LifeFuel Great article about Houellebecq

[SlayerSlayer]

Houellebecq and the Sexual Pauperization of the Nerd

A Cultural-Poetic Dialog Between Pick-up Artist and Incel

themodernmoralist.com

 

[LeFrenchCel]

That's why we should be bring marxism-rodgerism asap.

 

[Tunadiver]

Thanks for sharing this article, I’m looking forward to reading it.
I couldn’t read Houllebecq‘s books - especially elementary particles any further than the introduction, because it triggered me so much :‘(
All I want to find is equal love with a somehow normal woman, I don’t want to be special or super successful, but neither do I want to desperately go after those who are just about to hit the wall like the unlucky brother in elementary particles.
May this article have good insights that won’t make me too depressed…

 

[BornToLose]

I'll read it all when I can be bothered to sign up. I've read Whatever and watched Atomised: dude knew what was up.

 

[dziki_dzik]

just become a beta cuck to the noodle (that will take your money after you die)

 

[Lonelyus]

That's why we should be bring marxism-rodgerism asap.

Please remove that flag, Dont turn into a commie, Commies hate incels and call us nerds.

 

[LeFrenchCel]

Please remove that flag, Dont turn into a commie, Commies hate incels and call us nerds.

You don't want to put chads and normies in gulags and seize the means of sexual reproduction comrade?

 

[based_meme]

View attachment 1020970just become a beta cuck to the noodle (that will take your money after you die)
View attachment 1020977

They're looksmatched, ngl.

 

[BPJ]

the article is behind a paywall. fck

 

[NorthernWind]

View attachment 1020970just become a beta cuck to the noodle (that will take your money after you die)
View attachment 1020977

They don't even look happy or satisfied in a slightest sense.
"Just bring yourself together and start betabuxxing someone without basic attraction between yourselves ".

 

[Jedi Master Cock ru]

You don't want to put chads and normies in gulags and seize the means of sexual reproduction comrade?

We are already subsidizing chads and normies raising their children through taxation, I imagine this is the direction it'll continue to go in if we go further towards socialism or communism

 

[sulpuda]

i love houellebecq. He is a person who understands the pain of incels well.

 

[NoCopeNoHope]

This lengthy article undertakes a cultural-poetic analysis of the representation of the nerd in Houellebecq’s novels Whatever (1994) and Elemantary Particles (1998). Two manifestations of the nerd are distinguished, both of which can be understood as reactionary male movements in the 1990s as a consequence of the liberalization of female sexuality: One is the pick-up artist as a member of the “Seduction Community”, the other is the incel (“involuntary celibate”) as a member of an online cult. Two aspects are particularly interesting in terms of cultural poetry.

First, both the seduction community and the incel cult can be linked both historically and metaphorically to the advent of the computer. The pick-up artist applies techniques from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and views seduction as a kind of video game, while the incel communicates online with like-minded people and is offered the black pill, which allows him to recognize the matrix of the ‘biological game’. Figuratively speaking, the seduction community concentrates on (re)programming the ‘software’ (mindset, game), while the incel movement believes it has figured out that only the ‘hardware’ (appearance, body size) is decisive for sexual success with women.

Second, the silent dialogue between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in Houellebecq’s works is hard to ignore. It is true that the French author took an explicit and probably definitive stance in this regard with the collection of essays In the Presence of Schopenhauer, published in 2017. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s laughter always breaks through in this comforting presence from afar. These two tendencies can be linked culturally and poetically to the beginnings of the seduction community in the early 1990s and the Incel cult in the late 1990s. In Whatever, the figure of the seduction artist hovers between the lines, driven by a Nietzschean will to outwit female biology. In a pessimistic contemplation of the system of sexual differentiation, the figure of the computer scientist ultimately rejects this false game. The two half-brothers in Elementary Particles can be understood as tipping figures of the emergence and overcoming of the incel, who embodies the complete incarnation of Schopenhauer’s resignation with bitter seriousness. The genetic creation of a will-less human race leads to a peacefully silenced world in which Nietzsche’s laughter eternally echoes.

The Thesis of the Sexual Differentiation System​

The thesis of a second and relatively independent system of differentiation to monetary capitalism, first introduced in Whatever, is a central motif in Houellebecq’s work. The emergence of a global and largely invisible “marketplace of sex” is further developed in the follow-up novel Elementary Particles as a direct consequence of the sexual emancipation of women. It is argued that the market law of supply and demand has extended from economic to sexual liberalism. And like economic liberalism, sexual liberalism also produces phenomena of absolute pauperization: „Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none.“¹In one crucial respect, the losers of sexual liberalization are worse off than those of economic liberalism: not only are they exploited by the successful market participants, but society makes it impossible for them to form a kind of class consciousness. While there are certain market regulations in the economic system — trade unions, framework agreements, minimum wages, protection against dismissal — a free market economy prevails in the competition for sexual partners. “„In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited,” says the first-person narrator, “every person more or less manages to find their bed mate.“² Such ‘market regulations of sex’ have now lost their effectiveness since the sexual revolution of the late 1960s.³ The losers are not only sexually frustrated, but above all — and this is the real force behind Houellebecq’s recurring motif — deeply lonely and on their own. The pick-up artist and the incel try in different but ultimately unsuccessful ways to escape this loneliness.⁴

 

[NoCopeNoHope]

In one crucial respect, the losers of sexual liberalization are worse off than those of economic liberalism: not only are they exploited by the successful market participants, but society makes it impossible for them to form a kind of class consciousness. While there are certain market regulations in the economic system — trade unions, framework agreements, minimum wages, protection against dismissal — a free market economy prevails in the competition for sexual partners. “„In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited,” says the first-person narrator, “every person more or less manages to find their bed mate.“² Such ‘market regulations of sex’ have now lost their effectiveness since the sexual revolution of the late 1960s.³ The losers are not only sexually frustrated, but above all — and this is the real force behind Houellebecq’s recurring motif — deeply lonely and on their own. The pick-up artist and the incel try in different but ultimately unsuccessful ways to escape this loneliness.⁴

