Episode 14 reading list
What comes after sexual liberation?
George here…
I picked up Michel Houellebecq’s Submission again during the recent French elections, where an unstable coalition came together to prevent France’s National Rally party from winning in the run-off election. This same event is the subject of this novel, published in January 2015 but set in a hypothetical 2022 in which the parties of the French left, in order to prevent the far-right National Front from winning a majority, form a coalition with an (imagined) French incarnation of the Muslim Brotherhood. The result of this coalition’s victory is a top-down, formal Islamization of the Republic.
As our listeners know, Acton and I at Read Fems are not afraid of sensitive or controversial topics and texts. Submission received significant criticism even before its publication, but the novel raises many interesting questions (and offers some particularly provocative answers) in relation to one of our obsessions: the future of virtuous, rewarding, and fertile relationships between men and women. Also, as Mary Harrington fans, we never tire of wondering what comes after a feminism of progress. Submission, despite its audacious political setting, has a lot to say about what possibilities remain after the exhaustive (and exhausting) failure of the sexual revolution.
Here’s a choice quote, courtesy of Acton:
[Myriam] turned to face me. “You don't mind me calling you macho, do you?”
“I don't know, I guess I must be kind of macho. I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now — but was it really a good idea?”
Her eyes narrowed in surprise. For a few seconds she actually seemed to be thinking it over, and suddenly I was too, for a moment. Then I realized I had no answer, to this question or any other.
“So you’re for a return to patriarchy?”
“You know I’m not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.”
[...]
“Let’s say you’re right about patriarchy, that it’s the only viable solution. Where does that leave me? I’m studying, I think of myself as an individual person, endowed with the same capacity for reflection and decision-making as a man. Do you really think I’m disposable?”
The right answer was probably yes, but I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I wasn’t as honest as all that...
I still didn't want to give her a child, or help out around the house, or buy a Baby Björn. I didn’t even want to fuck her, or maybe I kind of wanted to fuck her but I also kind of wanted to die, I couldn’t really tell. I felt a slight wave of nausea. (28, 30)
We’ll be digging into this quote as well as exploring (as Mary Harrington herself has done) the relevance of some of the ideas of an even more controversial French writer, Renaud Camus. We urge you to read him rather than Google him; you don’t have to agree with everything to discover some interesting takes. In this quote, again selected by Acton, Camus is discussing Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, which discusses the meaning of words. While Camus is interested in the shift in the meaning of the word race, it is not difficult to see how this concept currently applies to woman (in the West).
In heart-breaking news from Australia, we see how woman can now indeed mean man.
Hermogenes, Cratylus’s contender, thinks that words are just words. They have no meaning of their own and no free will. They mean what their common users have decided they would mean, and nothing else; and if the same common users, or others, decide to change that meaning, then it will be changed, whether that pleases the speakers or not. Meaning is but a pure convention, a contract, a deliberation, a pact, an agreement.
For Cratylus, on the contrary, words are just as many survivors of time, and their letters and syllables have much to say about their signification and their long journey throughout the centuries. What they are and what they mean do not depend on some arbitrary decision, but on their origin, and on the origin of that origin, and on their endless run uphill in the nervous stream of history, like a salmon swimming counter-current towards the singing spring. Do words like French or British refer to an administrative stamp on some legal document, or to an ancestry, a long experience, a shared history, blood, race, love, culture, civilization?
Nouns and adjectives pertaining to nationalities are probably the best and simplest testimonies that for every given word there exists a mute and ferocious rivalry between its Hermogenian meaning—the superficial, administrative, official, legal, scientific, triumphant one, with its ID papers always in perfect order—and its Cratylian meaning, real, deep, profound, hard to explain, poetic and literary. Hermogenes, champion of stamping, and who has easier, simpler, more authoritative (be it only the authority of the law, or of dictionaries) ways of playing the game, or running the war, always wins... Nominalism is essential to the fakeal.1 It is of the utmost importance to it that things, being not what they are, don the name of what they are not. Language, this way, becomes totally corrupted. (149-151)2
Do your homework, and we’ll be recording soon.
“Fakeal” is an English version of a French word that Camus coined, le faussel, which he describes just before this quote, on p. 146, as “symmetrical and opposed to [the] real [le réel].” Camus intends this word “to describe and take into account the world of false reality, of the inverted real, of general falsehood we live in.”
Camus wrote this book directly in English, which accounts for regular awkwardness of language. It also doesn’t look like he had anyone edit or proofread it, which is a shame for such a capable, expressive writer. The trade-off here is that this work is available in English, online, for free; I believe the only currently edited, properly translated selection of his writings is the excellent Enemy of the Disaster.