbor’s kids if they feel like it. Most young women, however, are miserable. Also, men want women to marry for romance since it means that the men don’t have to compete as wage earners; it gives them a “magical” way of bypassing the system, so they keep telling young women how great romance is and how bad “sensible” choices are in order to try to game things. I decided to marry my husband since he was much smarter than me (40+ IQ points smarter) and so he wasn’t annoying to listen to, also he was handsome; maybe that is romance, since he didn’t have any money.
I think this author is just mad because young women don’t pay attention to him since he is an unattractive old guy, so he fantasizes that they will suffer and that is a satisfying thing to read if you, too, are upset at not getting attention. I don’t know why anyone would read a old male author in an attempt to know what is going on in the heads of young women; there are plenty of young women who write about what they are thinking and experiencing.
Okay, I’ve looked him up. It sounds like he was rejected very early by his parents and was sent to live with his grandmother, who then sent him to a boarding school. Maybe this was because he is so unusually repulsive looking; it is an unfair thing about the world that extremely unattractive children may be rejected. But all’s well that ends well; he has ended up with an Asian lady who is much younger than he is, who is a student of his works! Here they are at the Laperouse Masked Ball of Paris Fashion Week, 2020: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/writer-michel-houellebecq-and-his-wife-qianyum-lysis-li-news-photo/1157057661. He looks cheerful but unfortunately the Asian lady looks pretty depressed.
I think Houellebecq loves looking how he looks. If he wanted to look more conventionally handsome, he could, through short haircuts, healthy eating, sport, and strictly rationed depressive pondering. I think he cultivates and milks his look.
I read that a while ago and thought it was good. I read Atomised a few years ago when I was actually in France enjoying the Covid. I remember it describes French going to get-togethers in the countryside where they teach each other fluffy hippy type skills. “work on yourself” That was still true when I was there over 20 years after the book was written. I remember I mentioned Houllebecq to a couple females I knew, aged about 45 and 60, and they both said they thought he was a horrible old rascal, but they hadn’t read any of his books. The elder lady was an awful “repeater of the news” and could quickly work herself into a rage. As I recall the book mentions Rahan, a comic book hero. Bruno or Bruno’s mate read him in childhood.
yo rr, just wanted to pop in and say i started taking fish oil supplements based on your recent post about dha, and the improvement in my mood has been dramatic. thanks for the tip and i hope it’s working out for you.
A very strange passage. Those who don’t follow the path of love, marriage, and kids, are often pitied by those who do. Many think that because they had kids, the kids will be there for them when they are old. This often turns out to not be true, for a wide array of reasons. Some kids die. Some kids move far away in order to make their lives work. Some grow up and die in wars, or a disabled in wars and come home and need their parents to take care of them. Some kids grow up and have kids and the grandkids are so overwhelming, the kids dont have time for grandma and grandpa. Some parent abuse thier kids and the kids refuse to spend time with them.
My dad once said to me, “have kids because it’s the experience you want to have, not because you figure your kids will then owe you something and they’ll take care of you”. This was good advice.
One can have a happy and full life without kids. It’s just a very different life than the one they’d have had with kids. I think the author of this passage is the one that is lonely and sad and is projecting that on the girls he perceives to be the cause of his loneliness.
I haven’t read the novel, but I read the synopsis on Wikipedia and thought it looked interesting. The synopsis mentioned molecular biology, which reminded me of Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene” and his words that “organisms are merely vehicles for genes.”
Some people interpret Rene Descartes’ words “I think, therefore I am” as “humans discover themselves after discovering others.” From that perspective, what is a “failure of individuation”? I thought it might be hesitation to accept the self that we will ultimately discover.
You’re right. When I read Descartes’s explanation of “I think, therefore I am” on Wikipedia, I thought it was a solipsistic declaration.
I think my model of “I think, therefore I am” is an attempt to interpret Descartes’ original differently, correcting the weaknesses of solipsism and making it fit the modern era.
As a baby grows, it discovers its parents and siblings, as well as friends, lovers, and other people. By measuring itself with a ruler made from the differences between the people it discovers, it is possible to discover itself as a social being. By doing so, it is also possible to participate in society.
