Submission

by Michel Houellebecq

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

dithyrambic.

insalubrious,

I benefited from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from one year, or even one month, to the next.

lassitude:

badinage,

turgid,

hitherto

neologisms

According to Steve, an agreement had been struck between the young Salafists and the administration. All of a sudden, two years ago, the hoodlums and dealers had all vanished from the neighborhood. Supposedly that was the proof. Had this agreement included a clause banning Jewish organizations from campus? Again, there was nothing to substantiate the rumor, but the fact was that, as of last fall, the Jewish Students Union had no representatives on any Paris campus, while the youth division of the Muslim Brotherhood had opened new branches, here and there, across the city.

“But there’s the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re an unknown quantity. If they got twenty percent, it would be a symbolic benchmark, and could change the balance of power…” I was talking utter bullshit, of course. Ninety-nine percent of the Muslim Brotherhood would throw their votes to the Socialists.

“I don’t know, I guess I must be kind of macho. I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now—but was it really a good idea?” Her eyes narrowed in surprise. For a few seconds she actually seemed to be thinking it over, and suddenly I was too, for a moment. Then I realized I had no answer, to this question or any other. “So you’re for a return to patriarchy?” “You know I’m not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.”

A center-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the center-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the center-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.

It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.

I was grateful to the Chinese for having always kept the neighborhood free of blacks or Arabs—of pretty much anyone who wasn’t Chinese, apart from a few Vietnamese.

“Quite sure. It’s all been settled. And it is exactly in line with the theory of minority sharia, which the Muslim Brotherhood has always embraced. So they could do something similar with education. Public education would still be available to everyone—though with vastly reduced funding. The national budget would be slashed by two-thirds at least, and this time the teachers wouldn’t be able to stop it. In the current economic climate, any budget cut is bound to play well at the polls. At the same time we’d have a parallel system of Muslim charter schools. They’d have all the same accreditations as the public schools—with the difference that they could receive private funding. Obviously, the public schools would soon become second-class. Parents who cared at all about their children’s future would sign them up for a Muslim education.”

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless.

élan,

Skipping the usual reference to Jules Ferry and the secularist reforms of the 1880s, she went all the way back to Condorcet and the historic speech he made before the Legislative Assembly in 1792, when he evoked the ancient Egyptians and Indians “among whom the human spirit made such progress, and who fell back into the most brutal and shameful ignorance the moment that religious power assumed the right to educate men.”

In the old days, people lived as families, that is to say, they reproduced, slogged through a few more years, long enough to see their children reach adulthood, then went to meet their Maker. The reasonable thing nowadays was for people to wait until they were closer to fifty or sixty and then move in together, when the one thing their aging, aching bodies craved was a familiar touch, reassuring and chaste, and when the delights of regional cuisine, as celebrated every Sunday on Les escapades de Petitrenaud, took precedence over all other pleasures.

garrigue.

aphasia.

“And I don’t guess you’re really an atheist, either. True atheists are rare.” “You think? On the contrary, I’d have said that most people in the Western world are atheists.” “Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I’ve ever met were people in revolt. It wasn’t enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God—they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: ‘Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.’ They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don’t suppose you recognize yourself in this description.”

Toynbee’s idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.

(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).

He argued that Stalin was wrong and Trotsky was right: communism could triumph only if it was global, and the same held true for Islam: either it would become universal, or it would cease to exist.