Certainly, Houellebecq’s novels are also a critique of neoliberalism. But by rather ‘casually’ underlaying the descriptions of sexual liberalism with such criticism, they trigger a paralyzing unease that takes away the desire to point the finger at the usual culprits — ambition, cruelty or selfishness — at all. In his Poetik am Ende des Kapitalismus, the economist Bernard Maris writes about Houellebecq:

[N]o one has yet captured those subliminal economic sounds, that background music of the supermarkets that pollutes our lives with its notes as agonizing as they are monotonous, those ear noises of quantifying thought — business management, management, investment, pension, insurance, growth, employment, GDP, competition, advertising, competitiveness, trade, export et cetera — that fall drop by drop on our heads and gnaw at our brains so much that they drive us crazy.⁵

In this way, Houellebecq’s explicit thesis of the overall social concealment of sexual pauperization also implicitly applies to economic liberalism. We are obsessed with the desire to conceal what has always tormented people: love and death. After the Christianization of antiquity, it is essentially this second metaphysical transformation of science and technology that has, for several centuries, prepared the ground for the current relationship of domination, economic capitalism and, more recently, its extension to sexuality. Science and technology are no longer just scaffolding, but since the turn of the millennium also the cozy interior lining of the anthill, in whose corridors and cavities the isolated human being is denied a view of the damp earth behind it.⁶

The industrious ants of the information age advertise, advise, mediate, communicate and speculate, but there is one thing they cannot do: program. Only the few computer scientists who do the actual work today can do this, just as metalworkers did a hundred years ago. According to Houellebecq, computer scientists should earn at least three times as much. But even that would not free them from their sexual misery, because although the economic and sexual differentiation systems function analogously, they are completely independent of each other.⁷ In the following, the cultural-poetic references to the seduction artist are first elaborated on the basis of the role of appearance, the significance of information and the position of the computer scientist in the Whatever, before the two aspects of software and Schopenhauer are discussed.

Foul Play​

The Pick-up Artist​

The seduction community is a self-help subculture that emerged in the USA in the early 1990s, in which men exchange information about seduction techniques and motivate each other.⁸ Self-proclaimed seduction artists, so-called pick-up artists, pass on their practical and theoretical knowledge in books, blogs, forums and on their own paid websites. Some of them are revered like gurus. However, the community also meets offline for workshops and to ‘hunt for booty’ together in clubs.⁹ The seduction community is characterized by two central elements: the structural connection to the self-help discourse and the trend towards rationalizing feelings in general and love in particular.¹⁰ While class privileges were increasingly dismantled over the course of the last centuries, the importance of emotional self-control increased at the same time. While well-known figures of seduction in world literature such as Don Juan, Casanova or Kierkegaard still held a high social position and were able to express their feelings in exuberant tones when the opportunity arose, ever more diversified ideas of masculinity have since emerged and with them increased self-doubt with regard to one’s own social position. Against this background, members of the seduction community try to compensate for their lack of social skills in a methodical, rationalistic way. Seduction thus becomes a lifestyle for sale, in which the calculating love games are not so much aimed at a distant reward, but are primarily practiced as an end in themselves.

The nameless first-person narrator in Whatever works in a Parisian IT company and is sent on a business trip with his sexually frustrated colleague Raphael Tisserand to support the Ministry of Agriculture with the implementation of a software package. After the work is done, Raphael, accompanied by the first-person narrator, tries to pick up women in bars and fails miserably. The fact that he is still a virgin at the age of 28 makes him consider seeking regular sexual satisfaction from prostitutes, despite a “vestige of pride.”¹¹ He has no shortage of money. As an „[a]nalyst-programmer in a computer software company, my salary is two and a half times the minimum wage; a tidy purchasing power, by any standards.“¹² The two are definitely appreciated. According to a “theoretician”, a representative of the Ministry of Agriculture, the importance of information will increase massively in the future. According to Raphael, as “computer scientists, they are the real kings.” At least they should be.

Raphael’s plight makes you want to cheer him up with platitudes, such as that no master has ever fallen from the sky, that it’s all a question of practice. Fake it till you make it. Back in 1970, the famous seduction artist Eric Weber explained in How To Pick Up Women what is important with women:

When it comes to picking up girls, image and attitude are all-important. Projection is made up of the vibes you send out on all levels, from how you look to how you feel. Now, how you look has nothing to do with handsome features or a good body. We’ve all seen derelicts with pretty-boy faces and unsavory thugs with terrific physiques. Actual God given looks are of minimal importance, but appearance does count.¹³

The appearance and not the physical looks of the man is therefore decisive for success with women. According to Weber, it’s the vibe, the appearance, the strong positive projection that counts.¹⁴ This is nothing new at first. It is reminiscent of the comforting advice that mothers give their sons: It’s all about charisma.

In the seduction community, however, this well-intentioned advice has a biting undertone. The assumption is that women are unconsciously attracted to status and power. Charisma comes not from simply being yourself, but from imitating the appearance and confidence of an alpha male. Concepts such as “social-proof” aim to manipulate female biology in the same way that women play with male biology by dressing and applying make-up. In principle, wealth and status are not necessary and can sometimes even be an obstacle: “No matter how rich he [a street bum] may be, money just doesn’t mix with the image he projects.”¹⁵

In their analysis of the seduction community, Hambling-Jones and Merrison come to the conclusion: “A core belief, within [the seduction community], is that the means of seduction are not rooted in physical attractiveness, social status or wealth, but in the interaction.”¹⁶ In the scene of the seduction community and similar groups, the red pill was swallowed as soon as these interaction rules of biology were recognized and started to be played with.

