O romance sociológico em Michel Houellebecq

Abstract

This work analyzes the novels of the writer Michel Houellebecq, starting from the premise that literature, and the texts of the french author in particular, have epistemic dimensions (Sevänen, 2018) and establish discursivities (Foucault, 2001) about contemporary social pathologies. Literature, like the human sciences, produces discursive orientations about different realities. The question that arises is about the possibility of placing Houellebecq's text in the face of the condition of founder of discourse on social phenomena, especially the malaise of current civilization. It is a malaise linked to a crisis of what is called “humanism”, as discussed by Martin Heidegger (2005) and, more recently, re-elaborated by Peter Sloterdijk (2000; 2008). It is no longer a discontent resulting from the repression of a primitive man, but from the tensioning of the civilized individual between inhibiting and disinhibiting forces. It echoes, however, the same anguish with the decline of the body and with the “hell of the other” present in Freud (2011). Moreover, it is also a crisis of fundamental institutions of modernity (Bauman, 2001; 2014). The central objective of this thesis is to analyze this contemporary malaise through the Rociological Novel.