What is it about?
This article is about the fundamental link between sex and love in the fiction of the French writer Michel Houellebecq. Love, not sex, is his superior value. In the novel Sérotonine (2019), love is even endowed with a divine dimension. In Houellebecq's novels, it is however constantly destroyed by the basically inhuman modernity, or postmodernity, in which it is inscribed.
Why is it important?
Houellebecq is one of the most famous and widely read European novelists today. Commonly, he is considered a pessimistic and cynical analyst of postmodern society, represented by contemporary France. But under this surface, he is, with Antoine Compagnon's word, an anti-modern writer refusing to abandon fundamental traditional values, of which love is the most important. This fact makes Houellebecq even more interesting and more essential.