 

[NoCopeNoHope]

Even if the men’s movement of the seduction community is never explicitly mentioned, Raphael shows striking parallels to the attitude of the seduction artist. Equally striking is the pessimistic attitude of the first-person narrator towards such a program. The latter agrees with at least one of the seduction artist’s premises. Due to the fact that the sexual system of differentiation is “completely independent of the economic system of differentiation”, monetary wealth does not really matter for women: “ „On the economic plane Raphael Tisserand belongs in the victors’ camp; on the sexual plane in that of the vanquished. Certain people win on both levels; others lose on both.“¹⁷ However, he vehemently disagrees with the premise that physical appearance plays little or no role.

The problem with Raphaël Tisserand — the foundation of his personality, indeed — is that he is extremely ugly. So ugly that his appearance repels women, and he never gets to sleep with them. He tries though, he tries with all his might, but it doesn’t work. They simply want nothing to do with him.¹⁸

Because Raphael is ugly, he didn’t experience love during puberty. He was unable to interact. The sexual failure, the frustration have left an indelible mark on him, a painful wound that could never be compensated for, let alone healed, by methods of seduction:

Even supposing that you might have women in the future — which in all frankness I doubt — this will not be enough; nothing will ever be enough.¹⁹

Raphael can’t change this bitter reality and the first-person narrator can’t help him either: “But what can I do about it? Nothing. So I look at the landscape.” In parentheses, he cynically remarks:

Charm is a quality which can sometimes substitute for physical beauty — at least in men; anyway, one often says ‘He has loads of charm’, or ‘The most important thing is charm’; that’s what one says). Given all this, he is obviously terribly frustrated; but what can I do about it? So I gaze out at the landscape.²⁰

Software​

The Raphael case can be read culturally and poetically as Houellebecq’s response to the hopes and narratives of the pick-up artist. The nerd who falls for such promises is paradigmatic of this. Nobody tells him that he is too ugly or too small from the outset for such seduction methods to have any effect on him: “You have to resign yourself to the inevitable; such things are not for you.”²¹ Houellebecq hints at the outlines of a later critique of the seduction discourse:

Seduction, sold and taught as a life-style product, does not heal damaged masculinities, but injures them even further. It might provide some temporary relief and comfort through the community around the discourse/business. But that does not mean the loneliness will vanish. To the contrary, one might reckon, an instrumental attitude towards women will only exacerbate it and deepen the malaise.²²

The instrumental attitude towards women manifests itself in the nerd as a video game in which the number of sexual partners corresponds to the most important score.²³ The connection between the information society and the ‘gamification’ of sexuality and love is considered by the first-person narrator in a sober, almost cybernetic style.

Besides, most people vaguely admit that every relationship, in particular every human relationship, is reduced to an exchange of information (if of course you include in the notion of information messages of a non-neutral, that is, gratifying or punitive, nature). Under these conditions it doesn’t take long for a thinker on information technology to be transformed into a thinker on social evolution. His discourse will often be brilliant, and hence convincing; the affective dimension may even be built into it.²⁴

Even before the mass spread of computers and video games, seduction artists clothed their methods and concepts in information technology language right from the start. There is talk of script, protocol, game, or frame. Such a discourse is generally attributable to the growing importance of computer technology: The computer as a metaphor for mind. In particular, however, it is worth emphasizing the fact that since the 1990s, seduction artists have made use of NLP techniques, i.e. procedures that are intended to influence neuronal processes linguistically through systematic patterns of action.

The disillusioned first-person narrator rejects the possibility of such programming of his own neuronal software. There is no character in Whatever who would embody a pick-up artist, someone who could show Raphael how it’s done. The philosophy of fake it till you make it is the unspoken foil against which the seduction is finally achieved by a dark-skinned man who is characterized solely by being “a good head taller”²⁵ than the woman. The first-person narrator encourages Raphael to sexually assassinate her, which he abandons at the last moment: “Blood changes nothing.”²⁶ Raphael dies that same night in a car accident.

Schopenhauer​

Schopenhauer’s presence in Houellebecq’s work is unmistakable, not only implicitly in recurring themes such as desire, suffering and individualism, but also explicitly in numerous remarks, interviews and even a five-part collection of essays. Houellebecq is the undisputed herald of Schopenhauer’s comforting philosophy in the 21st century. He wrestled early on with Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer:

In philosophy, I had barely gone beyond Nietzsche, where, in fact, I got more or less stuck. I found his philosophy immoral and repulsive, but his intellectual power impressed me. I would have liked to destroy Nietzscheanism, to tear it down to its very foundations, but I did not know how to do so; intellectually, I was floored. Needless to say, it was here again my reading of Schopenhauer that changed everything. I’ve even stopped bearing poor Nietzsche a grudge; he had the misfortune to come after Schopenhauer, that’s all — just as he had the misfortune, in music, to cross Wagner’s path.²⁷

Like Schopenhauer, Houellebecq sees the root of all suffering — and the world is nothing other than suffering — in desire, which is driven by want and need. Unlike Schopenhauer, however, Houellebecq does not see salvation in aesthetic contemplation, altruistic compassion or ascetic denial of the will, but in the scientific-technical overcoming of want and need altogether, a possibility of which Schopenhauer simply could not yet have had any idea. However, before Houellebecq turns to the possibilities of science and technology in Elementary Particles, he does as Schopenhauer did and delivers a pessimistic contemplation on the suffering of our time with Whatever. The nerd stands for the highly unfortunate combination of intelligence and ugliness. He finds himself in a blind spot resulting from the orthogonal overlap of the monetary and sexual differentiation systems. His intelligence provides him with monetary wealth, but he cannot compensate for his ugliness.

