One-Dimensional Man?

There is a wonderful description of Michel Houellebecq in Anthony Daniels’ New Criterion essay (“France’s ‘Submission,’” February 2015).  Firstly here is Daniels on the writer’s credo: “Houellebecq is a writer with a single underlying theme: the emptiness of human existence in a consumer society devoid of religious belief, political project, or cultural continuity in which, moreover, thanks to material abundance and social security, there is no real struggle for existence that might give meaning to the life of millions.” Put another away Houellecbecq might be seen as the Zola of his generation. He is a determinist who disparages enlightenment notions which only detract from the tragedy of the inevitable. One might say that the anti-Christs in Houellebecq are the inveterate optimists, for instance 60’s utopians, who believe in the notion of human freedom. They remain paradoxically unenlightened enough not to realize the extent to which, like a stampeding mob, they trample on the needs of others as they seek to achieve their own private nirvanas. Daniels' essay comes on the heels of the publication of Houellebecq’s latest novel in which as Daniels states “a Muslim is elected President of France.” Houellebecq had at one point been charged in France when he publically stated Islam is "the most stupid religion” (“Calling Islam stupid lands author in court,” The Guardian, 9/17/02) Uncannily, his latest novel was released on January 7, the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  But here is Daniels' description of the author: “Houellebecq’s physical appearance as relayed in the press suggests that  he fully inhabits the world he describes. He looks like a man who has crawled out of a giant ashtray after a prolonged alcoholic binge in clothes that have not been washed for weeks.”  Houellebecq would shudder but there is a comparison to be made between him and Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt school Berkeley philosopher who coined the term “repressive desublimation” in his famous tome One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. The two have different agendas, but they might offer the same diagnosis about dark side of pleasure seeking. Houllebecq is now a film star too. He appears in The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq which just opened at Film Forum.

Make Love and War

photo: Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich)

Back in the sixties the only way to get laid was to join a demonstration against the war. Life was actually quite simple with a clean demarcation between the love children and student protestors and the defenders of traditional values who still used expressions like family values and pre-marital sex. Of course there were those who couldn’t even get laid in the aftermath of civil rights and war protests, but such unfortunates tended to be the exception rather than the rule. What was most liberating about the years following the war was the breakdown of this simple dichotomy. Sexual freedom was one of the few rights that was won by the student movement of the 60’s, though it was deemed a pyrrhic victory in the mind in the mind of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In One-Dimensional Man, he coined the term “repressive desublimation,” which, in a nutshell, means that once you get your rocks off you don’t want to do anything but cuddle up and sleep in. Now of course we are free to be as right wing and warmongerish as we wish without sharing the fate of the men in Aristophanes' Lysistrata who were deprived of sex as a protest by women against war. In fact, love is not exactly free in the left wing camp today, where political correctness rules and a heightened awareness of role playing often inhibits the animal in man, or woman.

Simon Leys on Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo,  the Chinese dissident writer, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, just one year after he was sentenced to ll years in prison.  In his review of Liu Xiaobo’s collection of essays No Enemies, No Hatred; Selected Essays and Poems in The New York Review of Books (“He Told the Truth About China’s Tyranny,” TNYRB,  2/9/12, Simon Leys singles out one of his essays, “To Change a Regime by Changing a Society,” remarking,  “I know of Western liberals who, confronted with the extreme puritanism of the Maoist era, naively assumed that, after long repression, sexual liberation was bound to explode sooner or later and would act like dynamite and open the way towards a freer society. Now an ‘erotic carnival’ (Liu’s words) of sex, violence, and greed is indeed sweeping through the entire country, but—as Liu describes it—this wave merely reflects the moral collapse of a society that has been emptied of all values during the long years of its totalitarian brutalization: ‘The craze for political revolution in decades past has now turned into a craze for money and sex.’” Xiaobo’s point about China’s superficial liberalization is curiously similar to the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse's concept of “repressive desublimation.” Marcuse applied the idea to the sixties love generation whose sexual freedoms siphoned off the energy of true rebellion. Thus the brutality of Tiananmen Square is quickly forgotten in an atmosphere of spurious freedom, a materialism that derives from a deep loss of an ethical and moral center. Leys comments in the beginning of his essay that “The general consensus, in China as well as abroad, is that the twenty-first century will be ‘China’s Century.’” But what is dramatic is the parallel ways in which the elites of two radically opposed ideologies have used material pleasures to muffle dissent.