MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, FOUNDER OF NEOREACTION

Michel Houellebecq: a boon to spellcheckers the world over.

by Brett Stevens

With Michel Houellebecq in the news for his novel, Submission, it makes sense to remember his roots. He has made his name writing about the tedium of modern life and fleeting glimpses of beauty, truth, and purity that tempt people from it. His usually tragic characters cannot realize that beauty because of their broken psychologies and neuroses.

Houellebecq burst onto the scene in 1997 with Whatever, a cynically humorous book — think Louis-Ferdinand Celine or William Burroughs — about the failure of modern life. The characters struggle through pointless and boring jobs, alienating sexual relationships and dysfunctional families, all while wandering through a 21st-century dystopian wasteland that is both beautiful in its ruin and crassly plastic in the assumptions through which most people survive.

THE NEVER-ENDING END OF HISTORY AND THE RECURRENCE OF THE LAST MAN

Francis Fukuyama in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia

by George Markoff

Recently I had a chance to attend an open lecture of the world renowned political theoretician, Francis Fukuyama, who, as a member of a delegation from Stanford University, gave a number of public lectures in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, on the topic of the future of democracy in the 21st century.

Being a citizen of a pro-Western democratic country like Georgia, it was not a surprise to discover that his public lectures were hosted by the country’s Neo-Liberal think-tanks such as Ilia and Free Universities, which promote influential thinkers and activists, who used to back the former ruling National Movement Party’s neoliberal reforms, and which oppose the current Georgian Dream coalition government. Given the fact that the majority of the Georgian, pro-Western intellectual elite support National Movement’s value system, the visit of Fukuyama presented an opportunity for this camp to reaffirm their political influence and once again prove to the Georgian public, which is largely hostile toward them, that their worldview retains credibility and competitiveness.