Placing lost intersectional plots in Houellebecq's Anéantir (2022): Race,climate and scandalous textual necropolitics

Abstract

Placed in the context of scandals surrounding Houellebecq's earlier novels, Anéantir (2022) is described as strategically losing its political and other plots to focus on the death of its protagonist. This narrative choice cannot, however, dispense with questions raised by representations of race (universalism, colourism, racialization, Islamophobia); of colonial and postcolonial exploitation (including the Françafrique); and of ‘green-bashing’, anthropocentrism and the elision of differential impacts of climate catastrophe. These questions are considered in terms of necropolitical power over who lives or dies, and precarious lives experienced as ‘slow death’. Fiction is established as always already a form of necropolitics–of textual decisions of life and death. Whilst climate catastrophe is not foregrounded in this predominantly anthropocentric narrative, the ultimate question is whether Houellebecq intends any kind of self-reflexive ‘ecocritique’, or whether the gravest global scandal—of human contributions to climate crisis—is ignored.

Putting Anéantir in place: politics, death and lost plots

In 1998, Michel Houellebecq became France's most notorious living writer when Les Particules élémentaires sparked the so-called affaire Houellebecq. The furore was not fuelled by the novel's replacement of humans by desire-free posthuman clones, but by critical and media uncertainty as to how to place the ambivalent discourses (misogynist; racist; homophobic; anti-soixante huitard; right-wing) staged in the novel; the disconcerting narration (variously flat; ironic; sarcastic; and bathetically humorous); and the provocative extra-textual interjections of its author figure. I argued that the novel and the scandal it provoked could be read as productively foregrounding a contemporary intellectual failure to deal with a challenge to the dominant neoliberal order (Cruickshank, 2003: 115–16). Houellebecq's subsequent novels adopt similarly undecidable narrative strategies, featuring representations of racial and social violence and often projections into a degenerative future, and scandal has become a media-inflated expectation of a Houellebecq text, albeit less due to intellectual failure than linked to events and uncanny prescience.

An interview in Lire September 2001 saw Houellebecq describe Islam as ‘la religion la plus con’ (Houellebecq, 2001a) leading to trial and acquittal for incitement to religious hatred. This coincided with the publication of Plateforme (Houellebecq, 2001b) featuring Islamic extremist bombings of a Thai sex-tourism resort days before the 9/11 attacks in the US and almost a year before the Jemaah Islamiyah bombing in Bali. Houellebecq's most speculative and least controversial novel La Possibilité d’une île (Houellebecq, 2005) was followed by Goncourt-winning La Carte et le territoire (Houellebecq, 2010) accused of plagiarising Wikipedia. Soumission (Houellebecq, 2015) premised a 2022 Muslim Brotherhood presidential win and a non-radical Islamization of a neo-colonial Republic, and was published 7 January 2015, the day of Al-Qaeda-attributed attacks on the Charlie Hebdo editorial office soon after a cartoon of Houellebecq on the cover as a Ramadan practicing soothsayer (and a day before he shared the cover with Islamophobic media figure and would-be politician Éric Zemmour). The year Emmanuel Macron awarded Houellebecq the Légion d’honneur, Sérotonine (Houellebecq, 2019) appeared to presage the gilets jaunes movement.

In this context, it is not surprising that scandal was hotly anticipated when Houellebecq published Anéantir (2022) 7 January 2022, on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in the heated run-up to the April 2022 présidentiels and in the wake of Houellebecq's expression of admiration for extreme-right populist candidate Zemmour (Houellebecq, 2020). Certainly, there is plenty of scandalous potential. Thrown into the centre of the electoral fray, Anéantir's protagonist Paul Raison becomes an advisor to Minister for Finance and the Economy Bruno Juge (thought to be referencing Bruno Le Maire, reputedly a friend of Houellebecq and, as the novel appeared, the centre-right holder of the same portfolio for Emmanuel Macron). Juge's decisions are extremely well-judged, whether negotiating French global economic interests internationally or manipulating voters, the media and political opponents in a 2026–27 presidential electoral campaign where the Rassemblement national threatens to win power. Other plot strands include attempts to identify the perpetrators of a rising tally of cyber-terrorist threats, attacks and deaths culminating in a video of drowning migrants. Meanwhile, the Raison family saga involves Paul re-igniting his marriage with momentarily vegan and enduringly Wiccan wife Prudence; his erstwhile intelligence agent father Édouard suffering a paralyzing stroke; and the latter being secreted out of hospital to evade a living death in a high-dependency geriatric unit by Paul's brother-in-law's far-right, ultra-Catholic contacts and Beninese care-worker Maryse. Maryse becomes Paul's brother Aurélien's partner until he kills himself after his ex-wife Indy vindictively publishes details of the hospital break-out. In the final 150 pages, this political plot–along with all the others–are largely lost. As the novel ends, focus shifts to Paul's diagnosis of and treatment for terminal cancer, and his dwelling on his life, love and imminent death.

