Submission ambiguity hypocrisy and misanthropy in Michel Houellebecq s imaginary politics

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Journal of Political Ideologies

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‘Submission’: ambiguity, hypocrisy and misanthropy in Michel Houellebecq’s imaginary politics Anders Berg-Sørensen To cite this article: Anders Berg-Sørensen (2017) ‘Submission’: ambiguity, hypocrisy and misanthropy in Michel Houellebecq’s imaginary politics, Journal of Political Ideologies, 22:2, 131-146, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2017.1306957 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2017.1306957

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Journal of Political Ideologies, 2017 VOL. 22, NO. 2, 131–146 https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2017.1306957

‘Submission’: ambiguity, hypocrisy and misanthropy in Michel Houellebecq’s imaginary politics Anders Berg-Sørensen Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K, Denmark

ABSTRACT

On 7 January 2015, the day of the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satirical magazine, French author Michel Houellebecq published Soumission (Submission), his already contested novel. Charlie Hebdo had a satirical feature on the cover that day ridiculing Houellebecq’s novel, which was accused of Islamophobia. In the novel, Houellebecq writes about how France in 2022 elects a Muslim president, Mohammed Ben Abbes, who wins the election against Marine Le Pen from the National Front and how the new president ‘Islamisizes’ the French state and society. Except for Islamism and nationalism, other political ideologies have failed to articulate political visions capable of generating support and stability in the citizenry. The article approaches Michel Houellebecq’s Submission as a diagnosis of a current ideological crisis in European democratic culture, and the passionate reactions to Houellebecq’s book as contesting the political thought-practices mapping the ideological landscape in contemporary Europe from below. It pays special attention to the ambiguity in Houellebecq’s criticism of Islamism and nationalism, his portrayal of the hypocrisy of liberal democrats and his misanthropy as regards the role of democratic citizens in future politics. The article also questions whether the satirical point of view that Houellebecq adopts constitutes an adequate point of departure for invigorating democratic imaginations. The argument is that the kind of negative ideological diagnosis that Houellebecq depicts could include potentials for how one could otherwise imagine political life. The question is simply whether this is the case in Houellebecq’s Submission. How does a literary representation of democratic imaginations produce meaning, reflection and points of orientation, and how does it work in Houellebecq’s imaginary politics?

1. Introduction On 7 January 2015, the day of the deadly attack on the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, French author Michel Houellebecq published Soumission (Submission), his already controversial novel. That day, Charlie Hebdo had a satirical feature on the cover ridiculing Houellebecq’s novel, which was accused of Islamophobia. Under the title, ‘the predictions

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of Wizard Houellebecq’ a caricature of Houellebecq with a swollen nose says: ‘In 2015, I lose my teeth […] In 2022, I do Ramadan!’ Houellebecq’s novel takes place in France in the near future, in 2022, where there is a presidential race between National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Mohammed Ben Abbes, leader of a moderate Muslim party, the Muslim Brotherhood. Because of a coalition with the socialist and conservative parties, Mohammed Ben Abbes wins the election, and French society becomes Islamized shortly after his victory. Sharia law is introduced, women leave the labour market to take care of their families at home and must be veiled and kept separate from men when in public, polygamy is allowed for men so that they can have up to four wives, and the universities are taken over by Saudi Arabian foundations, renamed, and non-Muslim professors are given the choice of converting to Islam or resigning. The latter is an important but unresolved issue in the novel for its main character, François, a literature professor and libertine in a mid-life crisis who used to have affairs with his young female students. The overall impression after reading Michel Houellebecq’s Submission is the strong satirical criticism of the ideological landscape in contemporary French and European political culture. This is criticism of the old left-wing and right-wing parties and the circular power distribution in the political system, an ongoing change between left-centre and right-centre coalitions. And it indicates the disillusionment among ordinary citizens and, consequently, the political failure of French and European democracy to establish trust among ordinary citizens. It is also a criticism of the value-political alternatives, the rising nationalism and Islamism on European soil, both in terms of totalitarian tendencies and violent conflicts. Finally, the satirical critique ignites the fear of a double-tongued moderate Islam eradicating old European culture by virtue of its imperial ambitions and ability to manipulate European politicians and public intellectuals. The latter turns out to be the most satirical part in its descriptions of how French male politicians and intellectuals are manipulated to convert to Islam through the prospect of getting married to up to four women of different ages and with different marital functions submitted to the men’s lust and sexual desire. This is a thick caricature of the fantasy of the Oriental harem, which at the same time embraces in its one-dimensional depiction of the human being – European men and Muslim women as marionettes for Muslim men in power – the pessimism and misanthropy of which Houellebecq has been accused. This impression stands in stark contrast to the reception of the book that followed the publication of Submission in France on 7 January 2015. Houellebecq’s novel is generally understood as a nationalist and cultural pessimistic dystopia of Europe in the very near future. Primarily due to Muslim immigration, high birth rates among Muslim immigrants and low birth rates among ‘old’ Europeans, European civilization will wither away and Europe will be taken over by a new Muslim empire instituting Muslim religious and cultural traditions as the dominant traditions on European soil. This common understanding of Submission is expressed from opposing ideological perspectives. Either the dystopia of Europe is a reason for a last-minute awakening that recognizes the erosion of European civilization caused by Muslim immigration and the need to protect the ‘old’ European nations and their cultural traditions and values against this erosion in the form of border protection and anti-immigration policies. Some have referred to this as an existential war between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’. Or the novel is simply an expression of a reactionary and nationalist stereotypical Islamophobia that does not have equal respect for Muslims, and that does not accept the right of religious freedoms and, thus, the rights for Muslims to live

