FLAUBERT’S POSTMODERNISM AND ITS LEGACY
FLAUBERT’S POSTMODERNISM AND ITS LEGACY

Summary/Abstract: The study presents a critical interpretation of the ethical imagination affirmed by Gustave Flaubert and Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq’s heroes move in a twilight world where all moral conflicts, all the anarchy of norms and all the energy of crisis accumulated in the two centuries of modernity explode paroxysmically. Bruno, the transformed copy of Bouvard, is a prisoner in the labyrinth of hedonistic consumerism and ends up in madness. Through his eyes, postmodern humanity appears deformed and naive, a schizoid victim of its own inability to ensure the flow of correspondences between mind and reality. Hedonistic ethics leads Bruno towards a universe that is equally anarchic and apocalyptic. Michel, the possible copy of Pécuchet, marks the maximum distance of the (post)modern’s alienation from itself, from its own human origin and from a moral ideal. The scientist Michel invents the method of replacing the human species – perpetually unhappy and bankrupt in its counterproductive ethical mediocrity – with a new species of self-sufficient robotic beings, perfectly reproducible by cloning the “particular elements” of the human genome… The (post)modern world therefore appears in Michel’s eyes as a hideous creature whose irreversible autism leads it towards programmed self-annihilation. The anti-utopia projected by Houellebecq, especially in Michel’s story, is falsely legitimized by Kantian ethics, betrayed, however, and manipulated by an anti-human mind. But Michel’s ethical absolute is the absolute of matter, which acts implacably against the human being. The bankruptcy of humanist-rationalist ethics and of scientistic ethics is for postmodernists like Houellebecq a reality that will hasten the catastrophe and not the ethical alternative.

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