As I write, febrile expectations of scandal and prescience in Anéantir appear to have been frustrated, despite its references to Le Pen, Zemmour, Identarian nationalists and an un-named President identifiable as Macron; despite often lurid non-medicalized threats of death include digital recordings of a simulated guillotining of Juge; an attack on a Danish IVF clinic; the destruction of a Chinese container ship; and the blowing up of a migrant boat focussing on the individual deaths of each passenger; and despite the misogynistic, racist and classist discourses. Concern about the possibly strategic leaking of a PDF version before publication (ironically for a text featuring cyber terrorism) was briefly raised and there has been muted critical outrage at the novel's strategic abandonment of its interwoven plot strands and its length (700-plus pages in Pléiade-evoking hardback). However, unlike Les Particules élémentaires (Houellebecq, 1998) and the affaire Houellebecq, whereas I perceived some heuristic potential for bringing into question ‘at best ambivalent, and at worst self-destructive institutional discourses’ (Cruickshank, 2003: 16), in the reception of the 2022 novel, what have been elided are the intersecting scandals facing populations and ecosystems that this reading of Anéantir brings to the fore. I identify this novel as a narrative which strategically loses its various plots to focus on the death of one white French man. Nonetheless, this move does not dispense with Anéantir's deeply unsettling intersectional representations of race bound up with universalism, colourism, Islamophobia, and gender. These raise questions of colonial and postcolonial exploitation including that, ongoing, of the Françafrique and, most urgently of all, the challenge of climate change. The analysis identifies in Houellebecq's figuring of French politics and the novel's other plot strands what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003), the social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die, as well as further examples of the kinds of precarious lives Lauren Berlant describes as ‘slow death’ (Berlant, 2007). Recognizing that fiction is always already a form of necropolitics–of deciding on life and death–I identify how questions of climate catastrophe are at stake throughout the novel, raising that of the extent to which any self-reflexive ecocritique (Morton, 2009) is intended, or whether this gravest global scandal is ignored.

Situating racist necropolitics in Anéantir

Death–or at least that of Raison family members–casts long shadows across Anéantir. Yet these overshadow the many forms of racism which saturate the novel which, whether intentionally or not, intersect with debates around universalism and intersectional politics of identity in contemporary France. There are some representations of the belief that the universalist belonging putatively fostered by the ‘République une et indivisible’ transcends race, religion and gender to render France immune to the systemic racism found in the US founded on slavery and segregation. The Raisons welcome Maryse as Aurélien's partner without comment on her sub-Saharan African origin (notably Paul's Catholic, Le Pen-voting house-wife sister Cécile). Maryse helps brother-in-law Hervé's Bloc identitaire friends to engineer Paul's father's escape from transfer into a high dependency geriatric facility. The Rassemblement national is represented as mainstream, dangerous only in its likelihood of electoral victory, not because of xenophobic policies, and its voter-support is variously attributed to the demise of the traditional left and right and to the ‘décalage entre les classes dirigeantes et la population […] dans les petites villes de province’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 532), whilst the impact of immigration on votes is eclipsed by that of unemployment. Paul, moreover, finds Cécile's and brother-in-law Hervé's long history of ‘voting Marine’ as a legible response to living in Northern France (Houellebecq, 2022: 154). So here, the voice of Raison bespeaks French universalist beliefs. Zemmour's Islamophobic reputation is mitigated and legitimized by being placed in a tongue-in-check line-up alongside a left-wing philosopher and a climate activist, underscoring Bruno's pragmatic ability to convince across the political spectrum: ‘avec Badiou il est parfait, avec Greta Thunberg impeccable, et avec Zemmour carrément royal’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 290). Paul's sister-in-law Indy unconvincingly claims that disgust with Zemmour's editorials made her leave Le Figaro for Marianne. In his misogynist caricature Houellebecq may be sending up ‘wokisme’ and bringing into question left-wing identity politics and the problematics of putative ‘colourblind’ French universalism. Yet, hearing his mixed-race nephew's racist description of Zemmour as ‘un bâtard de sa race’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 215), Paul's response is to muse how Zemmour enables people to show their unquestioned socio-political colours, strategically not labelled in terms of racist ideology: ‘il suffit de prononcer son nom et […] chacun retrouve ses marqueurs sociaux, son positionnement naturel, et en tire des satisfactions calmes’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 215).

Although a rare mention of racism is mitigated by a vindicating European alibi, ‘la haine raciale atteignait des niveaux inédits en Europe’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 532), there is nonetheless plenty of evidence of the shift from the universalist emphasis on class towards questions of race (Bancel et al., 2005). Certainly, Paul's extrapolation of changes in the Beaujolais resonates with Zemmour's espousal of Renaud Camus’ xenophobic, anti-Islamic conspiracy theory of the ‘Grand remplacement’ (Camus, 2013) positing that, in a generation, France has been submerged by non-European immigrants:

il fut surpris d’avoir la sensation que cette petite ville avait changé. […] [I]l y avait des Arabes, beaucoup d’Arabes dans les rues, et cela c’était certainement une innovation par rapport à l’ambiance générale du Beaujolais, et de la France tout entière. (Houellebecq, 2022: 195)