However, there are a certain number of people who reject the social being they have discovered, and I thought the woman in this novel might be one of them. I think this is a universal theme that occurs anywhere there is a society, so I thought this novel would be interesting.
When it says “I think, therefore I am,” two “Is” appear. One is the solipsistic self, and the other is the self as a social being.
My handle “gt” is an abbreviation for Google Translator. I’m not very good at languages.
So sometimes I make strange English comments or misunderstood comments, but please forgive me.
Some people like the idea that everything what happens, is a result of their consciously and unconsciously thinking. They are the center of the Universe.
For me this is pure horror. I would be the only real being in the whole Universe how I see it. Maybe God is around and watching me but not telling much to me.
I would press the “Universe-Self-Destuction-Button” if I could.
“When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children.” May 3, 2005, NYT
“We examined the relationship between infant attractiveness and adult affect by investigating whether differing levels of infant facial attractiveness elicit facial muscle movement correlated with positive and negative affect from adults (N = 87) using electromyography. Unattractive infant faces evoked significantly more corrugator supercilii and levator labii superioris movement (physiological correlates of negative affect) than attractive infant faces.” Infant Behavior Development, Feb. 3, 2015
“Mothers of more attractive infants were more affectionate and playful compared with mothers of less attractive infants. In contrast, the mothers of less attractive infants were more likely to be attentive to other people rather than to their infant and to engage in routine caregiving rather than affectionate behavior. ” Developmental Psychology, 1995
There are about a zillion studies that find that unattractive kids are treated worse. This guy looked extremely unattractive when he was younger as well; I can’t find any childhood photos but there is no reason to think that his revolting appearance is something new. It has colored his view of everything.
Here is Houellebecq’s mom in an interview in the Guardian from May 7, 2008, giving her view of him:
“But now Ceccaldi has emerged from her beach-hut on the French Indian ocean island of La Réunion and today publishes her own memoir answering back. She calls her son an “evil, stupid little bastard” adding that “this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all – above all – a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame.” It is a very long interview and pretty horrible.
The best thing to do in the case of people who are this damaged is to stay the hell away from them, since they will want to damage you. Maybe that goes for their writings, too. Also, there is no reason to think that their way of being in the world will match your own; all that you are learning is how a person who has been damaged in a particular way will interact with the world.
Unstable condition -a symptom of life
In mental and environmental change
Atmospheric disturbance, the feverish flux
Of human interface and interchange
The impulse is pure
Sometimes our circuits get shorted
By external interference
Signals get crossed
And the balance distorted
By internal incoherence
A tired mind become a shapeshifter
Everybody need a mood lifter
Everybody need reverse polarity
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
An ounce of perception – a pound of obscure
Process information at half speed
Pause, rewind, replay
Warm memory chip
Random sample, hold the one you need
Leave out the fiction
The fact is this friction
Will only be worn by persistence
Leave out conditions
Courageous convictions
Will drag this dream into existence
A tired mind become a shapeshifter
Everybody need a soft filter
Everybody need reverse polarity
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got mixed feelings
Everybody got mixed feelings
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to evelate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
As someone has already mentioned, Houellebecq is pretty much the most significant novelist currently writing I’ve read most of his work.
I would recommend anyone looking to understand him to read his analysis of the work of H.P Lovecraft – ‘Contre le monde, contre la vie’. It was his first published work.
I met Houellebecq 20 years or so ago and asked him the cliched question: “Why do you write?”. His answer : “To sleep with more women”. I asked him if it worked. He said “Non!”, but we all know he was kidding.
When I hear the word “happiness” I reach for my gun
— Buddha
I do not even remember to whom I lost my virginity (but I am sure I lost it)
That is either the saddest or possibly the most alcoholic thing I’ve heard in several hours.
I am not sad, I just do not remember which specific woman took my virginity
So alcohol?
No, I forgot which specific one was my first, could be one of three but I am not sure which one
Maybe things in Russia are different*.
