Whatever

by Michel Houellebecq

I eat a red bean taco and Jean-Pierre Buvet talks to me about sexuality. According to him the interest our society pretends to show in eroticism (through advertising magazines, the media in general) is completely artificial. Most people, in fact, are quickly bored by the subject, but they pretend the opposite out of a bizarre inverted hypocrisy. He gets to his main thesis. Our civilization, he says, suffers from vital exhaustion. In the century of Louis XIV, when the appetite for living was great, official culture placed the accent on the negation of pleasure and of the flesh; repeated insistently that mundane life can offer only imperfect joys, that the only true source of happiness was in God. Such a discourse, he asserts, would no longer be tolerated today. 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.