Notes On Houellebecqian Fahishism

No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with life
-Houellebecq

Fahishism

This has been a concept that I have tried to flesh out for some time, here I attempt to sketch it out. The basic premise is that the Western bloc is engulfed in Fahishism. The idea stems from the concept elaborated upon in Quranic Revelation - fahisha, where Haleem and Badawi in their dictionary of Quranic usage look at the linguistic root f-h-sh:

to be excessive, immoderate or beyond measure; to be foul, to be obscene, to act in an indecent way, to be shameless, to use obscene language; to commit adultery.¹

Although, technocracy and the administrative deep state is a key substrate and superstructure to understand contemporary American Empire, we would be remiss not to have an understanding of its cultural forms. I contend in the way that Qutb and many others before that the promise of the sexual revolution has created a distinct multifaceted alienation. Alienation from the self, from family, from community and most importantly from God. The ideology of the sexual revolution should be seen in Quranic terms as that of Fahishism and even responses to it by the likes of Houellebecq who will examine here, are guilty of falling into it despite being deeply concerned by the failures of Fahishism.

With the Quranic refrain against obscenity in all its forms it nevertheless offered an alternative vision of sexuality that differed from failed Christian heresies (many of whom are directly responsible for the insanities of the sexual revolution):

One of the most telling divergences between Islam and Christianity lies in the attitude which each religion has nurtured towards sexuality....on the rather more intractable matter of sex, they trod very different paths. ²

The case I present is simple that Houellebecqian literature represents an insightful diagnostician's conclusion that the Western order is premised on ever-shifting ubiquitous cultural productions tied to obscenity. This cultural production works in bidirectional ways, both as a consequence of the encroachment of hyper financialized debt-fuelled mutations of capitalism itself but also as a reaction to it - a type of Derridian autoimmunity, where the argument would follow that the very currents that produced the sexual revolution also carry with it the seeds of its own demise. Although Derrida used the metaphor in the context of charting the evolution of democratic norms and institutions it translates well into other domains.³

A later contention that I may revisit in the future, is that like many in the Western tradition before Derrida (think of Goethe for instance), his framing of parliamentary Ikhwanism spearheaded by charismatic religious authority premised on grassroots activism and demographic vitalism is simply Islamophilic projection that has little to do with Islam per se.

Depressive Realism

What drives the plots of the Houellebecqian canon that act almost as a fictionalized, sensationalised anthropology of Euro-American man is helplessness (and I would also contend boredom):

Helplessness is the current running beneath all of Houellebecq’s narratives, the inability to either get what you want or change what you want; to avoid death or believe that death is anything except bad. This is the omega point of depressive realism. What good are books if you are sick, alone, and unloved? They are no good. At best they are make-believe to help us disguise the facts of life – but the facts remain, and they are unbearably heavy. Hence the dark joke at the bottom of the pessimist’s project is that it subverts itself. Ridiculing the futility of human action finally makes pessimism seem pointless, demonstrates the emptiness of its honesty. Depressive realism leads us up to an airless summit, and the wonder is how seriously we can take it; whether, despite itself, there is anything to be drawn from its negativity.⁴

What is particularly cutting about Houellebecqian critique is not necessarily its stance against God or religion - that is an afterthought in many respects. What is more pressing is how it takes aim at art and culture itself. Nietzsche and other like minded souls like Schopenhauer in an effort to replace the gaping hole of the Church as it collapsed under its own inconsistencies tried to inject "art" and "culture" with the unreasonable task of shouldering the burden of civilizational renewal. Both envisioned standalone empty projects of artistic endeavours without any spiritual, metaphysical or inherent ethical content. This absurdity is what the Houellebecqian canon really takes aim at - the grappling and stumbling for meaning in "art" which as his characters and plots time and time again point out is utterly meaningless and pointless. Houellebecqian aesthetics mercilessly mocks the ridiculous contradictions of the Nietzschean Ubermensch.

If the soul is denied, spiritual reality mocked and God himself denied then what really is the point of art? If there is no longer a soul to move, to inspire, to caution, to restrain, to tutor then really what is point of artistic expression? This is not a rhetorical question where religious triumphalism is hiding, it is a genuine one - to what end is art produced? If the answer is "pleasure" which in Euro-American speak is a euphemism for fahisha then ultimately the current of cultural production which ironically started with a permissive impulse, stripped of shame and guilt starts to creak under its own contradictions because of its very permissive impulses:

So for art to be more than a narcissistic exercise the issue can’t be simply whether or not it pleases, but also to what end it pleases, and how well – which casts us back into the problem of what, if anything, guarantees worth. Wallace described late-twentieth century America as a ‘confusion of permissions’, which applies. Technically, art has the freedom to be ‘for’ almost anything the artist likes (I can write this novel in favour of murder, you can paint a picture for political reform) but even these agendas take on the feel of superficial gestures, none more particularly serious than others. Artists become ‘artists’; their messages become ‘messages’, drained of substance.⁵

Capitalist Realism

Here we stray dangerously close to Mark Fisher's inescapable conclusions that all forms of cultural expression under a capitalist (although I would use hyperfinancialisation in the Hudsonian sense⁶ not capitalist) are assumed under its design on its own terms. We are infact dealing with

the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the preemptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the rst time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.⁷

To extend Fisher's argument further, capitalist realism sums up the situation where Euro-American leadership can make grand gestures towards the language of human rights and humanitarianism whilst simultaneously legislating and encouraging the rapid expansion of a military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus without facing any challenge from their populace. This apathy, this daze of incapability where Western citizens assume they are far too sophisticated to participate in pogroms personally and are far too enlightened for God, religion is what allows for the encroachment of statist hyperfinancialization which today we loosely refer to as capitalism.

