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Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, “Annihilate”, now in the bookstore for La Nave di Theseo, is set in 2026-2027, a near future in which all the ruins that Houellebecq’s previous novels have announced have been inexorably accomplished: the disintegration of social ties, loneliness, anomie, affective, sentimental and sexual misery. None of this arouses more drama, nor conflict, nor triggers a principle of revolt as it did, albeit with vain hopes, in previous novels. Simply, for the young people who populate this new world it has become natural to seal themselves within themselves, indeed the very idea “of a sexual relationship between two autonomous individuals” now appears to him as “an outdated and, to be honest, deplorable fantasy”. The opposite of what men and women did until recently, that is, fuck, love each other, form couples, build families, and even more before, communities, parties, movements, schools, churches. So it seems the West has chosen to end.
The novel’s protagonist, Paul, is the adviser and confidant of the Minister of Economy, Bruno Juge, “probably the greatest Minister of Economy since Colbert” – a character clearly inspired by the current French Minister of Economy, Bruno Le Maire. Bruno Juge is a cultured and pragmatic technician, in a center-left government, who studies every dossier until late at night, thanks to a disastrous married life. It bypasses European directives in the name of national interests and is successfully trying to bring France back to industry. He is also one of the possible candidates in the next presidential elections and also for this reason he ends up in the crosshairs of a series of indecipherable cyber terrorist attacks on which Paul investigates without being able to understand much. In one of the most disturbing computer graphics videos released online, the minister is guillotined like aristocrats during the French Revolution, and it is understood that the threat sows panic in the rooms of the Ministry and the Government.
Of all of Houellebecq’s novels, “Annihilate” is arguably the most novel of all. Pages that openly border on the essay, as was often the case in previous novels, are reduced to a minimum. In the more than seven hundred pages of this story we pass instead from the political thriller, to the novel on French power, to the ferocious show of the presidential campaign without understanding for pages and pages where it will really end up. In a world in which the mutation announced by Houellebecq since his first novel, “Extension of the domain of struggle”, is almost completely complete, however, something absolutely unprecedented happens for a novel by Houellebecq. The protagonist, Paul, the man to whom the author most frequently lends his thoughts, is torn from his daily work alongside the Minister of Economy in Paris and is thrown back into his life as a boy in the French countryside. The cause is a stroke that affects the father and leaves him completely paralyzed. But this fact, instead of plunging him even deeper into the absurdity of life, as happens to most of the characters in Houellebecq’s previous novels, instead makes him make a reverse movement: illness, agony and proximity to death not only they bring him closer to his family and his wife, with whom he had not slept for more than ten years, not only make him understand something of what is happening in France far from the center, in the countryside where the votes for the Rassemblement national are flooding, but they reconnect him to a sacred sense of existence. “The forest seemed animated by a calm breath,” Paul thinks as he observes nature, “infinitely calmer than any animal breath. It was life in its essence ”.
The misunderstanding that Houellebecq is a nihilist writer leaves no more foothold in this novel. Nihilist, if anything, is the logic of the world against which Houellebecq lashes out, not his poetics, nor his political philosophy, a conservatism which, as he himself wrote, “is a source of progress”, above all because progressivism itself his eyes turned into a stupid praise of novelty, whatever it is. Thus we arrive at the most delicate and creatural heart of “Annihilate”, the confrontation with euthanasia.
“The real reason for euthanasia – Houellebecq makes one of the characters from“ Annihilate ”say – is that we can’t stand the old, we don’t even want to know that they exist. Almost all people today believe that the value of a human being decreases with increasing age ”. Last April, in Le Figaro, Houellebecq wrote that “a country – a society, a civilization – that legalizes euthanasia” immediately loses “in its eyes the right to respect”. At that point “it is not only legitimate but it becomes desirable to destroy it”. As opposed to Western assisted suicide, in Houellebecq there is once again love, the theme that dominates his entire work against the light, but which has never been so clearly brought to the surface as in this novel. He writes: “The entity formed by a couple, and more precisely by a heterosexual couple, remains the main practice of manifestation of love”. Neither power, nor knowledge, nor technology, nor subversion, nor politics seem to be able to stop the ongoing Apocalypse. The only possible barricade against annihilation is a realm where two people live.
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The Ship of Theseus
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