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according to their religious and cultural traditions as long as they do not violate the rights of others. The latter can be extended to the explicit recognition of the value of Muslim religious and cultural traditions. Both ideological points of view operate within the same frame of understanding as Houellebecq’s Submission. The first pretends to agree with Houellebecq, while the second wants to disagree. The question becomes, however, whether these ideological interpretations of Submission reduce the multiple meanings at play in the novel by their common understanding of a nationalist and culturally pessimistic dystopia of Europe. My claim is that they do. They operate through a political rhetoric aimed at ideological decontestation and the mobilization of emotions among ordinary citizens, but they do not pay sufficient attention to the subtle satire at play in the novel from beginning to end, therefore missing the critical potential in Houellebecq’s novel. In other words, the guiding point in the article is that a reading of Houellebecq’s Submission necessitates a discussion of ideology. Submission is political satire that lays out ideological battles, and the interpretations of Submission are articulations of ideologies that represent the broader ideological landscape in Europe today with their various contested political languages, patterns of meaning and justificatory ends.1 However, Houellebecq’s novel escapes those ideological attempts to decontest and control the political language and meaning of the text by its satirical style, ambiguity and indeterminacy. Therein lies the critical potential of the novel, although it is also the target of criticism, as exemplified by the satirical Charlie Hebdo cover on 7 January 2015. Reading Submission within the frame of Michael Freeden’s approach to the study of ideology and actual political thought, the article adds insights into how a satirical novel can provide social diagnosis and criticism of an ongoing ideological battle of which the novel itself becomes part. The novel is satirical in the sense that it draws caricatures and makes us laugh at political and social norms that are taken for granted, especially as they are represented by persons of authority pretending to be better and wiser but unmasked by satire.2 It is told by changing perspectives and because of this perspectival change no one is saved from ridicule and criticism in Houellebecq’s novel, not even the main figure François, representing a French political culture dominated by libertine men. With this in mind, the article pays special attention to the ambiguity in Houellebecq’s criticism of Islamism and nationalism, his picture of the hypocrisy of liberal democrats and his misanthropy regarding the role of democratic citizens in future politics. It also questions whether Houellebecq’s satirical point of view constitutes an adequate point of departure for invigorating democratic imaginations. The argument is that the kind of negative ideological diagnosis that Houellebecq depicts could include potentials of how one could otherwise imagine political life. The question is whether this is only the case in Houellebecq’s Submission. How does a literary representation of democratic imaginations produce meaning, reflection and points of orientation, and how does it work in Houellebecq’s imaginary politics? This raises the general question if, and how, the critical potential provided by satirical fiction such as Houellebecq’s Submission provides insights that might be relevant for the study of ideology.

2.  Interpretations: the ideological landscape of contemporary Europe Submission immediately triggered passionate reactions from French politicians, not least because of the coincidence with the deadly attacks on Charlie Hebdo. On January 8, 2015,

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the day after the attacks, French Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls stated: ‘France is not Submission, it’s not Michel Houellebecq, it’s not intolerance, hate nor fear’.3 The same day, Marine Le Pen, who happens to be a character in Houellebecq’s novel, called the book ‘a fiction that could become reality’.4 The National Front has included the threats posed by Islam to the cultural homogeneity of the French people on its agenda since the 1980s, but increasingly so since the last decade in order to reinvigorate a nativist ‘love of France’ at a point in time when she is considered to be withering away.5 A couple of days later in the National Assembly, Manuel Valls declared that France is ‘at war against […] jihadism, and radical Islam’ from the point of view of ‘freedom’ and ‘laïcité’. This is coupled with his understanding of the ‘only intermittently discussed […] fractures, tensions […] social misery […] and daily discriminations against those who don’t have the right name, skin color, or because they are women’. His claim is that this integration problem demands a ‘citizenship that needs to be re-founded, reinforced, and re-legitimated’.6 Valls constituted a double-bound point of view: on the one hand, that the problems of Islam in France are not religious as such, but rather associated with the social inequalities and discrimination that French Muslims experience in their everyday lives; on the other hand, France is at war against radical Islam. He therefore called for the re-foundation, reinforcement and re-legitimization of the French citizenry with reference to republican principles of secularism and freedom rather than the tensions, intolerance, hate and fear created, for instance, by Houellebecq’s Submission – and Le Pen’s National Front; in other words, by the Islamophobia of Houellebecq and the National Front. Valls’ point of view has resonated broadly among left-wing public intellectuals. Laurent Joffrin, editor of the left-wing newspaper Libération, wrote that the publication of Houellebecq’s novel marked ‘a date in the history of ideas when the thinking of the extreme right burst into, or returned to, serious literature’.7 In the eyes of the French left-wing public intellectuals, there is a close connection between Houellebecq and the extreme right, the National Front and national conservative public intellectuals. On the side of the French national conservative intellectuals, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut defended Houellebecq’s novel, applauded his courage not to be ‘intimidated by political correctness’ and found, like Le Pen, the idea of France converting to Islam ‘plausible’.8 In that sense, Submission suits Finkielkraut’s own agenda to rehabilitate a common French national culture and identity as the highest level in a hierarchical cultural and social order.9 Based on the few quotations from politicians and intellectuals, the picture drawn both by left-wing and right-wing reactions to Submission is the same: The socialist left is strongly against Houellebecq, whereas the national conservative and nationalist right is strongly for taking his political imaginary of the French and European near future seriously. The question is, however, whether Houellebecq takes such an explicitly ideological stance as represented in the immediate public debate after the publication of Submission. Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, who translated Soumission into English, said in an interview with The New York Times, shortly before the book was out in the US, that it gives ‘a picture of what European right-wing paranoia looks like’.10 In other words, it is a diagnosis of the actual ideological landscape and the fantasies, horror stories and scapegoats created in the French and European public debates, more than a clear political statement from Houellebecq himself. Stein’s interpretation points to another question raised in the immediate reception of the novel: Whether or not Houellebecq has a clear political agenda, does he live up to his responsibility as an author? French literary critic Pierre Assouline did not think so:

