Nostalgia, Melancholy, and the Emotional Economy of Replacement: Feeling for<i>La France Profonde</i>in the Novels of Michel Houellebecq
Louise D’Arcens
Michel Houellebecq’s two most recent novels, The Map and the Territory (2010) Submission (2015), call attention to powerful affective pull of premodern past within late capitalist multicultural France, portraying conflicting emotions loss this evokes. explores survival, revival, traditional arts crafts in a cultural scene where “la France profonde” has been commodified through lifestyle heritage industries, medievalist nostalgia recuperated into neoliberal economy yearning for authenticity is harnessed desire consume. significance near-future characterized by return religious impulses that have only superficially suppressed Enlightenment secular republicanism. Here, France’s contact with via tourism, patriotic poetry, neoreactionary politics revisits its Catholic patriarchal traditions. Flirting ideas pundits, Houellebecq adopts but also satirizes Right’s argument relationship essentially melancholic.
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