 

[NoCopeNoHope]

As unfortunate as his situation is, this puts him in a special epistemic position: his intelligence makes him realize that our information society is an illusion. As a programmer of virtual spaces, he is paradoxically more at the mercy of the damp earth, the merciless spectacle of nature, than anyone else. No one sees so clearly through the digitally fabricated world of entertainment, advertising and the stock market to the endless circle of aimless will. He recognizes that nature does not care in the slightest about our ideas, be it the promise of romantic love in Schopenhauer’s time or the false game of seduction artists in Houellebecq’s time. Software has no influence on hardware. Ignorance and ignorance of this truth lead to suffering, that is Houellebecq’s bleak message. But this truth is not to be understood as a ray of hope. No doctrine of redemption follows. All that remains in such a clear-sighted consciousness is bitterness. The first-person narrator finally commits himself to an institution. His psychiatrist cannot understand his bitterness when he reports:

In this way, and little by little, knowledge of the world’s constraints is established. Desire itself disappears; only bitterness, jealousy and fear remain. Above all there remains bitterness ; an immense and inconceivable bitterness.²⁸

It is the intelligent and ugly nerds who feel this bitterness more than anyone else:

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living by themselves; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.²⁹

As this passage shows, Houellebecq ultimately hints at the possibility of a pure encounter with another person, a gentle way out of loneliness. In Elementary Particles, this purity and gentleness are programmed into a literal superhuman. In the following, the cultural-poetic references to the incel are first elaborated on the basis of the role of appearance, the significance of information and the position of the technician or researcher in Elementary Particles, in order to then go into the two aspects of hardware and Nietzsche.

Deadly Serious​

The Incel​

The incel cult is an online movement that emerged in the mid-1990s made up of men who describe themselves as incapable of entering into a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman. Unlike the seduction community, which is characterized by a thirst for action, the Incel forums are characterized by hatred, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and racism. Characteristic is the idea of a male right to sex, which if necessary should also justify violence against women and sexually active men. In the last ten years, several mass murders have been committed by radicalized Incels, which has led to violence in connection with the Incel ideology being qualified as an act of terrorism since 2018. An Incel blogger’s comment on the Isla Vista rampage, in which six people were killed, reflects the fundamental view of the Incel movement:

What happened is punishment for evil and violence of feminists and liberals. […] atrocities such as women’s suffrage, immodest clothing, child support/alimony, no ban on adultery, ban on prostitution and a lack of female premarital chastity, all the things that drove this young man to be unable to find a girlfriend.³⁰

However, before the term incel is associated with misogynist terror, the scene is more like a collection of personal confessions and expressions of solidarity. In the 1990s, it would be wrong to speak of a movement characterized by a will to destruction, self-infantilization and misogyny, although the contours are already recognizable. The phenomenon was first reported in a scientific article in 2001.

Donnelly et al. write that in a society where sexuality is constantly on display, men isolate themselves from their social environment if they do not have access to it or feel uncomfortable creating intimacy. They feel the need to talk to their family or friends for fear of being teased or ostracized, which is why these incel groups have become particularly valuable. The psychological consequences of this involuntary abstinence are dissatisfaction, frustration and aggression.³¹

Since then, an online cult has developed whose self-image is essentially expressed through the metaphor of taking the black pill: success with women ultimately depends solely on looks, body size, physique, symmetry of facial features and penis size. Swallowing the black pill means accepting the fact that inferior men will never have a chance to build a sexual and romantic relationship with women.³²

The novel Elementary Particles can be understood as a prophecy of the advent of the incel. It traces the dual biography of the two half-brothers Bruno and Michel in flashbacks, dialogs, self-analyses and a web of biotechnical and world-view explorations. What connects the two genetically is their egocentric, loveless mother from the 1968 generation, who craves sexual freedom. Janine sends Bruno, who was conceived with Serge, to her grandparents in Algiers in his first year of life, where he grows up. At the same time, she is already pregnant again. She met Marc, Michel’s father, before she divorced her first husband. At the age of two, they leave the child in the care of Marc’s mother, who gives up her retirement in Provence to take care of him. A short time later, Janine falls in love with the founder of the commune, Francesco di Meola, and goes with him to California to live with him and other members. The two half-brothers happen to attend the same high school, initially without knowing it, and a fraternal relationship soon develops, based mainly on their shared life story.

The picture that Houellebecq paints in his breakthrough novel is clear: it is the picture of a generation of parents whose individual freedom is more important than the well-being of their own children.

Abandoned by their hippie mother, who indulges in her sexual obsessions and drug use, and by their fathers, who are equally incapable of building a relationship with their sons, Bruno and Michel grow up separately with their grandmothers, who give up their hard-earned retirement. It is no use, the two half-brothers are incapable of love and deeply lonely.

At boarding school, Bruno is humiliated and humiliated by the other pupils. Completely isolated, he develops sexual inferiority complexes. In his later career as a teacher, he covets young schoolgirls, visits swingers’ clubs in his free time and goes on vacation to nudist campsites. In his mid-twenties, he fathered a son and married, but divorced five years later. In his thirties, he began to write, including pamphlets with racist content. He went to prostitutes, met his father Serge again during an erotic massage and at the same time underwent psychiatric treatment.

Towards the end of his life, Bruno falls in love with Christiane, who is able to satisfy his sexual needs. However, when she becomes paraplegic due to an illness, he gives her up, whereupon she commits suicide. He spends the rest of his time in a psychiatric hospital. Michel does not fare quite so badly. In ninth grade, the angelically beautiful Annabelle falls in love with him, but he can only establish a platonic relationship with her. They break off contact. He later makes a career as a molecular biologist, takes a temporary leave of absence at the age of forty and meets Annabelle again during this time, with whom he begins a relationship that is sexual but unsatisfactory for Michel. Michel then takes over the management of a genetic engineering project in Ireland. A short time later, Annabelle commits suicide in the face of her incurable tumor.