But this is an EXTREMELY odd conversation for a heterosexual male to be having. Stop digging.
*In Soviet Russia, virginity take YOU.
That’s so funny. I thought the same thing. For me, I figured you were either very promiscuous, or very drunk. Otherwise, how could a person not know that?
My grandmother was a virgin when she married. I know that is true because I read her diary after she died.
I was neither very promiscous nor very drunk, I just do not remember which woman was my first, I forgot the timing
I’m thinking of SYM right now for some reason
https://youtu.be/9v-_eTVY2xg?si=f2zgVw9F9u8yUY20
Dead Kennedys is great 😀
Michel Houellebecq (i’m not sure i wrote it correctly, lol) is probably the most significant contemporary European novelist!
They often compare him to Dostoevsky, and I think the comparison makes justice to both.
I can’t praise enough RR for delving in his work…
Thanks Apollo.
I read his wikipedia entry, and the most entertaining part was the story about how they fucked him with sexuality. Made him drunk and filmed it without saying him he was filmed.
I think his power comes from being multiphrene like me. But he don’t has it under control, so they can fuck him again and again.
This is what happens with the self-centered model of self that the modern world subscribes to. Yes having children is risky and hard and expensive. Yes marrying in your 20’s is risky and hard and expensive. But it gives a man and a woman a chance at having a second half of life not characterized by loneliness and ennui.
Is it for everyone? No, of course not. But the physical world is in many ways a game of numbers. Traditions were formed over millennia by the brutal percentages imposed from without.
To each their own, but modernity thinks it can recalculate those percentages, and it cannot.
Loneliness and ennui are biochemical. About 40 percent of Americans are lonely all the time. It has nothing to do with their social situation, or whether they had kids. People who are naturally happy have kids, and then they attribute their happiness to their kids, but they would have been equally happy if they hadn’t had kids. People who are naturally miserable have kids, and they think their kids made them miserable, but they would have been miserable anyway. There’s just tons of data pointing to people having a personal happiness set point.
I spend 98% of my time (LSWM) alone and I never feel lonely or unhappy/sad.
You have to cope with loneliness by being a Nazi.
– Reductionist Libtard Projection Demon
Let us be joyful in our short lives.
https://youtu.be/MkUj4awBjxQ?si=CPmX-5Kf75pBdcG9
I’m back to not being able to post links.
https://twitter.com/truthache68/status/1925154582348648889?s=46
My niece is 16 or 17 years old; she has no interest in boys at all. She’s not gay, and she is smart and as sane as someone raised by my (now deceased) brother and his wife could be (she was adopted from overseas as an infant), and she is pretty and kindly. There are a couple of boys from her high school who would die to marry her and take care of her for life, but I doubt she will ever be interested. She and my sister in law are pretty much entirely focused on horseback riding competitions, and their two little dogs, and their guinea pigs. If it weren’t for covid I would be a little sad about this but I think that because of covid it is likely for the best. I was just talking with someone who has seen generation unto generation of cohorts of young people (mid 20s) and he said that in the latest cohort a startling number had had life threatening illnesses over the past few years. I know a young lady with two toddlers; one seems okay but the other does not. My neighbors two sons who are in their early 20s, who in another generation would be robust, are sick all the time. All of these people (including my niece) are ultra vaxxed, and they are all catching covid over and over again.
I don’t know what this text is from Atomized, but it looks like wishful thinking written by a man. From everything I see, women get happier as they get older; old ladies love sitting around eating treats and gabbing with other old ladies, and traveling to interesting places with other old ladies when their husbands expire. If they have kids that is a nice distraction but if they don’t that is okay, too; they pay attention to the neighbor’s kids if they feel like it. Most young women, however, are miserable. Also, men want women to marry for romance since it means that the men don’t have to compete as wage earners; it gives them a “magical” way of bypassing the system, so they keep telling young women how great romance is and how bad “sensible” choices are in order to try to game things. I decided to marry my husband since he was much smarter than me (40+ IQ points smarter) and so he wasn’t annoying to listen to, also he was handsome; maybe that is romance, since he didn’t have any money.
