Whatever

by Michel Houellebecq

He’s a famous hater partly because he’s very good at it and partly because he’s French.

‘Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization.’

They went on trotting out the platitudes for a good fifteen minutes. How she had the perfect right to dress as she wished, how this had nothing to do with wanting to seduce the men, how it was just to be comfortable, to feel good about herself, etc. The last dismaying dregs of the collapse of feminism.

The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death’s countenance appears in all its glory. The third millennium augurs well.

Despite that I’ve also had occasion to remark that human beings are often bent on making themselves conspicuous by subtle and disagreeable variations, defects, character traits and the like -doubtless with the goal of obliging their interlocutors to treat them as total individuals.

I spotted a strange graffito in the Sèvres-Babylon métro station: ‘God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice’, the inscription said. I mused on who the person so well informed about God’s designs might be.

We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvellous and exciting; and it’s abundantly clear that we rather doubt this.

It was supposed to be a non-violent demonstration, more like a big party. And like all non-violent demonstrations it turned nasty, a student has lost an eye, a CRS policeman has had a hand torn off, etc. The day after this huge demonstration a march has taken place in Paris to protest against ‘police brutality’. It has passed off in an atmosphere ‘of overwhelming dignity’ reports the commentator, who is clearly on the students’ side.

I don’t know who the mayor is, but it only takes ten minutes of walking the streets of the old town to realize that he is totally incompetent, or corrupt.

beds last on an average much longer than marriages, as is well-known).

Generally speaking, there’s nothing to be had from women in analysis. A woman fallen into the hands of the psychoanalysts becomes absolutely unfit for use, as I’ve discovered time and again.

Under the pretext of reconstructing the ego psychoanalysts proceed, in reality, to a scandalous destruction of the human being. Innocence, generosity, purity… all such things are rapidly crushed by their uncouth hands.

And that’s the first effect of psychoanalysis; to develop an unbelievably ridiculous avarice and pettiness in its victims.

From the amorous point of view Véronique belonged, as we all do, to a sacrificed generation. She had certainly been capable of love; she would have wished to still be capable of it, I’ll say that for her; but it was no longer possible.

Véronique had known too many discothèques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage.

Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two.

If it was necessary to sum up the contemporary mental state in a word, that’s the one I’d undoubtedly choose: bitterness.

As paradoxical as it may seem, there is a road to travel and it must be travelled, yet there is no traveller. Acts are accomplished, yet there is no actor. – Sattipathana-Sutta, XLII, 16