Michel spends the rest of his life laying the foundations for the creation of a human race to which emotional pain is completely alien. In the end, it is assumed, Michel throws himself into the waters of the Irish Sea.

The sexual liberalization, which in Elementary Particles is now accompanied by New Age spirituality, women’s magazines, social isolation and the decline of Christianity, not only unleashes a generation that is generally incapable of love. The forces in the marketplace of sex are also leading to the analog of what in economic liberalism is called homo oeconomicus, and is referred to by incels with awe and hatred as “alpha male” or “chad.”³³ Unlike the pick-up artist, the incel sees through the promise of the art of seduction from the outset. So does Bruno:

I’m not young or good-looking enough and I’m certainly not cool enough. My hair’s falling out, I’m getting fat. Worse than that, the older I get, the more terrified I am of rejection. I’m just not natural enough, not enough of an animal. It’s a permanent handicap because no matter what I say or do, no matter what I buy, I can never overcome it, because it’s a natural handicap.³⁴

While Raphael is still toying with the idea of going to a brothel, Bruno quickly realizes that this is the only solution. He tries several times to approach girls on the street, but only receives humiliation in return:

At night he would stare at himself in the mirror. He noticed that his hair, plastered to his head with sweat, was already beginning to recede. The folds of his stomach were obvious even through his shirt. He started visiting sex shops and peep shows, which served only to aggravate his suffering. For the first time he turned to prostitutes.³⁵

Bruno’s story can be seen as an alternative continuation of Raphael’s. It would only have been a matter of time before Raphael also gave up what was left of his pride. This would only have deepened his emotional wounds, because the role of appearance in success with women is also omnipresent in Elementary Particles. Bruno is regularly denied entry to sex parties, for example, as there is now “a kind of face check at the entrance.”³⁶ Going to the gym is not a solution, but only reveals further sources of suffering. Although Bruno now has handsome chest and shoulder muscles,

the problem — and it was a new one for me — was my dick. It probably sounds strange now, but in the seventies nobody really cared how big their dick was. When I was a teenager I had every conceivable hang-up about my body except that.³⁷

However, it is not only the men who suffer. Bruno’s ugliness and the sexual frustration it triggers is now also, and in particular, identified in Elementary Realms as a projection, as a superficial standard for evaluating women. According to Houellebecq’s cynical thesis, the liberalization of sexuality cannot be achieved without the objectification of women. Bruno’s first and, for a long time, only success story is his brief sexual relationship with Annick. He clumsily approached her on the beach, making no effort to be creative or use any method of seduction, because he suspected that she would consent. She was ugly and fat:

She was too ashamed of her body to get undressed, though she did offer to give him a blow-job the first night.³⁸

Bruno’s superficiality also caused his relationship with Anne to fail:

Later, her tits started to go south and our marriage went with them.³⁹

He goes on to tell Michel,

The only problem was that her little sister was really pretty. She looked a bit like Anne — she had big tits too — but she wasn’t plain at all, she had a beautiful face. It’s amazing how the smallest detail in someone’s features can make all the difference. Life’s a bitch . . .⁴⁰

The handsome Michel, on the other hand, does not attach much importance to a woman’s looks. Ironically, and for inexplicable reasons, Annabelle of all people falls in love with him, about whom the narrator says,

Only the most extraordinary fluke of morphogenetics could account for the devastating purity of her face. Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved.⁴¹

At the same time, it is one of the main disadvantages that such excessive beauty brings to a girl,

The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.⁴²

The tragic significance of appearance is contrasted with Whatever through the desperate attempt to reprogram one’s own software,

di Meola’s commune wasn’t a cult, it simply passed on the teachings of the Brahman. Di Meola knew a lot about cybernetics and communication skills and used deprogramming techniques he’d developed at Esalen. It was all about liberating the individual’s innate potential — ‘Because we only use ten percent of our brain, you know.’⁴³

The art of seduction is now immersed in the waters of the New Age. By embedding the information technology discourse of the pick-up artist in the esoteric cosmologies of the New Age, Houellebecq himself succeeds here too in making a shattering critique of neoliberalism and its inexorable rationalization not only of feelings, but also of spirituality. At a dance evening in the spiritually-inspired vacation resort LIEU DU CHANGEMENT, Bruno is joined by “two skinny, priestly individuals commenting on the rake’s progress.”

He’s very expressive, very emotional, you see . . .” said one. “On paper, he’s out of his league: he’s not good-looking, he’s got a beer belly and he’s a lot shorter than she is. But he’s a charming bastard, and that makes all the difference.” The other nodded, seeming to toy mournfully with an imaginary rosary. As he finished his vodka and orange juice, Bruno noticed that Karim had managed to inveigle the Rosicrucian onto a grass bank.⁴⁴

It is also this “bastard” who explains to them that there has never really been such a thing as “sexual communism”. Seduction has always existed. But in the

in the liberal system which Bruno and Christiane had joined, the sexual model proposed by the dominant culture (advertising, magazines, social and public health organizations) was governed by the principle of adventure: in such a system, pleasure and desire occur as a result of a process of seduction, which emphasizes novelty, passion and individual creativity (all qualities also required of employees in their professional capacities).⁴⁵

In their study on the new spirit of capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello list its three requirements: “attractive and exciting life prospects”, “security guarantees” and “moral reasons for one’s actions”.⁴⁶ While the seduction artist believes he can fool women into believing the first two requirements, the seduction guru apparently also succeeds in justifying his actions without having to descend into Nietzsche’s philosophy.

It is therefore not surprising that Bruno, who claims to be an “underexposed” Nietzschean, soon falls back into his pessimistic contemplation, which increasingly expresses racism and a willingness to use violence.