It is in such a deadening system that Houellebecq launches his critique where his characters lack any vitalism and mask it with meaningless indulgence in fahisha.

The Failure of Sexual Revolution

One of the conditions of participating in the sexual revolution was to construct an entirely different notion of identity and the self. No longer tethered, embodied it must become willing to be open to the promise of:

infinite possibility and constant renewal promoted by the consumer market, of rejoicing in the chance of putting on and taking off identities, of spending one’s life in the never ending chase after ever more intense sensations and even more exhilarating experience.⁸

Those who obviously cannot pass the test are no longer fully functioning citizens within American Empire, they are referred to in Bauman's terms as "dirt" but perhaps in an Islamic lexicon they would be referred to as the "strangers". Underpinning this hyper-libidinal impulse is once again the spectre of hyper-financialization where money itself is no longer anchored to a substantive physical resource/reality (like gold), standard or universal hardwired protocol (bitcoin) It becomes subsumed under the will of the State which must continually grow, be a parasite feeding on anything it can to bring it under its writ, absorbing and subsuming it under its terrain. Houellebecq alludes to this totalitarian impulse which installs a:

horrific and harsh superego, far more unmerciful than any imperative that has ever existed; and it sticks to the skin of the individual, unceasingly repeating: ‘You must desire. You must be attractive. You must participate in the competition, in the struggle, in the stream of life. If you stop, you no longer exist. If you fall behind, you are dead⁹

Trying to make sense of how this seemingly "rebellious" and "countercultural" movement accelerated in the 60s to become part of the larger structural superstructure of the Progressive Deep State deserves its own note, but is worth thinking how these attitudes now form the basis of political culture in American Empire and they are rarely if ever successfully contested.

Ultimately, the promise of the sexual revolution fails because of hyper-financialized capitalist logic. Despite all of Houellebecq's characters trying to opt for fahishism even this falls short because it simply cannot be sustained. As Boysen writes here:

In this universe, it is practically impossible to relate to one another in a meaningful manner; this is, strictly speaking, only possible by having sex together. The only time whatsoever in which life can offer some meaning and pleasure is in the sexual moment. But this is just a brief respite: after the orgasmic peak, when the sexual friction is over, suffering and emptiness instantly reappear.¹⁰

The emotional short-changing generated by hyperfinancialist consumerism creates this sexual competition that ultimately hollows out men and women - this "erotic totalitarianism" vindicates the constant Quranic refrains against fahisha. Our desires reign Sovereign over us - in turn our desires are weaponized by the machinery of the State.

Posthumanity

The Sexual Revolution is of course just one aspect of many seismic cultural and political changes in the 20th century. There was the foundations of Progressivism that provided the structural blueprint for imaging a new type of hyper-successful and prosperous Empire moving away from the original impulses of American limited government and constitutional originalism. This necessitated a construction of an elaborate and dense network of bureaucratic experts that assume a semi-permanent feature of dictating the direction of the country, as Watson and Kesler put it:

Economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians could all agree: individual and social interests could be harmonized with the intelligent application of technique. With such a shift in “historical consciousness,” it was perhaps inevitable that religious language would eventually become window dressing rather than the motive force for liberal social engineering. Social morality became less grounded in a particular religious dispensation or political philosophy and more a function of what the times required, floating rather freely in the flux of progressive aspirations.¹¹

The embrace of technique, of bureucracy, the application of secular domains of knowledge into questions of social, cultural and political longevity created a new language of Empire distinct from those that had come before it. Coupled with this embrace of technique was a efficient and unerring scientism. Again, there are other factors here to consider such as the genesis of financial capitalism¹², technological statecraft¹³, the cultural embrace around "identity" which created a more fluid, unstable sense of self¹⁴, profound pharmaceutical expansion¹⁵ and novel forms of technocratic governance on a supranational level.¹⁶

All of the above are signposts towards moving towards a posthumanity where the innovation and progress from across these domains coalesces into an urgent necessity and desire to re-engineer biology itself and thus perhaps then finally conquer nature in an effort to escape the boredom and emptiness that Houellebecq exposes. A boredom and emptiness that stems from a profound disgust and alienation from our own biology.

Despair and Fahishism

Our esteemed French diagnostician has made his judgement - at the root of it all, underlying it all is despair. Despair is what drives the ego towards spasms of libertine excess in the hope of batting it away but it is simply not sustainable. The posthuman (augmentation, transhumanism, prosthetic enhancement etc) drive in many respects is to to enhance libidinal endurance to ward off despair. The Houellebecqian cautionary tale is quintessentially about the end of the world

imagined in these novels...through a brief period of libertine participation that produces an irreversible cauterization of affect leading to social and sexual atomization and then to a total sloughing off of all human attachments and affiliations¹⁷

What is truly obscene though about Houellebecq both as a writer and as a person is the acknowledgement of despair without any sense of anticipation of mercy, redemption, renewal or even fear. None of these emotions or sentiments find any place in his literary canon or in his personal character, because in these emotions lie the seeds for religious transformation. This is in summary is the full offence and affront of Fahishism - the obscenity of despair without return or repentence.

And God knows best

Footnotes