Michel Houellebecq and the Possibilities of Fiction

Abstract

This chapter discusses two novels by Michel Houellebecq, Atomised (1998) and The Possibility of an Island (2005), both of which base a large amount of their intellectual focus on the relevance of the objective, material world to philosophical thought. The chapter outlines recent developments in continental philosophy, in which a revived interest in the significance of the material world and a desire to re-engage with the ‘in itself’ after decades of what Quentin Meillassoux terms the crippling ‘correlationism’ between thinking and being, has come to be classified under the banner of speculative realism or speculative materialism. By comparing the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux with Houellebecq’s fiction, I argue that both the speculative realist philosophy of these two thinkers and the aesthetics of the two novels under discussion, despite their alliance with scientific-materialist models of the universe, actually reach towards a transcendent space existing beyond objective reality.