The Elementary Particles

by Michel Houellebecq

When modern science appeared, medieval Christianity was a complete, comprehensive system which explained both man and the universe; it was the basis for government, the inspiration for knowledge and art, the arbiter of war as of peace and the power behind the production and distribution of wealth—none of which was sufficient to prevent its downfall.

The mysteries of time were banal, he told himself, this was the way of the world: youthful optimism fades, and happiness and confidence evaporate.

Everyday morality is always a blend, variously proportioned, of perfect morality and other more ambiguous ideas, for the most part religious. The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society. Ultimately, a society governed by the pure principles of universal morality could last until the end of the world.

Cohen had no illusions about the depths to which the human animal could sink when not constrained by law.

In Cohen’s opinion, the ideas manifest in Nietzsche’s philosophy—the rejection of compassion, the elevation of individuals above the moral order and the triumph of the will—led directly to Nazism.

Georges Courteline was a French writer whose stories parodied the

He was a solitary child, used to his own thoughts and dreams. Little by little, he grew accustomed to her presence.

It would be fair to say that the late 1950s and early 1960s were the golden age of romantic love—a time we remember today through the songs of Jean Ferrat and early Françoise Hardy.

Although their politics were notionally left-wing, these magazines embraced the ideals of the entertainment industry: the destruction of Judeo-Christian values, the supremacy of youth and individual freedom.

Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible—no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her.

His childhood had been difficult and his adolescence ghastly. He was forty-two now; objectively, death was still a long way off. What was left? Oh, there would be other blow-jobs and he would come to accept having to pay for them. A life lived in pursuit of a goal leaves little time for reminiscence.

“I’d like to believe that the self is an illusion,” said Bruno quietly, “but if it is, it’s a pretty painful one.”

Michel was far ahead of the rest of his class. Human reality, he was beginning to realize, was a series of disappointments, bitterness and pain.

At forty, like many people in California, he sensed a new movement, something deeper than simply a passing fad, calling for the sweeping away of Western civilization in its entirety. It was this insight which brought luminaries like Alan Watts, Paul Tillich, Carlos Castañeda, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers to his villa at Big Sur. A little later, he had the privilege of meeting Aldous Huxley, the spiritual father of the movement.

Water follows the path of least resistance. Human behavior is predetermined in principle in almost all of its actions and offers few choices, of which fewer still are taken.

He had a sudden premonition that all his life would be like this moment. Emotion would pass him by, sometimes very close. Others would experience happiness and despair, but such things would be unknown to him, they would not touch him.

A world that respects only the young eventually devours everyone.

As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.

Family relationships last for years, sometimes decades—much longer, in fact, than any other kind of relationship; then, finally, they too gutter out.

“The metaphysical mutation that gave rise to materialism and modern science in turn spawned two great trends: rationalism and individualism. Huxley’s mistake was in having poorly evaluated the balance of power between these two. Specifically, he underestimated the growth of individualism brought about by an increased consciousness of death. Individualism gives rise to freedom, the sense of self, the need to distinguish oneself and to be superior to others. A rational society like the one he describes in Brave New World can defuse the struggle. Economic rivalry—a metaphor for mastery over space—has no more reason to exist in a society of plenty, where the economy is strictly regulated. Sexual rivalry—a metaphor for mastery over time through reproduction—has no more reason to exist in a society where the connection between sex and procreation has been broken. But Huxley forgets about individualism. He doesn’t understand that sex, even stripped of its link with reproduction, still exists—not as a pleasure principle, but as a form of narcissistic differentiation. The same is true of the desire for wealth. Why has the Swedish model of social democracy never triumphed over liberalism? Why has it never been applied to sexual satisfaction? Because the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science leads to individuation, vanity, malice and desire. Any philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire—unlike pl...

In reality, men don’t give a damn about their kids, they never really love them. In fact, I’d say men aren’t capable of love; the emotion is completely alien to them. The only emotions they know are desire—in the form of pure animal lust—and male rivalry.

Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe.

For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless. Women are different, because they continue needing to have someone to love—which is not and has never been true of men. It’s bullshit to pretend that men need to fuss over their children, play with them or cuddle them. I know people have been saying it for years, but it’s bullshit. After divorce—once the family unit has broken down—a man’s relationship with his children is nonsensical. Kids are a trap that has closed, they are the enemy—you have to pay for them all your life—and they outlive you.”

Proust was fundamentally European—he and Thomas Mann were the last Europeans—but what he wrote no longer bears any relationship to the world as we know

these self-professed Satanists didn’t believe in God or Satan or any supernatural power. Blasphemy was simply something they used to spice up their rituals, and most of them quickly lost the taste for it. In fact, like their master the Marquis de Sade, they were pure materialists—libertines forever in search of new and more violent sensations. According to Macmillan, the progressive destruction of moral values in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties was a logical, inevitable process. Having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals, liberated from the constraints of ordinary morality, should turn their attentions to the wider pleasures of cruelty. Two hundred years earlier, de Sade had done precisely the same thing. In a sense, the serial killers of the 1990s were the spiritual children of the hippies of the sixties, and their common ancestors would be the Viennese Actionists of the fifties.

Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who affirmed the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity.

Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest.

The self is an intermittent neurosis, and this man was far from cured.

In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear they had no chance.

Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks always in the same direction). This weighing up of pleasure and pain, which everyone is forced to make sooner or later, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.

In part, this is because they are somewhat tired of life; but the principal reason is that nothing—not even death—seems worse than the prospect of living in a broken body.

He knew his life was over, but he didn’t understand the ending.

There is no power in the world—economic, political, religious or social—that can compete with rational certainty. Western society is interested beyond all measure in philosophy and politics, and the most vicious, ridiculous conflicts have been about philosophy and politics; it has also had a passionate love affair with literature and the arts, but nothing in its history has been as important as the need for rational certainty. The West has sacrificed everything to this need: religion, happiness, hope—and, finally, its own life. You have to remember that when passing judgment on Western civilization.”

One day when we were talking he said to me, ‘The value of any religion depends on the quality of the moral system founded upon it.’

Michel lit a cigarette to give himself time to think. “It’s a strange idea . . .” he said between his teeth. “It’s a curious idea to reproduce when you don’t even like life.”

All fear seemed to have disappeared; to Michel, she had never looked so happy. It is true that he’d always had a tendency to confuse happiness with coma; nonetheless she seemed to him completely happy.

Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart.

It can be compared to Georg Cantor’s work to establish a typology of the infinite, which created set theory, or the work of Gottlob Frege, which redefined the basis of logic.

Auguste Comte, in particular the letters to Clotilde de Vaux and Subjective Synthesis, the philosopher’s last, unfinished work. Even from the standpoint of the scientific method, Comte could be considered the true founder of positivism. No metaphysical or ontological system of the time appealed to him. It is probable, as Djerzinski points out, that if Comte had been in the intellectual circle of Niels Bohr between 1924 and 1927, he would have maintained his position of intransigent positivism and allied himself to the Copenhagen interpretation. In any case, the philosopher’s insistence on the reality of social structures as opposed to the fiction of individual existence, his continued interest in historical processes and currents of public opinion, and his deep sentimentality lead one to think he might have been at home with a more recent ontological overhaul, the replacement of an ontology of objects with an ontology of states, established by the work of Zurek, Zeh and Hardcastle.

He was slightly suspicious of Comte’s work, which he considered romantic. Contrary to the materialism it sought to replace, positivism could, he insisted, provide the foundation for a new humanism; in fact, this would be a first, since materialism was antithetical to humanism and would eventually destroy it.

Man no longer needed God, nor even the idea of an underlying reality. “There are human perceptions,” said Walcott, “human testimonies, human experiences; reason links them, and emotion brings them alive. All of this happens without any metaphysical intervention, without any ontology at all. We don’t need concepts of God or nature or reality anymore. In experiments, it is possible to get a group of observers to agree on the basis of reasonable intersubjectivity;

“There was something about him,” said Walcott, “something monstrously sad. I think he was probably the saddest man I have ever met, and even the word ‘sadness’ seems inadequate; there was something broken in him, something completely devastated. I always got the impression that life was a burden to him, that he no longer knew how to make contact with any living thing. I think he held out for exactly as long as was necessary to finish his work, and I don’t think any of us will ever know the effort he had to make in order to do so.”

“That which is there to be spoken and thought of must be.”

Whatever his failings, he understood how to communicate to a growing public the idea that humanity in its current state could and should control the evolution of the world’s species—and in particular its own evolution. In his struggle, he had the support of a number of neo-Kantians who, making use of the sudden unpopularity of Nietzschean ideas,

New Age thought appealed to a very real suffering symptomatic of psychological, ontological and social breakdown. Beyond the repellent mix of fundamentalist eco-babble, attraction to tradition and the “sacred” which they inherited from their spiritual forebears, the Esalen commune and the hippie movement, New Agers had a genuine desire to break with the twentieth century, its immorality, its individualism and its libertarian and antisocial aspects. It testified to the anguished awareness that a society cannot function without the unifying axis of some kind of religion; it was, in effect, a call for a new paradigm.

The coding sequences responsible for the formation of Krause’s corpuscles in the embryo had recently been identified. At the time, such corpuscles were sparsely spread on the surface of the glans penis and the clitoris. There was nothing, however, to prevent these from being multiplied in the future to cover the entirety of the epidermis, offering new and undreamed-of erotic possibilities.

Even the occasional, sporadic and contradictory interest which New Age devotees pretended to take in this or that belief or “ancient spiritual tradition” was nothing more than further evidence of a poignant, almost schizophrenic despair.

Like others in society, they believed in their hearts that the solution to every problem—whether psychological, sociological or more broadly human—could only be a technical solution.