Zamieranie. Anty‑atlas. O Mapie i terytorium Michela Houellebecqa
Fading Away. The Counter‑ atlas: On Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory

Summary/Abstract: Images play a crucial role in the post‑humanist critique of the Anthropocene. They often accompany intellectual reflections and are primarily used to demonstrate the state of the arts or to provide an example. The article, instead, asks about the function of the representations of artworks in literary fiction and their relation to the environment. The article performs an ecocritical reading of a series of ekphrasis art in Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory (2010). The artworks (photographs, videos) are discussed here not only as iconic representations but also as traces of the Real in a psychoanalytical sense. They reveal the environmental awareness of the main character of the novel, the artist Jed Martin. His late works convey not only the evanescence of nature but also the fading away of images as such. The article claims that images constitute an invisible bond between the languages of the Anthropocene. It would be tempting to remove them from our discourses. Jed Martin’s catalog of the fading images of nature is discussed here as an alternative to, and an intended criticism of, Aby Warburg’s category and concept of an “atlas,” which was fundamental to his Mnemosyne project.

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