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Yet this, in the end, is a book from which one emerges sad, gloomy, disenchanted, at least if we agree to take it seriously. […] There is nothing to salvage from his nihilism, his misanthropy, his misogyny that is more and more pronounced. […] In his view, a writer has only one duty: to be present in his book. He certainly is that, and on all the pages. And if one talks about responsibility, his or any other writer’s, he will claim the right of every artist to be irresponsible. But what is more irresponsible than playing with the fire of an imagined civil war in the France of today?11

Assouline’s point of view is followed by Stéphane Delorme, editor-in-chief of French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, who contrasts Houellebecq with Charlie Hebdo. In short, Houellebecq is called ‘anti-Charlie’ because of his mannered and egoistic public performances done ‘out of boredom’, ‘without convictions’ and ‘without a conscience’. As Delorme writes: ‘We have to put an end to these so-called X-rays of French society, which only reveal their authors’ sad bile. If Charlie could make us understand once and for all that our era needs courage and conviction, and that we’re done with spinelessness – that would be a step in the right direction’.12 According to Delorme, Charlie Hebdo revitalized the French spirit of satire in the tradition of ‘Rabelais, La Bruyère, Voltaire, Daumier, but also Jarry and the Surrealists (Breton’s “black humor”)’. They defended ‘the plain and simple right to laugh about things. To be insolent, biting, critical, satirical. To be witty, mocking, funny’. And this French spirit has to be seen in stark contrast to ‘the pettiness of national identity’. ‘In the ocean of cynicism, the Charlie idea was a lifeline. […] one of courage, liberty and conviction […] intelligence, impudence, irony, warmth, generosity, joy. And perseverance’.13 Again, Houellebecq is placed in the same camp as the National Front and national conservatives, characterized by their ‘pettiness of national identity’ rather than associated with the French spirit of satire. However, this interpretation is contestable. Lorin Stein emphasizes the humour of the book and how he laughed when translating it.14 That Houellebecq is considered ‘a man without conviction’ does not necessarily make him irresponsible. Rather, his misanthropy, nihilism and cultural pessimism are called a ‘jeu d’esprit’, which makes it possible for him to see the loss of meaning in a secular and democratic republic and in consequence the demand from ordinary citizens for a meaningful life that religions – and in Houellebecq’s novel most likely Islam – can provide.15 As noted by intellectual historian Mark Lilla, a Columbia University professor: The qualities that Houellebecq projects onto Islam are no different from those that the religious right ever since the French Revolution has attributed to premodern Christendom – strong families, moral education, social order, a sense of place, a meaningful death, and, above all, the will to persist as a culture. And he shows a real understanding of those – from the radical nativist on the far right to radical Islamists – who despise the present and dream of stepping back in history to recover what they imagine was lost.16

This tendency of French national conservative cultural pessimism and the sense of decline is referred to as ‘a national disease’. In his recent book, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, Sudhir Hazareesingh ends up analysing this political and cultural context of Houellebecq’s Submission.17 Houellebecq’s novels are characterized as confirming the stereotypes of the French because of their ‘sexual perversion’, whereas Hazareesingh does not mention them for their diagnoses of everyday life in contemporary France.18 However, Submission must be specifically seen in the context of a general diagnosis of the pathology of contemporary France that has become common among French intellectuals. They consider the ‘national disease’ in psychological terms and the remedies

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as mental change in order to prevent ‘the breakdown of its sense of collective identity’ most visibly promoted as ‘a return to the nation’.19 Hazareesingh’s own conclusion points in the direction of ‘a new division between the confident nation and the anxious nation’ that has replaced the old ones of class, religion, ideology and regional identity. The confident France consists primarily of mainstream political and business elites, and of the younger and more educated sections of the community. […] The anxious France is typically older, more provincial and more nationalistic, and feels much more economically fragile; it is warier of the outside world and apprehensive of its impacts […] on society and on the ‘French way of life’.20

This division in French society between the elite and ordinary citizens who have lost their faith in the political system, their hope in the future and who express a fear of Islam is exactly what Houellebecq writes about. And the reactions to his latest novel, Submission, render the ideological divisions explicit. In that sense, they operate as ideologies with their appeals to the French people to take a stance and let their actions be guided by this.21 On the one hand, a nationalist and national conservative right, which appeals to preserve the nation against the threat from the Muslim population to Islamize society. On the other hand, the socialist and secularist left, which appeals to the recognition of freedom and equality for all citizens and that all citizens take this as a common responsibility. If Submission is to be seen as a provocation, as some have claimed, it must be because Houellebecq has replaced the latter as a vital political force in the near future, where the value-political struggle is fought between two conservative parties: the one nationalist, the other Muslim. In any case, both ideological reactions to Submission agree that the novel expresses a national conservative mourning of decline and loss of collective cultural meaning, but they disagree on whether this appeals to a nationalist awakening or to an awareness of Islamophobia. In that sense, they are engaged in a battle of decontestation and control over political language and imaginations.22 The question is, however, whether it genuinely is that easy to attach a fixed and final meaning to Houellebecq’s novel. My claim here is that the novel represents an ambiguity and indeterminacy in the ideological landscape of contemporary Europe and, thus, that the ideologies at play and their representations possess multiple meanings.

