The Elementary Particles

This is an incel manifesto.
Houellebecq dresses up his ideas with intelligent and witty prose but the spiritual message of the novel is the same as Elliot Rodger's "My Twisted World". In fact, Houellebecq might be worse since he directs his anger at all of mankind rather than only sorority girls.

Attached: houellebecq.jpg (400x400, 17K)

two years ago you wouldnt have used the term incel. why are you using it now?

Language evolves.

I think you're a little low IQ if you think that. Houellebecq's misanthropy is infused with a deeply felt compassion for suffering, male and female, human and animal. Rodger's message -- and I don't blame him for it, he was deeply unwell -- was about retribution against the world because of what it did to HIM. Houellebecq has humanity transform on a fundamental level to permanently and universally alleviate psychic suffering, to heal. Also with Elliot Rodger, despite flinging more invective against women, you can detect that a lot of the focus of his anger and resentment is toward other males. In a sense his sexual frustration stems from social frustration; he thought he couldn't be equal with his same-sex peers because of his virginity, he felt alone and alienated and thought his lack of sexual experience was what differentiated him from people he longed to connect with.

I read it as a meditation on the perils of abandoning the sanctity of human consciousness in favour of bowing at the altar of hedonistic materialism, when we're clearly not equipped to do so. In the narrator's view, this has left the world in a state of individualistic alienation ('atomisation', or 'the elementary particles'). Obsession over sex, fetishising youth and discarding anything that doesn't potentiate hedons (like old age) are the pillars of this world

Bruno and Michel are two sides of the same coin, offspring spawned by the so called sexual liberation of the 60s (their mother Janette): sex addiction and asexuality. Two poles, rather than a continuum. Bruno struggles to find meaning by submitting to his hedonistic impulses, while Michel is reactionary, but can't escape his obsession with materialism. His work attempts to find a materialistic map of consciousness and free it from sex infused vanity. Since sex is the problem, mitosis is the answer: "It's a curious idea to reproduce, when you don't even like life".

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember finding it a pretty vivid and interesting picture of the potential hell of hedonistic materialism. Not sure what this has to do with enforcing inceldom though. Maybe you could provide some arguments OP.

Michel's inability to ask Annabelle to be his girlfriend when they were teenagers set up the rest of their miserable lives. Even though she obviously liked Michel, I still consider his case to be inceldom because he could not make it happen even though some part of him wanted to.

Bruno's inceldom is more straightforward. He is consumed by a desire to fuck young women but usually cannot except when he pays prostitutes.

My working definition of incel does not require virginity, only an tendency to have unfulfilled sexual desires and relationships.

Oh. I see what you mean now. It's a case of "the characters', or narrator's character/behaviour" is the author's direct endorsement of them. While the two characters' inceldom is debatable since all inceldom means is being involuntarily celibate -they will, or will not fit this description at different times in the narration-, inceldom is clearly one of the many repercussions of the world Houellebecq paints here, but it bears no significance with regards to his endorsement of it.

>implying Becky's chrarcters aren't thinly veiled copies of himself
owo

>implying that even if that's the case, that's an endorsement of their behaviour/condition.

No one "endorses" inceldom. I'm not sure what you're on about.