If this is intended as an observation rather than as a tacit approbation of anti-Islamic complotisme, the repetition of ‘Arabes’ nonetheless evokes what Bhabha describes as the fetishism of and fixation with the Other which structures European colonial discourses (Bhabha, 1994). Such fixation recurs in an egregiously lascivious report of Maryse's experiences living in Belleville-en-Beaujolais, where ‘[e]lle avait couché avec quelques types’ and where she ‘vivait dans un quartier d’Arabes, qu’elle haïssait et craignait d’instinct’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 412). However, what could also be a fetishized legitimizing of Islamophobia might yet be read as an attempt to foreground the cultural-differentialist racism Étienne Balibar describes as constructed institutionally and in popular culture (including, of course, literature), built on the foundations of the racial and geographic constructs born of slavery and colonialism, here in the racializing of Muslims as a discrete group (Balibar, 2008). Yet Paul's unconscious seems to override a critical perspective in a dream where Black and North African friends lure him into a torture trap (Houellebecq, 2022: 606). Fear of and fascination with the racialized Other recur as Paul attends a Villejuif hospital appointment, and brief mentions of deathly Resistance and Jewish history are followed by details of:

attentats, ou projets d’attentat islamistes. En janvier 2015, Amedy Coulibaly, qui devait plus tard prendre part à la prise d’otages de la supérette Hypercacher de la porte de Vincennes, et y assassiner quatre personnes, avait fait exploser une voiture à Villejuif. En avril 2015, un étudiant algérien, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, avait été arrêté au moment où il projetait un attentat à l’arme à feu, à l’heure de la messe dominicale, dans les deux églises de Villejuif. Le 13 novembre 2015, le hall de la mairie avait été incendié en signe d’hommage aux massacres qui, un peu plus tôt dans la soirée, avaient fait 129 morts à Paris. (Houellebecq, 2022: 636)

There are echoes here of Edward Said's figuring of ex-colonized populations as terrorists in response to the crisis in Orientalist constructs caused by postcolonial empowerment (Said, 2014). The description also ignores the ways in which colonial and postcolonial power relations; the material and psychological conditions of living in the banlieue; and racialization may construct conditions which fuel terrorism. These carefully enumerated and situated deaths and named Islamic terrorist perpetrators contrast with the novel's mass disposal of unnamed migrants, and also elide Houellebecq's own skin in the game: his implication with the strikingly unmentioned Charlie Hebdo attack.

There is colourism in Paul's declared indifference to skin tone: ‘Ce n’était pas une question de racisme, il n’avait jamais ressenti de répulsion, ni d’attraction particulière pour les personnes de peau noire’ (Houellebecq, 2020: 206). If Indy's choice of a Black sperm donor may be to shame Aurélien (Houellebecq, 2022: 206–207), the latter takes an exoticist pleasure in comparing Maryse's skin: ‘« Tu n’es pas vraiment noire, dit-il, enfin si, mais pas autant que certaines. […] »’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 414). As well as colourism, tolerance of the economically productive, Raison-serving assimilated immigrant appears to be a family trait. Paul comments on his dentist Al Nazri whom he adjudges less North-African than Syrian or Iraqi: ‘rien en lui ne laissait soupçonner l’islamiste, ni même le musulman, il donnait en tout point une grande impression […] d’avoir parfaitement intégré les procédures et les coutumes d’une démarche médicale rationnelle. L’immigration avait encore quelques succès en France’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 595). Choosing perfect integration to refer to (French) medical protocols may also intend to invite wry reflection on Republican failures of integration. (It certainly resonates with the earlier references to the Islamic fundamentalism associated with the 2015 terrorist attacks, as well as with ‘intégrisme’ in its ultra-Catholic manifestation, and is a useful plot device and springboard for expositions on the potential of religion and belief systems in neoliberal Europe). Meanwhile, Paul's father ‘entretenait des rapports particulièrement chaleureux avec un de ses collègues antillais’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 209). And, although there is no commentary on the ENT Nakkache's presumably Tunisian and consultant Bokobza's likely Jewish North-African origins, over-determined names are certainly part of a racialized onomastic play (Paul dubs the improbably named radiotherapist and chemotherapist Lebon and Legrange, Dupont and Dupond after the hapless detectives accompanying Tintin's colonial exploits.)

Of course, the choice of ‘Raison’ evokes Enlightenment thought, which the novel brings into question more or less deliberately. Paul's father's former colleague likens deep ecology ideology to ‘rousseauisme classique: l’homme naît bon, c’est la société qui le pervertit, etc. Et des gens comme Rousseau peuvent avoir une influence énorme’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 377). Such influence is evident in the representation of Maryse, evoking the problematic trope of the ‘bon sauvage’, supposedly demonstrative of universal human goodness. Indeed, Enlightenment thought also influenced and legitimized the colonial mission civilisatrice, with its ‘mix of religiosity and ethnocentricity’ and ‘malignant rhetoric of the white man's burden […] as the pretext for violent conquest’ (Harrison, 2019: 2) along with its ‘muddled blend of assumed superiority and projected assimilation’ (Harrison, 2019: 49). Aurélien's seduction of Maryse is an internalized neo-mission civilisatrice: ‘il était en train de la séduire, simplement en la traitant comme une personne intelligente, accessible à la culture, et pas comme une pauvre petite aide-soignante africaine–ce qu’elle était par ailleurs’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 412). Its leftovers are evident in her Catholicism–that paradoxical assimilating force alongside reason and laïcité–and in her gendered, subaltern work. However, still serving Reason(s) Maryse is neo-colonially exploited ‘au service de l’administration’ (Harrison, 2019: 262): to plug metropolitan employment holes. As Aurélien comments on Maryse's skin tone, she responds: ‘il se peut que ma grand-mère ait fauté avec un colon blanc. Déshabille-toi... »’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 414). Maryse thus also embodies a postcolonial palimpsest of racist and misogynist violence: simultaneously as ‘mulâtresse’ and ‘métisse’, fetishized victim of white sexual predators (Ravi, 2007); innately promiscuous and lascivious Jezebel (Ferris.edu, 2022); and subaltern.