In his telling article “What Nietzsche might have thought about Houellebecq”, Sieber emphasizes his longing “for all regressive, symbiotic, oceanic emotions: He [dreams] of an eroticism as a kind of infinite whirlpool and of a body as a perfect pleasure machine”⁴⁷

In Houellebecq, the latter is primarily oriented towards oral pacification. While Bruno stuffs himself with food in his childhood out of frustration and becomes increasingly fat, Michel overindulges in too much physical intimacy — both pathological manifestations of an original — according to Freud even the most original — developmental phase of a child’s capacity for love and pleasure. Bruno experiences his first oral sex, for which he doesn’t have to pay, at the aforementioned place of transformation, a vacation resort reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s island, which is designed for complete carelessness and sensual satisfaction:

He felt himself flooded with intense waves of pleasure and buoyed up by the whirlpool. All at once he felt very hot. She gently allowed her throat to contract around him; all the energy in his being rushed suddenly to his penis. He howled as he came. He had never felt such fulfillment in his life.⁴⁸

Nothing more.

As a prototypical incel, Bruno already exhibits the basic features of the later tendency towards terror. Rather, however, the case of Bruno is the typical psychosocial history of the incel’s cultural-poetic origins, namely the increasing sexual depravation of neglected children in the second half of the 20th century. At boarding school, Bruno once put his hand on the thigh of a pretty girl, Caroline. Although she gently pushed his hand back after a few seconds,

[w]hat the boy had felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms.

He had felt the simple desire to touch a loving body, to nestle in loving arms. “Tenderness,” says the narrator, “is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope. The hope of tenderness dies last. If he had touched her arm and not her bare thigh, it might have been the beginning of an intimate relationship between them. Why did Bruno touch her thigh?

Probably because Caroline Yessayan’s thigh was bare, and in his innocence he could not imagine it was bare for no reason. As he grew older and remembered his boyhood with disgust, he came to see this as the defining moment of his life. It all appeared to him in the light of cold and unchangeable fact. On that December evening in 1970, Caroline Yessayan had it in her power to undo all the humiliation and the sadness of his childhood. After this first failure (for after she gently removed his hand, he never spoke to her again), everything became much more difficult. Of course, it was not really Caroline Yessayan’s fault. Rather the reverse: Caroline Yessayan — a little Armenian girl with doe eyes and long, curly black hair who had found herself, after endless family wranglings, among the dark and gloomy buildings of the boarding school in Meaux — Caroline Yessayan alone gave Bruno a reason to believe in humanity. If it all had ended in a terrible emptiness, it was because of something so trivial that it was grotesque. Thirty years later, Bruno was convinced that, taken in context, the episode could be summed up in one sentence: Carolin Yessayan’s miniskirt was to blame for everything.⁴⁹

Bruno speaks from Incel’s soul. It is the aetiology of his illness. It is such “tiny, almost ridiculous details” that can trigger a cascade of sexual frustration in the abandoned children of the ’68 generation. Thirty years later, Bruno is firmly convinced: “If you gave the anecdotal elements of the situation the importance they really deserved, you could summarize the situation in the following words: Caroine Yessayan’s miniskirt was to blame for everything!”

Hardware​

In order not to beat his educator Schopenhauer to death with the extent of Western cultural decay and the penetration of individualism into every crevice of life — profession, feelings, spirituality — and to prevent the reader from putting the book down out of a last vestige of self-protection, Houellebecq must have good news at the ready behind his back, namely: only under such adverse circumstances could a person emerge who makes it scientifically and technically possible to break out of the circle of suffering.

If Bruno illustrates the psychosocial past of the incel, Michel shows how he will overcome it in the future. His autistic researcher’s existence is the exact opposite of Bruno’s search for sensual satisfaction. Michel sees his physicality more as an annoying, but currently still necessary appendage.

He seeks the depth of emotional bonds with his fellow human beings because he lacks the sensitivity for adventure and physical desire. Even as a child, he did not understand the aggression and brutality of this world. All he longed for was harmony and a world that, as he later said in retrospect, would be more feminine overall.

Women are “ gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; they were less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or selfcenteredness. Moreover, they were more rational, intelligent and hardworking”⁵⁰ Men, on the other hand, with “ with their predilection for risk and danger, their repulsive egotism, their irresponsibility and their violent tendencies-were directly to blame”⁵¹ for all the useless revolutions and wars in the world.

Unlike Bruno, Michel does not share the ugliness of the two computer scientists in Whatever — Michel is even described as rather handsome — but rather their intelligence. He even surpasses them by far. Once again, Houellebecq uses the figure of the nerd, this time in the form of the molecular biologist, the programmer of DNA. When the first-person narrator looks through the digital software in Whatever, Michel’s gaze bores through the physical hardware itself. He is no longer so much the embittered genealogist of our postmodern values, but rather the autistic geneticist of our human condition.

But even Michel ultimately longs for a deep relationship. Shortly before Annabelle’s suicide, Michel has a terrible nightmare: “His eyes were bleeding; he knew that he would be blind, and his right hand was almost severed. In spite of the blood and pain, still he knew that Annabelle would stand by him, shielding him forever with her love.”⁵² But blad had to realize that even Annabelle could no longer love, despite or precisely because of her beauty, which left a “painful shock” in everyone. The fact that she also grew up in a loving family and hid a conviction of true love in her heart that bordered on naivety did nothing to dampen her disappointed expectations of men. In the reasonably happy weeks before her suicide, she snuggled back into the arms of her childhood sweetheart Michel after decades of sexual debauchery. Looking back, she realizes

It took me years to come to terms with the cliché that men don’t make love because they’re in love, but because they’re turned on. Everyone around me knew that and lived like that-I grew up in a liberated environment — but I never enjoyed the game for its own sake. In the end, even the sex started to disgust me; I couldn’t stand their triumphant little smiles when I took off my dress, or their idiot leers when they came and especially their boorishness once it was all over and done with. They were spineless, pathetic and pretentious. In the end, it was too painful to know they thought of me as just another piece of meat. I was a prime cut, I suppose, because I was physically perfect, and they were proud to take me out and show me off in a restaurant.⁵³

 

[NoCopeNoHope]

Even the autistic Michel realizes that Annabelle has little desire to live. He feels compassion for her and “the boundless reserve of love simmering inside her, which the world had wasted; it was perhaps the only human emotion which could still touch him.”⁵⁴ Then Annabelle takes her own life. Michel reflects in his usual clinical tone.