3. Ambiguity The battle of ideological decontestation is exemplified by the crucial question of the meaning of the title, ‘submission’. In the interpretations of Submission sketched out above, the title is claimed to refer to the future submission of Europe to Muslim domination – the dystopia that Europe will become Eurabia. This contestation became visible on the European political agenda with the short movie from 2004, Submission, made by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh about the oppression of women in Islam; the film that provoked van Gogh’s murder later the same year. The focal point of the contestation is whether this is a ‘realistic’ and ‘plausible’ prospect for the near future, as argued by Marine Le Pen, or one driven by ‘intolerance, hate or fear’, as Manuel Valls claimed. While one can claim this to be an underlying question throughout the novel, it is not stated explicitly. The one and only time the notion of ‘submission’ is mentioned explicitly is in the European male fantasies about polygamy and the submission of Muslim women to their lust and sexual desire – a thick caricature of the Occidental fantasy of the Oriental harem.23

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Towards the end of the novel, the main character, François, a former literature professor who had to leave his position at University of Paris-Sorbonne because he was not Muslim, has accepted to meet Rediger, the new vice chancellor of the now Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne, in his private home. Rediger used to have nationalist, Catholic, even fascist political attitudes until he converted to Islam more than a decade ago. In his eyes, Islam is the only sustainable religion in the future. Rediger means ‘editor’ in French, indicating that Rediger is the ideologue per excellence, revising and transforming the value-conservative political agenda. At a point in the meeting when Rediger asks François to return to his professorship under the condition of conversion, they begin talking about Rediger’s house and the meaning of submission in Islam: ‘Obviously, I have no interest in Paulhan – who could be interested in Paulhan? But it is a constant source of happiness to think that I live in the house where Dominique Aury wrote Story of O – or, at least, in the house of the lover she wrote it for. It’s a fascinating book, don’t you think?’ I completely agreed. In principle, Story of O contained everything I didn’t like in a novel: other people’s fantasies disgusted me, and the whole thing was so ostentatiously kitschy – the apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, the hotel particulier in Faubourg Saint-Germain, Sir Stephen, all that stuff was shit. All the same, the book had a passion, a vitality that swept everything before it. ‘It’s submission’, Rediger murmured. ‘The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there’s a connection between woman’s submission to man, as it’s described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man’s submission to God.’24

Although the Arabic ‘al-Islam’ etymologically means voluntary submission or surrender to the will of God, the use of the word in the novel is also associated with the libertine and sadomasochistic Story of O and, thus, it plays on the erotic fantasy of the Oriental harem. After the meeting, François returns home and reads Rediger’s Ten Questions on Islam, a book he was asked to read for the purpose of his own eventual conversion. ‘Like most men, probably, I skipped the chapters on religious duties, the pillars of wisdom and child-rearing, and went straight to chapter seven: “Why Polygamy”?’25 Given the storyline about François’ failed sexual encounters with young female students and various prostitutes as well as his frequent use of Internet pornography, this obsession with polygamy adds to the reading that the novel is a thick caricature of the Occidental fantasy of the Oriental harem; a fantasy that has become closer to reality because of the possibility of polygamy. This emphasizes the ambiguity of the meaning of submission and the various possible interpretations through perspectival change26; in the case of Rediger, his awareness of his understanding of submission that might be scandalous among his fellow Muslim men. Furthermore, it exposes the hypocrisy of both Rediger and François. They know their own real desire but they pretend out of loyalty to be otherwise. To put this interpretation into the French political context, the fantasy of the harem has changed meaning from an exotic and erotic difference to be controlled by policies of assimilation as represented in art and novels in the 19th Century to something to desire by giving up assimilation into a common French national identity at present.27 This is the ambiguity in a nutshell.

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This ambiguity has generally paved the way for the various different interpretations of the novel in the public discourse. They reproduce the ideological landscape of Europe today and, thus, the novel has had an impact on the ongoing production of meaning by questioning what goes on. Nevertheless, it escapes the decontested meanings produced by the interpretations because of the ambiguity and multiple meanings at play. In other words, the aim of my interpretation is to point out the ambiguities and indeterminacies in the novel and maintain them as crucial features in order to question the unambiguous but ideologically opposed interpretations by the nationalist and national-conservative right and the secularist and socialist left. Houellebecq’s way of representing the political parties in the presidential race is also ambiguous. Let us begin with Muhammad Ben Abbes and his Muslim party, described as moderate Muslim and named ‘The Muslim Brotherhood’. First, the naming and association to the violent Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is in itself an example of the ambiguity in Houellebecq’s presentation of the moderate Muslim party and its ideology, questioning how moderate the party really is or whether it represents itself as moderate for strategic reasons.28 This naming reflects the ambiguity of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood under the Egyptian democratic revolution, at one and the same time a democratic force taking the power from the Egyptian ruler and, when in power, as a party maintaining power with all possible means from the former regime, legitimate as well as illegitimate: the military and the secret police. Second, the Muslim Brotherhood is able to bridge traditional Muslim cultural values with the new spirit of capitalism in terms of entrepreneurship in small, family-based companies and a network economic society. In other words, traditional cultural values are not eroded by modern capitalism, which would render them opposed to each other. Rather, they complement one another and are compatible. Houellebecq writes: Ben Abbes […] understood that the pro-growth right had won the ‘war of ideas’, that young people today had become entrepreneurs, and that no one saw any alternative to the free market. But this real stroke of genius was to grasp that elections would no longer be about the economy, but about values, and that here, too, the right was about to win the ‘war of ideas’ without a fight.29

This is confirmed by the election of Ben Abbes as president, which generates an economic optimism unseen in France in the post-war period and until the 1970s.30 Finally, the French converts to Islam, like Rediger, had previously displayed nationalistic and fascistic sympathies in their critique of the left-wing liberal democrats and their multicultural and anti-racist policies. This does not seem to be a problem among their new Muslim friends. There is an element of shared anti-Semitism. However, the value-conservative axis across nationalists and Muslims consolidates a stronger identification of a common enemy: secular liberal democratic society and what is called the arrogance of humanism; secularism and atheistic materialism is seen as coming to an end. This movement from one kind of strong identity politics to another stipulates a number of common features among nationalism and Islamism while at the same time putting the ambiguity in Houellebecq’s depiction of the value-political landscape in a nutshell. The central pillar in this value-political takeover is the education system. The Muslim Brotherhood aims at the ideological control of the education system and, thus, control of the cultivation of the next generations and their mindsets.31 What matters is the expansion of the republican school system in such a manner that it can co-exist with the three major