Displaying symbolic capital, patriarchal power and ignorance of (post)colonial history, Aurélien woos Maryse on the Roche du Solutré, a grand site national. Such is the perhaps deliberately ironic context for exposition of Maryse's origins in Benin:

« C’est ce que les Français appelaient le Dahomey, quand ils possédaient le pays. » Mais le mot de Dahomey ne lui disait rien […]. « Oui, tu préférais l’histoire à la géographie » conclut Maryse. « L’histoire ancienne, surtout » ajouta-t-il. « L’histoire ancienne… » dit-elle doucement, en détachant les syllabes. (Houellebecq, 2022: 410)

Violent ‘ancient’ colonial history is nonetheless spelled out in syllables, raising–whether deliberately or not–the question of the impact of French colonialism and of its postcolonial consequences which saturate the novel. The choice of verb ‘posséder’ bespeaks of ongoingly exploitative power relations which echo in Aurélien's comparison of Maryse's white forebear with his own français de souche stock, ‘des gens franchement enracinés, pas du tout du genre à se lancer dans une aventure colonial; des gens qui, probablement, ignoraient même que la France possédât des colonies’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 415). This profession of ignorance presumably also extends to Benin's previous exploitation as a key port in the Atlantic slave trade. Unproblematized, such blithe references to colonial possession and responsibility-relieving ignorance foreground how French colonial and postcolonial universalist ideologies and failures of education elide pressing responsibilities.

Already vulnerable in her precarious employment managing the lives and deaths of the economically empowered, Maryse is exposed by Indy vindictively misattributing her as a ‘ravissante aide-soignante d’origine antillaise’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 484). Having served her economic (and narrative) purposes she returns to Benin before inevitable disciplinary procedures and likely expulsion, averting a slow death of precarious work in France (Berlant, 2007). Maryse's fate might be intended to raise awareness of the systemic wearing out and disposal of immigrant workers in the Global North, but this seems unlikely given the novel's sudden move into a broader context of migrant necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003). In implicit contrast to the filmed terrorist sinking of a Chinese container ship, gaining little worldwide traction, a subsequent terror attack is on an old boat full of mostly Francophone migrants. Migrants’ journeys towards this disposable fate (ironically sailing in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade, not far from Spanish tourist hotspots) are not considered, yet there is careful attention to the deadly detail of the necropolitical actions of a socialist Spanish government not apprehending them because they aim to cross the Pyrenees to France swiftly:

Le seul danger qui menaçait les migrants venait non pas des autorités mais de milices locales, armées de battes de base-ball et de couteaux—il n’était pas rare qu’un Africain […] soit égorgé ou battu à mort, et la police montrait en général peu d’empressement à rechercher les coupables, les médias espagnols eux-mêmes traitaient à peine l’événement, c’était en quelque sorte rentré dans les mœurs. (Houellebecq, 2022: 546)

This re-imagining of European border necropolitics (Garcés Mascareñas, 2022) farms out the sacrificing of lives in the interests of state ‘defence’ of borders. In Anéantir, both the state and the media sanction vigilante action, here presented as just a part of life in a neoliberal free-for-all of ‘letting die’, founded on nationalism fear and (post)colonial violence (Mbembe, 2003). Houellebecq thus supplements modes of subjugation of 'life to the power of death' (Mbembe, 2003: 39). If there is here some appreciation of the supranational, implicitly state-sanctioned parallel economy of death, it is scandalously followed by the elected representative of a nation state only recognizing mass deaths for their potential electoral benefits. European policy and postcolonial global economically driven motors of migration are elided into a fantasy of putative choice made by an anonymous, homogeneous group:

— [C]’est horrible à dire, mais l’immigration va subir un coup d’arrêt, et sur le plan électoral c’est tout bénéfice pour nous. […]

— Tu crois vraiment que ça va dissuader les migrants ?

— Bien sûr. Je sais ce que les gens disent : “Ils sont tellement dans la misère, ils sont prêts à prendre tous les risques”, etc. C’est faux. […] ce sont plutôt les diplômés demi-riches, les classes moyennes […]. Ils savent qu’ils peuvent être recueillis par un bateau humanitaire, et qu’ensuite il y aura toujours un pays d’Europe qui les laissera débarquer. Ils prennent de gros risques […] mais ils ne prennent pas tous les risques. Et là, ils vont devoir introduire un nouvel élément dans leur calcul.

