'Submission': Ambiguity, Hypocrisy and Misanthropy in Michel Houellebecq's Imaginary Politics

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