Michel Houellebecq is France s most famous and controversial living novelist. Since his first novel in 1994, Houellebecq s work has been called pornographic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and vulgar. His caricature appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day when Islamist militants killed twelve people in an attack on their offices and also the day when his most recent novel, Soumission the story of France in 2022 under a Muslim president appeared in bookstores. Without God examines how Houellebecq has given voice to the underside, indeed the downside, of the progressive ethos that has animated Western and, specifically, French social, political, and religious thinking since the 1960s.
Both because of and despite this, his work is extremely popular because controversy sells, but also because his work is indicative of the broader cultural forces of malaise and disillusionment at work in France and elsewhere in the West. While the bulk of scholarship on Houellebecq addresses the social, political, and economic concerns raised in his work, Louis Betty instead focuses on Houellebecq s complicated relationship with religion. He shows that Houellebecq, who is at best agnostic, is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer. In exploring the religious, theological, and philosophical aspects of Houellebecq s work, Betty situates the author within the broader context of a French and Anglo-American history of ideas ideas such as utopian socialism, the sociology of secularization, and quantum physics. Materialism, Betty contends, is the true destroyer of human intimacy and spirituality in Houellebecq s work; the prevailing worldview it conveys is one of nihilism and hedonism in a postmodern, post-Christian Europe. There emerges in Betty s analysis a kind of materialist horror as both a philosophical and aesthetic concept that describes and amplifies contemporary moral and social decadence in Houellebecq s fiction."