— La violence est efficace. (Houellebecq, 2022: 564)

This repeated referencing of choice and knowing risk, albeit self-reflexively mitigated by recognizing the horror of a government's choice of ‘letting die’ (Mbembe, 2003), has already been undercut just pages before by the description of the terrorist video recording individual deaths of nameless migrants which:

s’attachait successivement à l’agonie de chacun, […] se déplaçant d’un nageur à l’autre, jusqu’à la submersion du dernier[…] durait un peu plus de quarante minutes, mais probablement peu d’internautes la virent jusqu’au bout, hormis ceux qui ne se lassaient pas d’assister à la mort de migrants africains.

Paul le reconnut aussitôt, l’impact mondial de ces images serait en effet considérable. (Houellebecq, 2022: 547)

The spectacularizing, politically weaponized video is also a narrative device, dwelling pruriently on individual deaths to escalate apparent focus on the terrorism strand and its political impact, only to lose this plot strand entirely to focus on one dying white man. This chillingly efficient narrative violence, makes for a scandalous contrast with the enumeration of the Villejuif-related terrorists and the 129 victims of the cited November 2015 attacks, foregrounding the wielding of the necropolitical power of the writer chooses such textual conditions of life and death.

The enduring scandal of the Françafrique: necropolitics and ecological racism

Anéantir's hitherto homogenized migrants, whose lives and deaths are determined on supranationally and (para)economically institutionalized levels culminating in a spectacularized end by drowning, are only distinguished in that they are French-speaking Africans. In terms of migration and exploitation, then–and whether Houellebecq intends it or not–this novel evokes the Françafrique. This ‘plus long scandale de la République’ (Verschave, 1998) involves the maintenance of military, political and economic influence to exploit African potential to keep big French industrial names running the lucrative of shows including oil, aluminium, the industrial exploitation of natural resources and nuclear energy. The scandal also encompasses French co-implication in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, involving the necropolitics of Franco-African inter-governmental corruption and the diversion of aid funds (Verschave, 1998). François Hollande declared the end of the Françafrique in 2012, just as Françafrique 2012: la bombe à retardement (Boudiguet, 2012) described a neo-colonial system thriving on aid and raw materials. The end of the Republic's longest scandal was promised again by Macron (2017), projecting a restitution of cultural heritage such as Beninese artefacts; rapprochement with Rwanda; and a promise of greater cooperation in education, entrepreneurship, sustainable development, culture and greater economic cooperation across Africa. Just as L'Empire qui ne veut pas mourir: une histoire de la Françafrique (Deltombe, 2021) was published, Macron's October 2021 Africa-France summit deployed Mbembe, in a controversial twist worthy of a Houellebecq novel.

Perhaps unintentionally, Anéantir provides another perspective on the ongoing scandal of the systemically state-sanctioned, racist, necropolitical exploitation of the Françafrique, projecting forward to a 2026–27 where the exploitation of Africa for the benefit of France comes with neo-imperialist expansion. Paul (after an earlier trip to Morocco) accompanies Bruno to a congress on African development which is, in fact, an opportunity to protect French nuclear and solar energy interests in Africa. When considering Addis Ababa's putative bid to become an African hub for global trade, Paul judges the aim to be quite realistic ‘du point de vue par exemple des prestations de service annexes, les putes d’hier soir étaient d’un niveau plus qu’honorable, elles auraient pu subjuguer n’importe quel homme d’affaires occidental, et un businessman chinois tout aussi bien’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 54). Humour notwithstanding, this is a re-writing of the myth of the sexually available colonial female Other into a twenty-first century global-economic version. Here African women are all part of the service for powerful men from the Global South. They come with a domination fantasy, and later, in Paul's dream, with an exhibitionist fetish, being accompanied to a bar by ‘une jeune Noire qui ressemble aux deux Éthiopiennes d’Addis-Abeba; […] désireuse d’exhiber son sexe en toutes circonstances’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 219). The supranationally sanctioned regulation of female bodies in prostitution diversified to include ‘des filles éduquées par ailleurs, voire des ingénieures ou des doctorantes’(Houellebecq, 2022: 51) is here an ongoing service expected and rendered to Global North supremacy, to capitalism and to patriarchy.

Juge does not avail of this offer of ‘service’, not because of its racist and misogynist premises, but because his focus is on furthering French economic interests: ‘ce n’était certainement pas là que des décisions allaient se prendre pour le développement de l’Afrique […]. Bruno réussirait peut-être, par-ci par-là, à placer quelques centrales nucléaires’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 51). Juge's deadly serious motives are further revealed by a conversation about securing French hegemony in renewables, which also belies an ignorance of colonial exploitation and the scandals of its postcolonial consequences:

On ne peut pas laisser les Chinois en situation de monopole sur les terres rares » […].

— Ça devrait le faire, avec le Burundi » répondit Paul avec insouciance. Le Burundi était un pays africain ; là s’arrêtaient, à peu près, ses connaissances […].