Though it may be indefinitely postponed, the idea of a more personal, human relationship never fades, quite simply because human relationships do not fit easily into narrow, fixed compartments. Human beings therefore think of relationships as potentially “deep and meaningful” -an idea that can persist for years, until a single brutal act (usually something like death) makes it plain that it’s too late, that the “deep, meaningful” relationship they had cherished will never exist, any more than any of the others had.⁵⁵

Michel’s prospect of a “real, deep” relationship is just as ineradicable as Bruno’s longing for “pure, gentle” tenderness. No philosophy, no software can ever change that. Even as a child, Michel understands that such a relationship, such tenderness, is the lowest foundation, the actual hardware, when he watches animal documentaries:

Amid the vile filth, the ceaseless carnage which was the lot of animals, the only glimmer of devotion and altruism was the protective maternal instinct, which had gradually evolved into mother love.⁵⁶

With regard to the critical role of computer scientists in the expansion of the battle zone for the functioning of economic capitalism, both Bruno and Michel appear as figures who once again suggest and intensify this thesis. Bruno’s profession as a teacher basically enables him to do nothing:

“I’m useless,” he said resignedly. “I couldn’t breed pigs, I don’t have the faintest idea how to make sausages or forks or mobile phones. I’m surrounded by all this stuff that I eat or use and I couldn’t actually make a single thing-couldn’t even begin to understand how they’re made. If industrial production ceased tomorrow, if all the engineers and the specialist technicians disappeared off the face of the earth, I couldn’t do anything to start things over again. In fact, outside the industrialized world, I couldn’t even survive; I wouldn’t know how to feed or clothe myself, or protect myself from the weather. My technical competence falls far short of Neanderthal man. I’m completely dependent on my society, but I play no useful role in it. The only thing I know how to do is write dubious commentaries on outdated cultural issues. I get paid for it, too, well paid-much more than the average wage. Most of the people I know are exactly the same. In fact, the only useful person I know is my brother.”⁵⁷

In fact, Michel can be seen as the actual protagonist of the novel. Bruno’s frequent flashbacks, self-observations and outbursts provide the autistic researcher with the material that informs him about the peculiar behavior and emotions of the other person and allows him to become more and more convinced that a fundamental intervention is necessary to put an end to this suffering.

Michel identifies himself as a “technical expert, who had studied at a distinguished academy” and who should actually appreciate his existence: “Instead, he was depressed, constantly searching for a reason to live.”⁵⁸ He found this meaning in his efforts to get to the bottom of human suffering. This suffering arises, as becomes increasingly clear towards the end of the novel, in reference to Schopenhauer, from the awareness of death lurking around every corner and the deep-seated longing for deep, tender love.

Nietzsche​

Houellebecq, Nietzsche would say, is a Schopenhauerian, a Wagnerian, a decadent, a disease. He embodies everything that is sick about modern man, his “deep alienation, coldness, disillusionment with everything temporal, contemporary”. Many critics have expressed themselves in similarly drastic tones. Houellebecq’s aim is clear from his first novel: he wants to bring down the reader. He wants to lure Westerners into the sea until they gradually lose their footing on the bottom and finally surrender to the element of their disgrace: One should swim in his depressive realism.⁵⁹ And not out of particularly noble motives: his agenda is set by senses like Schopenhauer, who provides a doctrine of redemption. He is an active, malignant nihilist whose only task seems to be to drag as many people as possible into the abyss with him.

Houellebecq is unhappy, and he wants to infect the entire West with his misery. Since he has a genius for literary seduction and an authentic, harrowing vision, he should succeed, at least with the nerds. With a mixture of performance and scientific-technical sobriety, he defies all three of Schopenhauer’s possibilities of redemption: his novels, which come across as trash, defy aesthetic contemplation. His biological, physiological and socio-psychological explanations immediately dissolve any altruistic compassion in clinical sobriety. And by calmly putting the Western New Age on ice, he freezes the promises of ascetic negation of will.⁶⁰

It is obvious that Michel embodies Schopenhauer’s philosophy better than he ever could have. Houellebecq enforces this interpretation himself by scattering a few clear references, first and foremost in the title Michel chooses for his world-changing article: Toward a Science of Perfect Reproduction.

Just as obviously and explicitly, the case of Bruno stands for the unsuitability of Nietzsche’s philosophy in our postmodern world. He describes himself as an “underexposed” Nietzschean and serves up half-baked platitudes to Michel. His lifestyle satirizes the selective interpretation of Nietzsche in the service of sexual liberalism and demonstrates what originally lies behind it: the need for pure, gentle tenderness. Drunk and deeply agitated, he realizes that

the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science leads to individuation, vanity, malice and desire. Any philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire — unlike pleasure — is a source of suffering, pain and hatred.⁶¹

In his bitterness, Bruno tries to fight against his resentment from an early age. He reads the existentialists, telling himself over and over again that he is responsible for his own happiness. His racist and misanthropic pamphlets give Michel unmistakable evidence that Nietzsche’s philosophy is just another desperate attempt for Bruno to redeem himself from his suffering.