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religious traditions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. As Ben Abbes states: ‘It was time to broaden the idea of republican schooling, to bring it into harmony with the great spiritual traditions – Muslim, Christian or Jewish – of our country’.32 Furthermore, Ben Abbes is represented as having imperial dreams, the Roman Empire his model in terms enlarging the European Union with Turkey and Egypt33 and shifting the European centres of power to the Mediterranean; that is, the European Commission to Rome, alluding the Ancient Roman Senate, and the European Parliament to Athens, alluding the Ancient Greek Assembly;34 a caricature of the European centres of power by the Ancient comparison. The other political ideology represented in Submission is nationalism, in terms of the ideology of the far-right party, the National Front, under Marine le Pen’s leadership. As in current French politics, she is the National Front candidate for the French presidency. In the first round in the presidential race, she received the highest percentage of the votes (34%). First, she represents a nativist kind of nationalism, emphasizing how the French people have grown out of the French soil and have acquired their specific character, traditions and cultural values over the course of a lengthy history. It is an anti-immigration and anti-Islam kind of nationalism with closed borders and protection of this specific tradition and history expressed on banners like ‘We are the people of France’ and ‘This is our home’.35 Throughout the presidential campaign, she invokes the republican values of freedom as formulated by Condorcet in 1792, which initially implies an ambiguity between the universal human rights of freedom and the particular nativist French political culture. This receives a satirical description in the eyes of François: Marine Le Pen counter-attacked at twelve thirty. Brisk and blow-dried, shot from below, with the Hôtel de Ville rising up behind her, she was almost beautiful. This was quite a contrast to her earlier appearances. During the 2017 campaign, the National Front candidate had been persuaded that a woman had to look like Angela Merkel to win the presidency, and she did all she could to match the bristling respectability of the German chancellor, right down to copying the cut of her suits. But on this May afternoon, Le Pen seemed to have recovered a flamboyance, a revolutionary élan, that recalled the origins of the movement. […] Right away I was struck by the republican, even anticlerical, tenor of her remarks. Skipping the usual reference to Jules Ferry and the secularist reforms of the 1880s, she went all the way back to Condorcet and the historic speech he made before the Legislative Assembly in 1792, when he evoked the ancient Egyptians and Indians ‘among whom the human spirit made such progress, and who fell back into the most brutal and shameful ignorance the moment that religious power assumed the right to educate men’.36

At second glance, thus, the initial ambiguity changes when Le Pen embraces an articulate and aggressive atheism of a secular democracy rather than the Catholic heritage embedded in the French cultural tradition against the religious identification of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is strengthened by her references to the rights of insurrection as a sacred right and indispensable duty of the people in the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1793. Furthermore, like the Muslim Brotherhood, there is an ambiguity between the moderate, official face of the National Front and the militant but secret factions of nationalists and nativists involved in violent conflicts with militant jihadists. The National Front and Muslim Brotherhood have chosen the democratic parliamentarian path, while the nationalist movement and jihadists opt for militant violence. The latter is described as a potential civil war between the original Europeans and Muslim immigrants.37 By pointing out this

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ambiguity, Houellebecq plays to the fears of double-tongued politicians who accept violent power below the surface. He thus raises the question of the potential inconsistency and hypocrisy of politicians in both the National Front and Muslim Brotherhood.

4. Hypocrisy The primary target of Houellebecq’s satirical representation of hypocrisy, however, is the criticism of the ‘old’ politicians from the socialist, social democratic, liberal and conservative parties usually understood as the backbone of a well-functioning secular democracy. In Submission, their hypocrisy assumes two forms: The first refers back to the old circular political system where the political elite, irrespective of political ideology, was so used to being in power that they just said one thing and did another. This was simply part of the system automaticity and was not really met with resistance from the citizenry, only with disillusionment, distrust and disempowerment. This is the charge of hypocrisy in terms of an inconsistency between the political elites’ principles and ideals and their decision-making and behaviour.38 Having in mind Judith N. Shklar’s understanding of hypocrisy as an inherent aspect of ‘the play of ideologies’ in a liberal democracy, Houellebecq’s diagnosis of hypocrisy adds a systematic character to Shklar’s idea of ‘basic hypocrisy’: ‘the pretense that the ideological needs of the few correspond to the moral and material interests of the many’.39 The consequence of this systematic character is the aforementioned disillusion, distrust and disempowerment of ‘the many’; that is, ordinary citizens. The second kind of hypocrisy adds a new dimension. It depicts the politicians from the old parties as persons who are aware of the real mechanisms of power in the new presidency with Muhammad Ben Abbes; officially, however, they pretend the situation is different. They only get involved in coalitions with him for their own personal gain, giving up their political principles. And if they cannot pretend to be blind and innocent, they silence the critical questions. They know they are hypocrites and continue to be so rather than changing their actions. This is hypocrisy as loyalty – but with other motives behind the masks.40 Behind this depiction of forms of hypocrisy lies deep disillusionment with ‘old’ politicians and an all too elitist political system that has forgotten the existence and everyday experiences of ordinary citizens. Houellebecq adopts a special critical attitude towards the left-of-centre politicians who have failed to formulate political visions for the citizenry in recent decades. And it is claimed that their anti-racism has blocked more thorough distributive politics establishing a more egalitarian society. When Muhammad Ben Abbes was elected, some in the secular opposition raised their critical voices and organized protest meetings, which is described as a necessary kind of public debate, although it is a skin public debate rather than a genuinely democratic one. So, little by little, the stage was set for a political debate. This would be a new kind of debate, unlike anything in recent French history, more like what existed in the Middle East. But still it would be debate, of a sort. And the existence of political debate, however factitious, is necessary to the smooth functioning of the media – and, perhaps also, to keep people feeling that they live, at least technically, in a democracy.41