« Récemment, le Burundi s’est doté d’une équipe dirigeante tout à fait remarquable”. (Houellebecq, 2022: 39–40)

Burundi, a Belgian colony 1916–62, was, in 2022, the world's poorest country. Here, rare earth elements are mined at Gakara by a subsidiary of London-listed Rainbow Rare Earths, which extracts ‘the fundamental building blocks for the permanent magnets driving the global green technology revolution’ (Rainbow Rare Earths Limited, 2022). The Burundian government has a 10% stake, and operations were suspended in 2021 by the Ndayishimiye regime's quest to maximise profit for Burundi's own development (Africa News, 2021). Yet the condescension in Juge's faint praise occludes how decolonization leaves damaging power vacuums that ex-colonial powers exploit or ignore, leading to ‘conditions of life conferring […] the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003: 40). A further untold scandal is a fatal extension of the Françafrique into Burundi unacknowledged by Macron: the 1972 genocide of 200,000–300,000 Hutu, facilitated by the ‘prominence of the French influence not only at the military level but also in the cultural, educational and technical spheres’ (Lemarchand, 2016: 106). Alongside the revenant of French co-implication in genocide is the impact of ecological racism, expressed in African vulnerability to extreme climate impacts. Burundi, like many Sub-Saharan African countries contributes infinitesimally to net global emissions. Yet the country is disproportionately subjected to the effects of climate crisis: the 2022 ND-Gain index cross referencing vulnerability and readiness to adapt to climate change ranked Burundi 165 out of 182 countries (including France at 16) (ND-Gain, 2022). Meanwhile, Benin, the twenty-eighth poorest country in Africa by GNI per capita (World Bank in Benin, 2022) ranked 152. Also featuring in Bruno and Paul's emissions-intensive peregrinations and neo-Françafricain exploitative plans is Ethiopia, the twentieth poorest country in the world (World Population Review, 2022) and ND-Gain ranked 161, but which the novel pitches as a new trade hub for Africa because temperatures are cooler in Addis Ababa compared to Djibouti, Sudan and Morocco, ND-Gain ranked 122, 177 and 66 respectively.(ND-Gain, 2022).

The African foray notwithstanding, the focus of the novel is consistently Francocentric, such that where it is projected that the impact of technological changes on the labour market render Anéantir's France a ‘juxtaposition hasardeuse de conurbations et de déserts ruraux’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 237), the effects of the Global North exploitation on other countries is again underplayed: ‘[c’était] la même chose un peu partout dans le monde, à ceci près que dans les pays pauvres les conurbations étaient des mégalopoles, et les banlieues des bidonvilles’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 237). This throwaway remark, like that justifying the terrorist attack on a Chinese container vessel, because of the industry's ability to ‘plonger dans une misère sordide la plus grande partie des habitants de la planète’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 315) resonate with the ‘slow death’ Berlant describes of the physical wearing out and deterioration of certain parts of populations such that this defines their experiences and conditions of existence (Berlant, 2007). Where Houellebecq takes his writerly power over life and death into the Global South, then, the scandalously disproportionate effects of ecological racism and their origins in (post)colonial necropolitics and those of the Françafrique can but be revealed, inextricably bound up with the question of differential impacts of climate emergency.

Green-bashing, climate catastrophe and ecocritical scandal

If global competition, electoral trade-offs for keeping the green vote and mocking of ecologists are preoccupations in Anéantir, across the political spectrum, it is telling that Houellebecq's 2026–27 electoral race features no climate emergency policy, no mention of the 2015 Paris Agreement, emissions reduction targets (or failures to meet them) or France's 2050 Net Zero goal. This scandalous silence is filled by the din of an interchangeable set of political priorities Juge needs to be seen to address: “‘L’industrie automobile’, ‘Le nucléaire’, ‘Le commerce extérieur’, ‘L’équilibre budgétaire'’’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 289). Juge's ability to win Francocentric economic battles and his political brilliance are foregrounded: ‘il répondait avec aisance à toutes les questions, passant du transport aérien à la BCE, de la BCE aux énergies fossiles sans effort apparent, à plusieurs reprises il réussit à faire rire l’assistance’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 317). Yet, decidedly, fossil fuels and air transport are no laughing matter. However, there appears to be little irony in Bruno's messianic declaration of a return to the heavy industrialized Trente glorieuses which ignores their damaging extractive consequences, not to mention the further emissions which would ensue (Houellebecq, 2022: 44). There is also a counterintuitive, nationalistic return to the symbol par excellence of extractive culture: the car. Recalling ‘La Nouvelle Citroën’ in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) which identifies the manipulation that seems to go without saying in consumerist ideology, here the DS is appropriated to serve as a fiction of French economic success that seems to fly perversely in the face of emissions eradication targets:

créateurs de la Traction et de la DS, Citroën avait réussi, et plus généralement la France avait réussi à redevenir la nation emblématique du haut de gamme, […] fruit accompli de l’union de l’intelligence technologique et de la beauté. […] la France était redevenue la cinquième puissance économique mondiale. (Houellebecq, 2022: 46)

If this myth and a jump up world economic rankings are perhaps sarcastically exaggerated, the elided effects of the ongoing primacy of automotive petroculture cannot go without saying. The novel begins with a throwaway remark about an incidental character who drives an Aston Martin rather than a Tesla (Houellebecq, 2022: 14–15), but otherwise, the presumably fossil-fuelled automotive industry is anachronistically positioned as core to the French global-economic power, including beating German brands in climate-change vulnerable India (Houellebecq, 2022: 45). Paul's brief musing on global inequities–but not of the experience of global heating–is sparked by being chauffeured to Addis Ababa airport alone in a Mercedes big enough to accommodate an extended family (Houellebecq, 2022: 54). Otherwise, his appraisal of the automotive industry is as little concerned with emissions as is Bruno's focus on renewables: an economic fight to the death to keep France's global market share (and win green votes at home):

