Submission Houellebecq Quotes

It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.

Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend.

It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.

People don’t really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible.

I didn’t even want to fuck her, or maybe I kind of wanted to fuck her but I also kind of wanted to die, I couldn’t really tell.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know,

For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure,

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.

It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.

All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations.

Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.

That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion.

His masterpiece was a dead end—but isn’t that true of any masterpiece?

While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.

Jesus had loved men too much, that was the problem; to let himself be crucified for their sake showed, at the very least, a lack of taste, as the old faggot would have put it.

the word humanism made me want to vomit,

The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man.

No doubt the Romans had felt that theirs was an eternal civilization, right up to the moment their empire fell apart. Were they suicides, too?

Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content.

Meursault.

I’d feel kind of like a rat abandoning ship.” “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.

Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.

Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I’ve ever met were people in revolt. It wasn’t enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God—they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: ‘Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.’ They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don’t suppose you recognize yourself in this description.

they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That’s why atheist humanism—the basis of any ‘pluralist society’—is doomed.

The fact is, most people live their lives without worrying too much about these supposedly philosophical questions. They think about them only when they’re facing some kind of tragedy – a serious illness, the death of a loved one. At least, that’s how it is in the West; in the rest of the world people die and kill in the name of these very questions, they wage bloody wars over them, and they have since the dawn of time. These metaphysical questions are exactly what men fight over, not market shares or who gets to hunt where. Even in the West, atheism has no solid basis. When I talk to people about God, I always start by lending them a book on astronomy …

Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic ‘engagement,’ its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all.

We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless.

For these Muslims, the real enemy—the thing they fear and hate—isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam—that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.

The sun shone on the meadows and woods like a trusted employee.

Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define.

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There was no way I could think it over without a second Calvados. After thinking it over, I decided that the really prudent thing was to go out and buy another bottle.

What’s amazing about Bayrou, what makes him irreplaceable,” Tanneur enthused, “is that he’s an utter moron.

an intellectual didn’t have to be responsible. That wasn’t his job. In

Toynbee’s idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.

In that time he had managed to write books that made me consider him a friend more than a hundred years later.

Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it.

impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.

For the first time in my life I’d started thinking about God, seriously imagining that there could be a kind of Creator of the universe observing everything I did, and my first reaction was uncomplicated, pure and simple fear.

Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm. Over

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).

In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton’s—just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies and the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God.

The fighting had begun. You could make out groups of masked men roaming around with assault rifles and automatic weapons. Windows had been broken, here and there cars were on fire, but the images, shot in the pelting rain, were of such poor quality it was impossible to get a clear idea of who was doing what.

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to

We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace. Gradually,

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. You see,” he went on, “Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha—unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called ‘the prince of the world’? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece.

You’re what,” I asked, “Catholic? Fascist? Both?” It just popped out. I was out of practice with intellectuals of the right—I couldn’t remember how to behave. All at once, in the distance, we heard a kind of sustained crackling. “What was that, do you think?” asked Alice. “It sounded like shooting,” she added, hesitantly. We fell silent,

Yes, in theory you’re definitely macho. But then you have such refined tastes in writers: Mallarmé, Huysmans. They don’t exactly play to the macho base. Plus you have a weirdly feminine eye for household textiles. On the other hand, you dress like a loser. I could see you cultivating a macho slob thing, but you don’t like ZZ Top, you’ve always preferred Nick Drake. In other words, you’re a walking enigma.

Unlike his sometime rival Tariq Ramadan, who’d been tainted by his old Trotskyite connections, Ben Abbes had kept his distance from the anticapitalist left. He 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 his 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.

Her family had been very kind to me, friendly and welcoming, and without treating me as special in any way, which made it even better. As her father was uncorking a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, it suddenly occurred to me that for the last twenty years Myriam had had dinner with her parents every night, that she helped her little brother with his homework, that she took her little sister shopping for clothes. They were a tribe, a close-knit family tribe, and as I thought back on my own life, it was so unlike anything I’d ever known that I almost broke down in sobs.

it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner—he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known—had to have known—that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.

Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale. Submission is not the story some expected of an armed coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. At one level it is simply about a man who through suffering and indifference finds himself slouching toward Mecca. At another level, though, it is about a civilization that after centuries of a steady, almost imperceptible sapping of inner conviction finds itself doing the same thing. The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemmour’s Le Suicide français is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever.

Asia so degraded, so corrupted by the colonial era and by its own crowdedness that it can only choose between depravity and the puritan orgy of communIsm. The women of Thailand are so beautiful that they have become the hostesses of the Western world, sought after and desired everywhere for their grace, which is that of a submissive and affectionate femininity of nubile slaves - now dressed by Dior - an astounding sexual come-on in a gaze which looks you straight in the eye and a potential acquiescence to your every whim. In short, the fulfilment of Western man's dreams. Thai women seem spontaneously to embody the sexuality of the Arabian Nights, like the Nubian slaves in ancient Rome. Thai men, on the other hand, seem sad and forlorn; their physiques are not in tune with world chic, while their women's are privileged to be the currently fashionable form of ethnic beauty. What is left for these men but to assist in the universal promotion of their women for high-class prostitution?

