Management and Organization in the work of Michel Houellebecq

Abstract

Rarely is a producer of fiction subject to such a complicated mixture of praise and outrage as Michel Houellebecq. Saying that the opinions on the French novelist differ would be a euphemism. Literary scholars have provided extensive analyses of the racist, xenophobic and misogynist elements that recur throughout his work (e.g. Clement, 2003; Michallat, 1998 Morrey, 2013; Snyman, 2008), and already in 2001, Houellebecq was sued for propagating hatred against Islam in his novels Plateforme and Les particules élémentaires (Jefferey, 2011). His latest novel, Soumission, in which a Muslim political party wins the French national elections, leading to a gradual conversion to Islam of French society, came out on the day of the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, making it extremely difficult not to read his work as some kind of commentary on the current place of Islam in France.