Abandonnant les terres rares, [Bruno] s’était lancé dans une violente diatribe contre les panneaux solaires chinois […]. Il en était au point de songer à une authentique guerre commerciale avec la Chine […]. Ça, c’était peut-être une bonne idée […]; il avait beaucoup à se faire pardonner des électeurs écologistes, en particulier son soutien sans failles à l’industrie nucléaire française. (Houellebecq, 2022: 56–57)

If there is no recognition of urgent ecopolitics, the ‘ton persifleur’ Stephanie Posthumus identifies as a characteristic of anti-nature and anti-ecological sentiment in France (2019: 183) speaks loud and clear via a systematic ‘green-bashing’ (Posthumus’ other characteristics–a systematic adoption of doubt vis-à-vis ecology and dismissal of ecological science involved in politics–do not get a word in). The Parti écologiste is considered as risible, for example in the foregrounding of Bruno's pragmatic rhetorical prowess praised for showing up the lack of knowledge of an anonymous ‘short, fat’ female ecology candidate only to marshal his own knowledge of food chains to score points rather than advocate for change (Houellebecq, 2022: 505–506). The systematic trivializing of ecopolitics is symptomatic of the portrayal of ecologists as unhinged, with even the terrorist attacks considered at one point as articulating a ‘une perspective écolo-fasciste’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 550), described via lurid parallels with French-born esoteric fascist Savitri Devi (Maximiani Portas), and America's ‘Unabomber’, Theodore Kaczynski. Any recognition of green politics is sarcastically undercut: ‘Bruno n’était pas absolument hostile aux écologistes, […] mais il les considérait quand même globalement comme de dangereux imbéciles, et surtout il trouvait absurde de se priver du nucléaire' (Houellebecq, 2022: 601). Meanwhile, Animalists are reported as failing to reach the 5% threshold for recouping campaign costs (Houellebecq, 2022: 526), and Juge is angered by the President's decision to close nuclear power stations ‘dans l’espoir de grappiller quelques voix écologistes’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 600). The fight here is for votes in France, not for planetary ecosystem survival.

The novel contains only one mention of global heating, the unseasonably warm spring as Prudence travels to Brittany:

« Oui, c’est surprenant, n’est-ce pas ? remarqua Prudence, j’ai même pris un maillot de bain. […] » Le réchauffement climatique était indéniablement une catastrophe, Paul n’avait aucun doute là-dessus, il se sentait tout à fait prêt à le déplorer, voire à le combattre le cas échéant ; il n’empêche qu’il donnait à la vie un tour imprévisible, fantasque, qui lui faisait défaut auparavant. (Houellebecq, 2022: 388)

If climate warming is here labelled a catastrophe, its consequences are trivialized. Subtending the anecdote are Paul's repeated fantasies about Prudence's body as well as that of enduring potential to combat climate crisis, the latter further undercut by the description of its unpredictable effects as energizing. And if Houellebecq is deploying irony here to highlight the prevalence of climate change denial, there is nonetheless an unquestioning supposition that catastrophe may be averted. The vineyards of Burgundy and the Beaujolais which, by the publication of the novel in 2022 had already suffered from hotter summers, earlier ripening and spring frosts, are here represented as examples of resilience in a perception of nature somehow unchanged by humans, but ready to serve their needs: ‘on n’imaginait nullement que de si vilaines petites choses puissent plus tard donner naissance à du vin, le monde était quand même bizarrement organisé’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 165). Whilst Wiccans are branded ‘écolos vaguement mystiques’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 424) they are commended for a certain ‘logic’ linked to ‘la parenté fondamentale de toutes les formes de vie, la réincarnation’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 425), betraying a fantasy of rebirth, and of planetary renewal. Foreshadowing suicide, Maryse and Aurélien's sense of impending doom still harbours hope: ‘immobiles dans l’attente d’une catastrophe, ou d’un miracle’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 476).

There seems to be something more than pathetic fallacy, then, in the novel's 15 references to mist or fog in the Rhône valley or in Bercy and, instead perhaps, a textual trace of the occlusion of the realities of climate crisis, an anthropocentric desire to be able to control nature as Other and read meaning into it. Yet Houellebecq has impending catastrophe in the very title of his novel, underscoring his textual power over life and death. The word ‘anéantir’ is cited in the text, but refers to the annihilation of the Western world, so degenerate and worthy of destruction that terrorist killing is legitimized: ‘si l’objectif des terroristes était d’anéantir le monde tel qu’il le connaissait, d’anéantir le monde moderne, il ne pouvait pas leur donner tout à fait tort’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 316). The worldview here is twice qualified as 'modern society'. The referent is neoliberal ideology and its effects on human relations and culture, not that society's destructive, planet-threatening ecological ramifications. The inference is that other worlds and societies remain possible. Later, the object of annihilation is again the neoliberal decadence and intellectual failure of a world overtaken by a century of slimy jokers, lacking a putative ‘innocence du singe, […] portés par la mission infernale de ronger et de corroder tout lien, d’anéantir toute chose nécessaire et humaine’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 690). Paul's consideration of future technological medical solutions to his terminal illness seems to map on to similar redemptive fantasies for combatting climate catastrophe. His doctors cannot save him, and all he can be sure of is that the care he gets will be better than that of human populations bearing the brunt of poor postcolonial healthcare infrastructure in countries vulnerable to the inequitable effects of global heating: ‘le maximum serait fait dans le cadre social en vigueur dans son pays […] [qui] offrait encore de meilleures opportunités techniques que le Venezuela ou le Niger (Houellebecq, 2022: 658).