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time. Still, it’s harmless, and can even have a certain marginal value.

Obviously they had no autonomy, but as they say in English, fuck autonomy.

I’d never felt the slightest vocation for teaching—and my fifteen years as a teacher had only confirmed that initial lack of vocation. What little private tutoring I’d done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality. Worse, maybe, I didn’t like young people and never had, even when I might have been numbered among them. Being young implied, it seemed to me, a certain enthusiasm for life, or else a certain defiance, accompanied in either case by a vague sense of superiority toward the generation that one had been called on to replace. I’d never had those sorts of feelings.

When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain,

literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.

Alice watched us with the affectionate, slightly mocking look that women get when they witness a conversation between men—that oddity, not quite buggery, or duel, but something in between. Above our heads the linden branches stirred in the breeze. Just then, in the distance, I heard a soft, muffled noise like an explosion.

Or maybe I was just hungry. I’d forgotten to eat the day before, and possibly what I should do was go back to my hotel and sit down to a few duck’s legs instead of falling down between the pews in an attack of mystical hypoglycemia.

To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you’re always likely to run afoul of some agency or other.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it

The French Revolution, the republic, the motherland … yes, all that paved the way for something, something that lasted a little more than a century. The Christian Middle Ages lasted a millennium and more.

Secret Stories, which advertised name-brand lingerie at discount prices, had nothing to worry about: the same kind of shops were doing fine in the malls of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Neither, for that matter, did Chantal Thomass or La Perla. Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless. All

The transition to a salaried workforce had doomed the nuclear family and led to the complete atomization of society,

The floor was strewn with various animal skins—mainly sheep, I’d guess. It was kind of like being in a German porn flick from the seventies, set in a Tyrolean hunting lodge.

That’s why atheist humanism – the basis of any “pluralist society” – is doomed. Monotheism is on the rise, especially in the Muslim population – and that’s even before you factor in immigration. European nativists start by admitting that, sooner or later, we’ll see a civil war between the Muslims and everybody else. They conclude that, if they want to have a fighting chance, that war had better come as soon as possible – certainly before 2050, preferably sooner if possible …’ ‘I see what you mean …’ ‘Yes, from a political and military standpoint they’re obviously right. The question is whether they’ve decided to go from talk to action – and if so, in which countries. Every country in Europe is more or less equally hostile to Muslims, but France is a special case because of its military. The French armed forces are still among the strongest in the world, and their strength has been maintained, in the face of budget cuts, by one government after another. That means no uprising can take hold if the government sends in the troops. Which is why there has to be a special strategy for France.’ ‘Meaning?

You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model airplanes.

Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him,

You know I’m not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.

nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it’s not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters.

André and Jeanne soon felt nothing but blessed tenderness, maternal satisfaction, at sharing the same bed, at simply lying close together and talking before they turned back to back and went to sleep.” It was beautiful, but was it realistic? Was it a viable prospect today? Clearly, it was connected with the pleasures of the table: “Gourmandise entered their lives as a new interest, brought on by their growing indifference to the flesh, like the passion of priests who, deprived of carnal joys, quiver before delicate viands and old wines.” Certainly, in an era when a wife bought and peeled the vegetables herself, trimmed the meat, and spent hours simmering the stew, a tender and nurturing relationship could take root; the evolution of comestible conditions had caused

Had I fallen prey, in middle age, to a kind of andropause? It wouldn’t have surprised me. To find out for sure I decided to spend my evenings on YouPorn, which over the years had grown into a sort of porn encyclopedia. The results were immediate and extremely reassuring. YouPorn catered to the fantasies of normal men all over the world, and within minutes it became clear that I was an utterly normal man. This was not something I took for granted. After all, I’d devoted years of my life to the study of a man who was often considered a kind of Decadent, whose sexuality was therefore not entirely clear. At any rate, the experiment put my mind at rest. Some of the videos were superb (shot by a crew from Los Angeles, complete with a lighting designer, cameramen and cinematographer), some were wretched but ‘vintage’ (German amateurs), and all were based on the same few crowd-pleasing scenarios. In one of the most common, some man (young? old? both versions existed) had been foolish enough to let his penis curl up for a nap in his pants or boxers. Two young women, of varying race, would alert him to the oversight and, this accomplished, would stop at nothing until they liberated his organ from its temporary abode. They’d coax it out with the sluttiest kind of badinage, all in a spirit of friendship and feminine complicity. The penis would pass from one mouth to the other, tongues crossing paths like restless flocks of swallows in the sombre skies above the Seine-et-Marne when they prepare to leave Europe for their winter migration. The man, destroyed at the moment of his assumption, would utter a few weak words: appallingly weak in the French films (‘Oh putain!’ ‘Oh putain je jouis!’: more or less what you’d expect from a nation of regicides), more beautiful and intense from those true believers the Americans (‘Oh my God!’ ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’), like an injunction not to neglect God’s gifts (blow jobs, roast chicken). At any rate I got a hard-on, too, sitting in front of my twenty-seven-inch iMac, and all was well. Once I was made a professor, my reduced course load meant I could get all my teaching done on Wednesdays.

