Showing posts with label Michel Houellebecq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michel Houellebecq. Show all posts

WORK Vs. JOBS

Office drone

by Brett Stevens

Conservatives espouse traditional (or, more accurately, eternal) values including the importance of hard work and dedication. Few ask themselves, however, if this extends to jobs. It should not, mainly because (1) jobs are not actually work in most cases and (2) jobs are the antithesis of what the value of hard work is designed to foster.

In modern Europe and the Americas, everyone — male and female — over the age of majority must attend a job. This means showing up every day from eight to five and being in the office, doing office tasks. Every person gets a cubicle or an office and a computer, maybe a title. They do this until they are sixty-five, then wonder what it meant.

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.