The statement points in the direction of the disillusionment, distrust and disempowerment of the ordinary citizenry and what has been discussed as the overall themes of pessimism and misanthropy in Houellebecq’s works, not only Submission.42

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This raises the question as to whether Houellebecq’s diagnosis resonates with Shklar’s notion of putting hypocrisy first. According to Shklar, there is a tendency for people who accuse others of being hypocrites as having a moralistic picture of the pure human being with a true inner self and upholding an ideal of authenticity and sincerity. However, this ideal picture barely fits real political life, where accusations of hypocrisy are ‘part of the rhetoric of legitimization and the politics of persuasion’.43 Shklar’s point is that a focus on hypocrisy can make a society more decent, but it does not solve the more moral urgent problems of cruelty; the violence behind the surface of the official political rhetoric. Rather it endangers us, in becoming misanthropes instead of vigilant citizens in an imperfect liberal democracy. In other words, does Houellebecq have a sober sense of the ideological play between anti-hypocrisy and hypocrisy and a clear sense of when the borders of hypocrisy are transgressed and turned into cruelty; in Shklar’s terms, by putting cruelty first? Or does his diagnosis of hypocrisy turn into a misanthropy because of an unrealistic ideal of liberal democracy?44

5. Misanthropy The narrator in Submission, François, is the one who represents the pessimism and misanthropy of which Houellebecq is often accused. François is a middle-aged professor of literature at Sorbonne with a specialty in late-nineteenth century French literature and French author Joris-Karl Huysman. He describes the decay, disillusionment and calculated behaviour that has gone on and transformed not only political life and society in general over the last couple of decades but also working life, intimate affairs and existential matters, specifically. In other words, the negative diagnoses of hypocrisy in the old political system and the uncertainty created by the ideological ambiguity in the value-political landscape have had an impact on ordinary citizens and their self-understanding. François describes himself as apolitical and disillusioned. He has given up on any hope for a better future, is merely doing what he has to do without any energy and enthusiasm, and the only passion he has left – which is also waning – is his sexual desire. He has become an animal. Let’s consider a few examples. In the beginning of the novel, when François is thinking back on the time when he submitted his doctoral dissertation, he realizes that he had laid part of his life behind him, ‘probably the best part’.45 He describes what he had lost by finishing the doctoral dissertation as his freedom, the self-chosen free intellectual activity. This is understood in contrast to holding a permanent university position and the lack of vocation in his professorial métier. Upon losing his professorship at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, however, François is asked to edit and write an introduction to the collected works of Huysman. He engages in this writing with a fiery energy and enthusiasm, forgetting himself and everyone around him. When finished, he says: Some of the punctuation needed correcting, a few of the references still had to be filled in, but even so, there was no doubt about it: it was the best thing I’d ever written, the best thing ever written on Huysman, full stop./I made my way home slowly on foot, like a little old man, more aware with every step that this time my intellectual life really was over; and that so was my long, very long relationship with Joris-Karl Huysman.46

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In other words, he is feeling rather ambivalent. While he realizes that this is the best text he has ever written, he is exhausted and again becomes misanthropic, describing himself as ‘a little old man’ who has ended his ‘intellectual life’. François elsewhere compares himself with rats and is told that rats are more intelligent than human beings in terms of their ability to survive. ‘“Rats are intelligent mammals”, he answered calmly, almost with amusement. “They will probably outlive us. Their society, at any rate, is a good deal more stable than ours”’.47 The point of comparing humans and animals is common in political thought, describing the power of human sovereignty with animal metaphors and characteristics, such as a fox, a lion and a wolf.48 In this case, however, a parasitic animal is being described as superior to human beings; a comparison which exemplifies the ambiguity between self-irony and pessimism relating to human beings. François returns to the Catholic monastery in which Huysman lived after his conversion to Catholicism and that François had therefore visited twenty years ago, now meeting the same monk. The monk is one of the few people who François would describe as ‘a good man’ because he cares about other people’s well-being. As he explains, ‘I realized that he was expressing not just a belief, but a hope, because he was one of those people, and you don’t see them every day, who take an instinctive pleasure in the happiness of their fellow men – that he was, in other words, nice’.49 In other words, François’ pessimistic self-description stands in contrast to the identification of ‘good men’ and, furthermore, to the passionate criticism he raises against the apathy of others in the actual political situation. He has a keen interest in getting as much detailed information about the nationalist movements and the Muslim Brotherhood in order to understand the ongoing transformations in the contemporary political landscape and himself being able to manoeuvre under these conditions. He considers it better to be politically engaged than to decay as an apolitical man.50 So rather than mere pessimism and misanthropy, François represents a movement back and forth between apathy, disillusionment and decay, on the one hand, and energy, enthusiasm and engagement on the other. Towards the end, he formulates the culturally pessimistic diagnosis that the Occident is approaching its end with a satirical twist. That which is addressed as the suicide of Europe in the French public debate is satirically compared with the history of 19th century brothels (la belle époque) and the then sexual practices that are all now forgotten; every civilization and its practices will change and at some point be forgotten.51 This is another example of the thick satire in the novel. In actual political life, the idea of the suicide of Europe is articulated by the national conservative intellectual Éric Zemmour.52 When published, Houellebecq’s Submission was seen as a parallel to Zemmour’s The French Suicide. In his satire, however, Houellebecq distances himself from this reception, thus stipulating that the nationalist and national conservative prognosis for the near future should not be taken too seriously. The novel ends along the satirical line running throughout the entire novel – the fantasies men have about young women – and it stipulates a new beginning. But nothing has changed, and François’ sexual fantasies are the same from beginning to end: A few months later there would be new classes and new students – pretty, veiled, shy. I don’t know how students find out which teachers are famous, but they always, inevitably, did, and didn’t think things could be so different now. Each of these girls, no matter how pretty, would be happy and proud if I chose her, and would feel honoured to share my bed. They would be worthy of love; and I, for my part, would come to love them./Rather like my father a few years before, I’d be given another chance; and it would be the chance at a second life, with very little connection to the old one./I would have nothing to mourn.53

