Du héros à la victime: l’apocalypse selon Michel Houellebecq
From the hero to the victim: apocalypse according to Michel Houellebecq

Summary/Abstract: The paper proposes an interpretation of Michel Houellebecq’s work in the perspective of heroism and victimization, two fundamental, according to Jean-Marie Apostolidès, categories of Western civilization. Referring these categories to Houellebecq’s discussion with contemporary individualism and its crisis, announced by the French intellectualists and called penseurs’68 by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, the author of the paper shows the presence of post-heroic utopias which are manifestations of humanism reduced to individual and trivial happiness in Houellebecq’s work. In this context, Houellebecq’s work appears to be a form of resistance against the fall of the great heroic tradition. Heroism and victimization enable us to associate Houellebecq’s work with the predicament of the retour du sujet (return of the subject) through an ethic of sacrifice as well as a game with Roland Barthes’ concept of the death of the author.

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