I think this author is just mad because young women don’t pay attention to him since he is an unattractive old guy, so he fantasizes that they will suffer and that is a satisfying thing to read if you, too, are upset at not getting attention. I don’t know why anyone would read a old male author in an attempt to know what is going on in the heads of young women; there are plenty of young women who write about what they are thinking and experiencing.
Okay, I’ve looked him up. It sounds like he was rejected very early by his parents and was sent to live with his grandmother, who then sent him to a boarding school. Maybe this was because he is so unusually repulsive looking; it is an unfair thing about the world that extremely unattractive children may be rejected. But all’s well that ends well; he has ended up with an Asian lady who is much younger than he is, who is a student of his works! Here they are at the Laperouse Masked Ball of Paris Fashion Week, 2020: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/writer-michel-houellebecq-and-his-wife-qianyum-lysis-li-news-photo/1157057661. He looks cheerful but unfortunately the Asian lady looks pretty depressed.
That is the most Asian looking woman I have ever seen.
I think Houellebecq loves looking how he looks. If he wanted to look more conventionally handsome, he could, through short haircuts, healthy eating, sport, and strictly rationed depressive pondering. I think he cultivates and milks his look.
Yeah I think so too. He wants to look like this homeless creepy old man. He embraces his creepiness.
Wasn’t it the same like John Lennon and Yoko Ono?
Other than race, no.
https://astralflight.substack.com/p/a-remedy-for-the-exhaustion-of-being
I read that a while ago and thought it was good. I read Atomised a few years ago when I was actually in France enjoying the Covid. I remember it describes French going to get-togethers in the countryside where they teach each other fluffy hippy type skills. “work on yourself” That was still true when I was there over 20 years after the book was written. I remember I mentioned Houllebecq to a couple females I knew, aged about 45 and 60, and they both said they thought he was a horrible old rascal, but they hadn’t read any of his books. The elder lady was an awful “repeater of the news” and could quickly work herself into a rage. As I recall the book mentions Rahan, a comic book hero. Bruno or Bruno’s mate read him in childhood.
All of you fem-boys need to get back on topic:
https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/List-of-Adverse-Events.pdf
Start with the first item on the list.
yo rr, just wanted to pop in and say i started taking fish oil supplements based on your recent post about dha, and the improvement in my mood has been dramatic. thanks for the tip and i hope it’s working out for you.
A very strange passage. Those who don’t follow the path of love, marriage, and kids, are often pitied by those who do. Many think that because they had kids, the kids will be there for them when they are old. This often turns out to not be true, for a wide array of reasons. Some kids die. Some kids move far away in order to make their lives work. Some grow up and die in wars, or a disabled in wars and come home and need their parents to take care of them. Some kids grow up and have kids and the grandkids are so overwhelming, the kids dont have time for grandma and grandpa. Some parent abuse thier kids and the kids refuse to spend time with them.
My dad once said to me, “have kids because it’s the experience you want to have, not because you figure your kids will then owe you something and they’ll take care of you”. This was good advice.
One can have a happy and full life without kids. It’s just a very different life than the one they’d have had with kids. I think the author of this passage is the one that is lonely and sad and is projecting that on the girls he perceives to be the cause of his loneliness.
I haven’t read the novel, but I read the synopsis on Wikipedia and thought it looked interesting. The synopsis mentioned molecular biology, which reminded me of Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene” and his words that “organisms are merely vehicles for genes.”
Some people interpret Rene Descartes’ words “I think, therefore I am” as “humans discover themselves after discovering others.” From that perspective, what is a “failure of individuation”? I thought it might be hesitation to accept the self that we will ultimately discover.
“I think, therefore I am” can only prove a solipsistic world, but not the existence of the outer world, or the existence of others.
You’re right. When I read Descartes’s explanation of “I think, therefore I am” on Wikipedia, I thought it was a solipsistic declaration.
I think my model of “I think, therefore I am” is an attempt to interpret Descartes’ original differently, correcting the weaknesses of solipsism and making it fit the modern era.