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If François is a misanthrope, he might be what Judith N. Shklar characterizes as the ‘satirical’ misanthrope in contrast to ‘self-hating’ and ‘self-righteous’ misanthropes.54 Satirical misanthropes enjoy ‘the spectacle of human imbecility’ and become actively involved in ridiculing hypocrites and what they consider intolerable behaviour. The self-hating misanthrope hates ‘himself and all humanity’, while the self-righteous upholds a pure inner vision of humanity that actual human beings fail to live up to. With Shklar, one could characterize Houellebecq’s Submission as misanthropy turned into ‘satire, which is preeminently the literature of honesty in disgust’.55

6.  Conclusion: satire and public criticism In her article written in the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, ‘Free Speech and Civility in a Pluralist Society’, Simone Chambers emphasizes that Charlie Hebdo undoubtedly has its legal right to exercise its freedom of speech as it does – that is beyond question. However, this is not the same as saying that it cannot be criticized and its authority be questioned; an authority granted and consolidated by the reference to the French satirical tradition known since Voltaire and his contemporaries. Public criticism is exactly this ongoing questioning of utterances, images and texts rather than putting restrictions on the legal right to freedom of speech.56 An example of such public criticism was the 7 January 2015 cover of Charlie Hebdo; the day of the deadly attacks on the magazine. The cover was a satirical ridiculing of Houellebecq’s Submission published the very same day; a novel that similarly claims its authority from the French satirical tradition. However, in his article on satire written in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, ‘Satire, Who Whom?’, Raymond Geuss questions the kind of satire Charlie Hebdo is known for producing. He distinguishes between satire as a ‘biting critique of the great and the powerful’ and satire as ‘a form of blaming the victim’ of power.57 Without unambiguous judgment, Geuss stipulates that the satire of Charlie Hebdo is closer to the Roman literary genre of personal insult than the French tradition of satire from Voltaire articulating social criticism. Leaving this discussion of Charlie Hebdo aside, it is a valuable distinction, because it could also have Houellebecq’s Submission as target. Is the novel insulting the victims of power and expressing Islamophobia? Or does it create the potential for social criticism? In my eyes, there is no doubt. You can use satire to expose, ridicule, mock, make us laugh, unmask and, thus, criticize those in power and with authority. This is what Houellebecq is doing in his diagnosis of the ideological landscape in contemporary Europe. An important aspect of Houellebecq’s kind of satire is the perspectival change that does not spare anyone from being satirized. On the one hand, he reproduces the contemporary ideological framework of European identity politics giving power to the words of an increasing national-conservative fear of the role of Islam on European soil in the very near future. On the other hand, the reconstruction of the transformation of the European ideological landscape reveals a critical engagement with both the old political regime with a circular distribution of power between a centre-left and a centre-right political elite and the new value-political regime of national-conservatism struggling with a conservative Islam. This is done in the language of satire. In other words, Houellebecq’s literary diagnosis of contemporary European political culture uses the genre of satire to question the ongoing political identity constructions within a stagnated European political system. The narrator, François, is raising all of these

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questions. He is a disillusioned, middle-aged man – both politically and personally. In that sense, he represents French political culture. François constitutes the critical perspective by exposing the ambiguities and contradictions within the various ideologies and the hypocrisy of politicians and public intellectuals. He continuously challenges his own perspective by other perspectives with a certain self-irony, unmasking his own hypocrisy. Fundamental for François’ critical perspective is his doubt, misanthropy and despair. That is one of the reasons why Houellebecq’s Submission has been met by strong reactions and accusations of cultural pessimism. You are either for or against the novel! The tricky question is whether Houellebecq’s ambiguous pessimism and misanthropy provide us with an alternative vision for getting involved in common matters and acting together as citizens, or whether it deprives us of the energy to engage in what is beyond our own personal pleasure and desire. In other words, the question is whether Houellebecq’s negative approach to the ideological landscape in Europe today has some political potential or whether it ends up in mere reactionary disillusion with personal pleasure and desire as the one and only energy to rely on – deprived of any political potential. The novel ends with an open question and, thus, without closure: We can either choose resignation or continue to pay attention to the hypocrisy of both the old political regime and the new value-political regime backed up by means of violence. With the end in mind, does the novel create new imaginaries? Or does it merely reproduce existing ideological imaginaries making a caricature out of these? The only potential for new imaginaries Houellebecq provides is François’ self-irony; that he sees himself at a distance, laughs at himself and, thus, indirectly imagines that he could be otherwise. My claim is that this self-critical reflexivity at the personal level can have implications on the political level. Houellebecq points out the failure of imagination in the ‘old’ political regime by contrasting it with the success of the ‘new’ political regime in creating an ideological imagination that reinvigorates people’s hope in progress and prosperity. By doing so, he asks democratic politicians and citizens to do better in their political visions. Even if one takes Houellebecq’s Submission as mere disillusionment, a point where reading Houellebecq might disappoint, the novel calls for critical engagement in order not to give either the ideological interpretations of Houellebecq or Houellebecq himself the last word. Thus, the point in my reading of Houellebecq’s Submission is, firstly, to read the novel carefully instead of the ideological reductions of the novel in the public interpretations either to a cultural conservative nationalist agenda, adopting it as an apocalypse for Europe; or to a multiculturalist agenda, accusing it simply of Islamophobia. It is a much more perspectival, joyful and humorous novel than those unambiguous interpretations, pro et contra Houellebecq, indicate. It exposes doubts and raises crucial questions of contemporary political relevance that the ideological formation in Europe today bypasses.

