The Absence of Otherness and the Fiction of Corporeality in Michel Houellbecq’s Prose
The Absence of Otherness and the Fiction of Corporeality in Michel Houellbecq’s Prose

Summary/Abstract: The current paper aims to illustrate how Michel Houellebecq's prose revolves around the failure of otherness. His character, always male, is in search of indemnifying options to rebuild the connections that have been suddenly interrupted, such as miscarriages or losing partners due to suicide. At first sight, the woman's figure naturally meets these requirements. Otherness is being reduced to a barren body, that acts as an extension of the traditional female role: woman as an erotic partner and maternal figure. The inability to communicate, the split between the two above-mentioned fixed roles leads to the abnegation of the self while failing to be defined through otherness. My thesis will argue that Houellebecq's prose grows as a fiction of otherness: excessively eroticised bodies that impel communication, dispersed families by repudiation of sons as feasible otherness, artificial heroes, either orphans or abandoned, incapable of exceeding their own individuality, replace the claim for the heroic in contemporary French writing.

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