As a baby grows, it discovers its parents and siblings, as well as friends, lovers, and other people. By measuring itself with a ruler made from the differences between the people it discovers, it is possible to discover itself as a social being. By doing so, it is also possible to participate in society.
However, there are a certain number of people who reject the social being they have discovered, and I thought the woman in this novel might be one of them. I think this is a universal theme that occurs anywhere there is a society, so I thought this novel would be interesting.
When it says “I think, therefore I am,” two “Is” appear. One is the solipsistic self, and the other is the self as a social being.
My handle “gt” is an abbreviation for Google Translator. I’m not very good at languages.
So sometimes I make strange English comments or misunderstood comments, but please forgive me.
Some people like the idea that everything what happens, is a result of their consciously and unconsciously thinking. They are the center of the Universe.
For me this is pure horror. I would be the only real being in the whole Universe how I see it. Maybe God is around and watching me but not telling much to me.
I would press the “Universe-Self-Destuction-Button” if I could.
Diogenes:
>“I think, therefore I am” can only prove a solipsistic world, but not the existence of the outer world, or the existence of others.
https://youtu.be/_KcyM3cpbEc?si=6RYNgk92-TqXG_W_
“When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children.” May 3, 2005, NYT
“We examined the relationship between infant attractiveness and adult affect by investigating whether differing levels of infant facial attractiveness elicit facial muscle movement correlated with positive and negative affect from adults (N = 87) using electromyography. Unattractive infant faces evoked significantly more corrugator supercilii and levator labii superioris movement (physiological correlates of negative affect) than attractive infant faces.” Infant Behavior Development, Feb. 3, 2015
“Mothers of more attractive infants were more affectionate and playful compared with mothers of less attractive infants. In contrast, the mothers of less attractive infants were more likely to be attentive to other people rather than to their infant and to engage in routine caregiving rather than affectionate behavior. ” Developmental Psychology, 1995
There are about a zillion studies that find that unattractive kids are treated worse. This guy looked extremely unattractive when he was younger as well; I can’t find any childhood photos but there is no reason to think that his revolting appearance is something new. It has colored his view of everything.
Here is Houellebecq’s mom in an interview in the Guardian from May 7, 2008, giving her view of him:
“But now Ceccaldi has emerged from her beach-hut on the French Indian ocean island of La Réunion and today publishes her own memoir answering back. She calls her son an “evil, stupid little bastard” adding that “this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all – above all – a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame.” It is a very long interview and pretty horrible.
The best thing to do in the case of people who are this damaged is to stay the hell away from them, since they will want to damage you. Maybe that goes for their writings, too. Also, there is no reason to think that their way of being in the world will match your own; all that you are learning is how a person who has been damaged in a particular way will interact with the world.
https://youtu.be/Yh5RSv52g6U?si=jr1BHtwziLUdm7-G
Unstable condition -a symptom of life
In mental and environmental change
Atmospheric disturbance, the feverish flux
Of human interface and interchange
The impulse is pure
Sometimes our circuits get shorted
By external interference
Signals get crossed
And the balance distorted
By internal incoherence
A tired mind become a shapeshifter
Everybody need a mood lifter
Everybody need reverse polarity
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
An ounce of perception – a pound of obscure
Process information at half speed
Pause, rewind, replay
Warm memory chip
Random sample, hold the one you need
Leave out the fiction
The fact is this friction
Will only be worn by persistence
Leave out conditions
Courageous convictions
Will drag this dream into existence
A tired mind become a shapeshifter
Everybody need a soft filter
Everybody need reverse polarity
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got mixed feelings
Everybody got mixed feelings
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to evelate from the norm
Everybody got to elevate from the norm
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
As someone has already mentioned, Houellebecq is pretty much the most significant novelist currently writing I’ve read most of his work.
I would recommend anyone looking to understand him to read his analysis of the work of H.P Lovecraft – ‘Contre le monde, contre la vie’. It was his first published work.
I met Houellebecq 20 years or so ago and asked him the cliched question: “Why do you write?”. His answer : “To sleep with more women”. I asked him if it worked. He said “Non!”, but we all know he was kidding.