Notes 1.  Cf. R. Hansen, ‘After Paris: liberalism, free speech, religion, and immigration in Europe’, in E.M. Iacobucci and S.J. Toope (Eds) After the Paris Attacks: Responses in Canada, Europe, and around the Globe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), p. 3. (Hansen draws a similar picture of the general tendencies in the ideological battles in Europe on religion and immigration over the last decade); M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); M. Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short

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Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); M. Freeden, The Political Theory of Political Thinking: An Anatomy of a Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2.  R.B. Branham, ‘Satire’, in R. Eldridge (Ed) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 140–156. 3.  ‘Paris Review editor says new Houellebecq book misunderstood’, New York Times, 18 October 2015. 4.  Quoted in A. Chrisafis, ‘Michel Houellebecq: “Am I Islamophobic? Probably, yes”’, The Guardian, 6 September 2015. 5.  S. Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People (London: Allen Lane, 2015), p. 299. 6.  Quoted in R. Marshall, ‘The (in)secure citizen: Islamophobia and the natives of the Republic after Paris’, in E.M. Iacobucci and S.J. Toope (Eds) After the Paris Attacks: Responses in Canada, Europe, and around the Globe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), pp. 44–45. 7.  Quoted in The Economist, 10 January 2015. 8.  Quoted in R. Zaretsky, ‘Do France’s intellectuals have a Muslim problem?’ Foreign Policy, 8 January 2015. 9.  Hazareesingh, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 310–311. 10. New York Times, op. cit., Ref. 3. 11. P. Assouline, ‘Houellebecq’s incendiary novel imagines France with a Muslim president’, La République des Livres, 9 January 2015. 12. S. Delorme, ‘Insoumission’, The Nation, 3 March 2015. 13. Ibid. 14. New York Times, op. cit., Ref. 3. 15. A. Shatz, ‘Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées’, London Review of Books, 9 April 2015. 16. M. Lilla, ‘Slouching toward Mecca’, The New York Review of Books, 2 April 2015. 17. Hazareesingh, op. cit., Ref. 5. 18. Ibid., pp. 296–297. 19. Ibid., p. 295. 20. Ibid., p. 323. 21. Freeden, The Political Theory of Political Thinking, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 53. 22. Ibid., p. 23. 23. Mark Lilla thinks the novel is a fantasy of a ‘family romance’ (sic!); Lilla, op. cit., Ref. 16. 24. M. Houellebecq, Submission, tr. Lorin Stein (London: William Heinemann, 2015), p. 217. 25. Ibid., p. 224. 26. Freeden, The Political Theory of Political Thinking, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 69–70. 27. Ranjana Khanna cites Eugène Delacroix for saying, ‘That is woman as I think she should be’, the first time he was allowed to visit a seraglio in Algiers in 1828. Or, as Khanna questions, was it just a pure imagination of the Oriental harem illustrated in Delacroix’ paintings, which at the same time has assimilation as its aim? R. Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 140. 28. Houellebecq, op. cit., Ref. 24, pp. 40–41. 29. Ibid., pp. 125–126. 30. Ibid., p. 164. 31. Ibid., pp. 66–67. 32.  Ibid., p. 89. 33. Ibid., p. 129. 34. Ibid., pp. 241–242. 35. Ibid., p. 97. 36. Ibid., pp. 89–90. 37. Ibid., pp. 42–43. 38. D. Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 8. 39. J.N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 66.

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40. Runciman, op. cit., Ref. 38, p. 8. 41. Houellebecq, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 166. 42. Cf. C. Sweeney, Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 43. Shklar, op. cit., Ref. 39, p. 75. 44. Cf. Runciman, op. cit., Ref. 38. 45. Houellebecq, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 5. 46. Ibid., p. 236. 47. Ibid., p. 72. 48. J. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I, tr. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 49. Houellebecq, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 175. 50. Ibid., p. 27. 51. Ibid., pp. 212–214. 52. Hazareesingh, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 305–309. 53. Houellebecq, op. cit., Ref. 24, pp. 249–250. 54. Shklar, op. cit., Ref. 39, p. 194. 55. Ibid., p. 205. 56.  S. Chambers, ‘Free speech and civility in a pluralist society’, in E.M. Iacobucci and S.J. Toope (Eds) After the Paris Attacks: Responses in Canada, Europe, and around the Globe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), pp. 17–20. 57. R. Geuss, ‘Satire, who whom?’, in R. Geuss, Reality and Its Dreams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 222.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to the audience at the “Re-energizing ideology studies” conference at University of Nottingham, the WPSA conference in San Diego and the ECPR Joint Sessions in Pisa for questions and comments on an earlier version of this article and in particular Verena Erlenbusch, Michaele Ferguson, Michael Freeden, Jan Ifversen, Alexander Livingston, Mihaela Mihai, Sara Rushing, Shalini Satkunanandan, Mathias Thaler, Rob Watkins and Yves Winter. I had fruitful conversations with Jeff Green, Anne Norton and Rogers Smith at a very early stage of drafting the article and I’m especially grateful to Hans B. Dabelsteen, Christian F. Rostbøll and Lars Tønder, who read a draft very carefully.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.