This is the real crux of the novel, namely that Bruno’s superficial Nietzscheanism is characterized by his longed-for self-dissolution, while Michel’s utopia of a round, smooth, feminine world without any desire always allows his powerful act of will, which is necessary for its creation, to shine through. For Bruno, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not a toolbox with which one can build a platform that lifts one out of the heaviness of the sea, but the ramp that should lead into it. And for Michel, too, Nietzsche’s philosophy is a means to an end, the necessary act of will to break out of the circle.

For better or worse, he has to approach the hardware with a hammer, otherwise, according to Houellebecq’s message, there is no other way today. Man has become too individualistic for redemptive doctrines such as Schopenhauer’s to suffice; on the contrary, such software has long since served only egotistical self-reflection. This is the bitter medicine, the bitter seriousness of the incel.⁶²

Conclusion​

This article explored the cultural-poetic development from pick-up artist to incel in the course of Houellebecq’s first two novels. In Whatever, there are clear references to the idea of the modern seduction artist as it emerged in the early 1990s: by taking the red pill, he believes he can see through female biology and play with it.

In the seduction community, seduction methods are developed and tested that are ultimately available to all men through the rationalist encapsulation of feelings, including and especially the socially and sexually incompetent computer scientists, whose intelligence makes the art of seduction accessible to them as a video game to be programmed. It is about programming the software, i.e. the mindset.

Raphael and the first-person narrator, who are in a constant implicit dialog with this seduction discourse, see through its sales pitch as a false game with the nerd’s despair: Ultimately, it’s all about the hardware, the look. It is the nerds who recognize this merciless spectacle of nature; lonely and desperate, they look at the foundations of our digital imaginary world and recognize the Schopenhauerian will that delights in this spectacle.

In Elementary Particles, this consideration is radicalized and Bruno and Michel, the two tilting images of the proto-incel, are created: Bruno’s sex addiction leads him into ‘onanistic isolation’, Michel’s autism leads him into ‘ascetic immersion’. The one goes to prostitutes and flirts with terror, the other increasingly isolates himself and works on overcoming modern man.

The incel, this serious beast, unites Bruno’s sexual bitterness and Michel’s autistic seriousness to form the bitter seriousness of the black pill: the realization and acceptance that in the system of sexual differentiation, appearance has become the new rationality in the marketplace of sex. Only an intervention in the genetic hardware can change the situation. In the end, the creation of a completely will-less new human being succeeds, a feminine, maternal human being who knows only lust but no narcissistic desire, only pity but no romantic, naive love.

Elementary Particles thus narrates a utopia that is negated by the text itself: The world of the will-less human race turns out to be a dream that extends the irresponsibility of the 1968 generation into infinity. Cloning appears here as the logical consequence of egoism, which no longer knows any boundaries for its own life and is not really interested in anything beyond its own self:

Though he was too miserable and frustrated to be especially interested in the psychology of others, Bruno realized nonetheless that his half brother’s situation was worse than his own.⁶³

Here it is no longer so much the appearance, but the lack of interaction — not in the sense of the seduction artist as the indispensable element of practicing seduction methods — but in a biological sense: Bruno and Michel are marked by the deprivation of maternal love. This is not a question of will, of motivation; the two half-brothers really are mentally ill and incapable of entering into sexual relationships: Bruno not because he is a sex addict and does not perceive feelings of love, and Michel not because he is autistic and feels no sexual needs whatsoever.

So after the Red Pill has exposed the biological game of seduction and the Black Pill has seen through this game itself as a cheap consolation, it is finally Hou-ellebecq’s pill that reveals to the reader a sober view of the genetic code and brings the consideration of the scientific-technical overcoming of suffering closer.

However, Houellebecq’s sincerity is often clouded by irony and a philosophical stance that oscillates between Schopenhauer’s Buddhist negation and Nietzsche’s Dionysian affirmation of life. In contrast to Huxley’s brave new world, to which explicit reference is repeatedly made, it is not clear whether Houellebecq’s oceanic new world is to be understood as a utopia or a dystopia.

But even as a dystopia, such a world would still be the lesser evil if the alternative is modern Western individualism. At least that is what Houellebecq seems to cynically suggest, but not without eliciting a cheerful laugh from the reader.



THE END. Fuck this was a long essay.

 

[LeDepravedCel]

I've read several of his books and enjoyed them all. The famous incel movie is I believe also based on one of his books.

 

[Robb97]

Thanks for sharing this article, I’m looking forward to reading it.
I couldn’t read Houllebecq‘s books - especially elementary particles any further than the introduction, because it triggered me so much :‘(
All I want to find is equal love with a somehow normal woman, I don’t want to be special or super successful, but neither do I want to desperately go after those who are just about to hit the wall like the unlucky brother in elementary particles.
May this article have good insights that won’t make me too depressed…

Tbh I never read Houellebecq, it sounds too depressing ngl

 

[LeDepravedCel]

Unlike the seduction community, which is characterized by a thirst for action, the Incel forums are characterized by hatred, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and racism. Characteristic is the idea of a male right to sex, which if necessary should also justify violence against women and sexually active men.

 

[Copexodius Maximus]

Never forget

 

[Tunadiver]

Tbh I never read Houellebecq, it sounds too depressing ngl

The introduction of elementary particles is really beautiful, because it describes two siblings that have fundamentally different luck in their life, but both had the same chances.
I guess most of us here started off with fair chances, but got unlucky in the course of life. Just like ER was kind of handsome enough to not end as a truecel, but got fucked over by the constant moving between England and CA, as well as his step mother being an absolute cunt to him.
Houellebecq managed to write an immersive story about how the ways could go different, after that introduction it gets ugly very quick, and I couldn’t carry on