From the very beginning of the novel, then, before plots are lost and Paul's death becomes the primary concern, dichotomous representations of (Western) man and nature invite critical questions. Long ahead of his terminal diagnosis, Paul Raison seeks to find existential reasons in nature:

Il y avait quand même […] une sorte de reproduction des plantes […], à vrai dire ses souvenirs de biologie végétale étaient lointains, mais cela mobilisait quoi qu’il en soit une dramaturgie moins tendue que les combats de cerfs ou les concours de tee-shirts mouillés. (Houellebecq, 2022: 226–227)

Although the humour here may be Houellebecq mocking such attempts to impose meaning, the reference to ‘biologie végétale’ evokes Christy Wampole's examination of a ‘burgeoning vegetal interest’ in La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and La Carte et le territoire (2010), identifying in these novels an opening up to plants’ ontology. Wampole identifies a use of plants as conceptual tools for ‘addressing problems of writerly observation, survival and existential fitness, abjection, proliferation and contingency, rootedness, multiplicity and individuality, time and human finitude’ (2019: 218). This and other explorations of questions of ecology and climate (Boulard, 2017; Malone, 2018; Milner and Burgmann, 2018) raise the question of how self-reflexively Houellebecq deploys references to nature, and the extent to which Anéantir's visions of it correspond to what Timothy Morton establishes as ‘ecocritique’: ‘a dialectical form of criticism that bends back onto itself […] permeated with considerations […] such as race, class, and gender, which it knows to be deeply intertwined with ecological issues’ (2009: 13).

As I have already suggested, in Anéantir, the links between colonial and postcolonial exploitation and their impact on climate catastrophe are not self-reflexively made. Instead, nature is dichotomously treated as a ’transcendental, unified, independent category’ (Morton, 2009: 13). To be sure, the question of imminent collapse is raised:

Famille et conjugalité, tels étaient les deux pôles résiduels autour desquels s’organisait la vie des derniers Occidentaux en cette première moitié du XXIe siècle. […] La doxa libérale persistait à ignorer le problème, […] l’ensemble du système allait s’effondrer dans un gigantesque collapsus, sans qu’on puisse jusqu’à présent en prévoir la date, ni les modalités–mais cette date pouvait être rapprochée, et les modalités violentes. (Houellebecq, 2022: 549–550)

However, this violent end is figured as Western (not of the whole species) and of late capitalism. Future human relations remain in play without consideration for the environment shared with other life forms. As Anéantir drops its other plot strands, anthropocentric pace gathers as Paul considers his imminent death: ‘Sa conscience aurait entièrement disparu, et ce serait comme s’il n’avait jamais existé […]. Le monde continuerait, les êtres humains s’accoupleraient, ressentiraient des désirs, poursuivraient des objectifs, nourriraient des rêves ; mais tout cela aurait lieu sans lui’ (Houellebecq, 2022: 631). This confidence in an anthropocentric future is underscored by an insistent dichotomous relationship with nature, also anthropomorphically attributing nature undying wisdom:

Cette mort solitaire […] célébrée par les auteurs de différents ouvrages de développement personnel […] avaient pris plus récemment le virage de l’écologie fondamentale. Ils y voyaient le retour bienvenu à une certaine forme de sagesse animale, […] lorsqu’ils sentaient la mort venir [les animaux éprouvaient] le besoin de s’écarter du groupe; ainsi parlait la voix de la nature dans sa sagesse immémoriale (Houellebecq, 2022: 656–657).

This green-bashing gallows humour is a further swipe at ecological ideology appropriated by self-help literature. However, with presumably unintentional irony, this foregrounds human animals’ failure to deploy the literary to help themselves in the face of climate catastrophe, bearing out Pierre Madelin's (2022) argument that failure to confront our own inevitable death leaves us unable to appreciate the gravity of the ramifications of human activity on ecosytems.

Anéantir, nonetheless, does feature ‘intersecting narratives intertwined with ecological issues’ (Morton, 2009: 13). Gender, race and class do, as I have argued, permeate the novel in the necropolitics of deeply unsettling intersections of racial discrimination bound up with universalism, colourism,racialization and Islamophobia; of migration; of postcolonial exploitation in and beyond the Françafrique; and of inequitable vulnerability to global warming. However, Houellebecq's power over life and death in Anéantir foregrounds a contemporary intellectual failure far greater than that expressed by the 1998 affaire Houellebecq. Scandalously, the plot lost in Anéantir is the opportunity to bend critically backwards and beyond anthropocentrism to confront the intersectional consequences of human activities on climate catastrophe.