The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.

Those hideous buildings had been constructed during the worst period of modernism, but nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it’s not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.

even the word humanism made me want to vomit, but that might have been the canapés.

No, in fact, I didn’t; even the word humanism made me want to vomit, but that might have been the canapés. I’d overdone it on the canapés.

As time went on, I subscribed more and more to Toynbee’s idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide. And then one day everything changed for me. It was March thirtieth, 2013, I’ll never forget—Easter weekend. At the time I was living in Brussels, and every once in a while I’d go have a drink at the bar of the Métropole. I’d always loved Art Nouveau. There are magnificent examples in Prague and Vienna, and there are interesting buildings in Paris and London, too, but for me—right or wrong—the high point of Art Nouveau decor was the Hotel Métropole de Bruxelles, in particular the bar. The morning of March thirtieth, I happened to walk by and saw a sign that said the bar of the Métropole was closing for good, that very night.

It will all be much easier for the conservatives, who are in even worse shape, and who never cared about education—they hardly even know what education is.

What little private tutoring I’d done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality.

In any case, it wouldn’t affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you’d been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I

So you’re for a return to patriarchy?” “You know I’m not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.

if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the southwest. I knew next to nothing about the southwest, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war.

during a press conference he declared (to general bafflement) that he was profoundly influenced by distributism. He had actually said so before, several times, on the campaign trail, but since journalists have a natural tendency to ignore what they don’t understand, no one had paid attention and he’d let it drop. Now

that if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the south-west. I knew next to nothing about the south-west, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war.

According to Steve, an agreement had been struck between the young Salafists and the administration. All of a sudden, two years ago, the hoodlums and dealers had all vanished from the neighborhood. Supposedly that was the proof. Had this agreement included a clause banning Jewish organizations from campus? Again, there was nothing to substantiate the rumor, but the fact was that, as of last fall, the Jewish Students Union had no representatives on any Paris campus, while the youth division of the Muslim Brotherhood had opened new branches, here and there, across the city.

soixante-huitards,

What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life an unending torment, grim, joyless, and mean. When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain, only through pleasure. Modest but robust, it had always served me faithfully. Or, you could argue, I had served it—if so, its yoke had been easy. It never gave me orders. It sometimes encouraged me to get out more, but it encouraged me humbly, without bitterness or anger. This past evening, I knew, it had interceded on Myriam’s behalf. It had always enjoyed good relations with Myriam, Myriam had always treated it with affection and respect, and this had given me an enormous amount of pleasure. And sources of pleasure were hard to come by. In the end, my dick was all I had. My interest in the life of the mind had greatly diminished; my social life was hardly more satisfying than the life of my body; it, too, presented itself as a series of petty annoyances—clogged sink, slow Wi-Fi, points on my license, dishonest

A noise recalled him to Saint-Sulpice; the choir was leaving; the church was about to close. “I should have tried to pray,” he thought. “It would have been better than sitting here in the empty church, dreaming in my chair—but pray? I have no desire to pray. I am haunted by Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and candle wax. I hover on its outskirts, moved to tears by its prayers, touched to the very marrow by its psalms and chants. I am revolted with my life, I am sick of myself, but so far from changing my ways! And yet … and yet … however troubled I am in these chapels, as soon as I leave them I become unmoved and dry. In the end,” he told himself, as he rose and followed the last ones out, shepherded by the Swiss guard, “in the end, my heart is hardened and smoked dry by dissipation. I am good for nothing.” —J.-K. Huysmans, En route

The idea that political history could play any part in my own life was still disconcerting, and slightly repellent. All the same, I realized—I’d known for years—that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to a situation that was chaotic, violent, and unpredictable.

Islam here is an alien and inherently expansive social force, an empire in nuce. It can be peaceful, but it has no interest in compromise or in extending the realm of human liberty. It wants to shape better not freer ones. Whatever Houellebecq thinks of it, Islam is not the target of Submission. It serves as a device to express a recurring European worry that the single-minded pursuit of freedom - freedom from tradition and authority, freedom to pursue one's own ends- must inevitably lead to disaster.

(like Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarmé, then Breton). Their

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the one from 1793:

She just turned fifteen.