Thread 24518627 - /lit/ [Archived: 531 hours ago]

Anonymous
7/4/2025, 12:11:44 AM No.24518627
Whatever_(novel)
Whatever_(novel)
md5: 78fc52af10ea0a7f55149e67a283132d🔍
Tired of seeing this book filtered through midwits who think it's just "Le Incel Manifesto". The title is literally the thesis (Extension of the domain of the struggle), you retards. It's not *about* "la misère sexuelle", that's just the final, most brutal battlefield.

The book is a clinical diagnosis of late-stage liberal society.

The Left and Feminism are portrayed as completely fucking useless because they're fighting the last war.
>Feminists in the book are a cope-ideology. The "deux boudins" pretend clothing isn't for seduction because they have zero capital on the seduction market. It's a denial of reality.
>The Left (syndicates, socialists) is obsolete. They're still bickering about wages while the real suffering is metaphysical, affective, and sexual. For the narrator, the strike is a pure nuisance, one more obstacle in an already absurd world. The strikers and their "commandos" are an irrational force that only increases the general entropy. They have literally zero answers for a guy like Tisserand.

The true horror is the "normal" people who are the active agents of this decay.
>Catherine Lechardoy: turns her sexual frustration into raw professional aggression. She extends the struggle herself because it's the only game she can win.
>Véronique: the ultimate product of therapy-culture. "Healed" by psychoanalysis into a black hole of narcissism who sees her ex's suicide attempt as "emotional blackmail" and a "nuisance".
>These aren't villains, they're what the system produces and considers "healthy".

And let's not forget the corporate world, which is just a sanitized version of a fucking knife fight.
>The narrator's job consists of navigating a minefield of petty tyrants and sociopaths.
>Schnäbele isn't a manager, he's a predator marking his territory. He humiliates his subordinates for sport, as a pure display of power. Tisserand is just collateral damage in his pathetic psychodrama.
>The Ministry meetings are a Kafkaesque nightmare. The "Théoricien" wields jargon not to communicate, but to dominate and exclude. Every interaction is a subtle power play, a jab, a move to establish dominance.
>The struggle is so total that even simple human interaction is impossible. The narrator and Tisserand are constantly on the defensive, trying to survive presentations to people who are actively hostile and looking for any reason to tear them down.
>The office is just as much a zone of competition and brutal exclusion as the nightclub. The only difference is that the currency isn't beauty, but bullshit. The atomization of society is proven by the fact that the narrator's professional life is a series of meaningless, hostile encounters with human-shaped obstacles.
Replies: >>24518729 >>24518734 >>24519185 >>24519199 >>24520392 >>24521172 >>24521645 >>24523091 >>24523685 >>24524047
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 12:44:46 AM No.24518729
>>24518627 (OP)
You put more thought into the novel than Houellebecq himself did.
Replies: >>24518766
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 12:47:33 AM No.24518734
>>24518627 (OP)
He was so based when he was young and then he became a cringe boomer retard.
Replies: >>24518738 >>24522439
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 12:49:41 AM No.24518738
>>24518734
He always seemed very slow brained in his interviews
Replies: >>24518741
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 12:52:05 AM No.24518741
>>24518738
He's calm and easy going, not everyone needs to talk like a spitfire annoying schizo like ben shapiro.
Replies: >>24518782
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 1:00:08 AM No.24518766
240px-Michel_Houellebecq
240px-Michel_Houellebecq
md5: f45b79e690022c12ab55ea1d3055ce46🔍
>>24518729
Not at all, it is clear from the novel that even if Tisserand and the narrators suffer from a sexual and emotional point of view, they are above all facing the incredible hostility of French society. Hostility from the narrator's work colleagues but also from all political leftist structures in 1990 the socialists/feminists/Lacanians who are decried throughout the novel etc... were incredibly powerful in France
Replies: >>24519100
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 1:03:36 AM No.24518782
>>24518741
There's a difference between being calm and easy going and spending half your time trying to remember how to speak. I would know, I do the same and I am not particularly intelligent
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 2:40:55 AM No.24519100
>>24518766
I always thought it as a scathing crotoque of the leftist idealization of humanity. They think that if society is just structured in such a way then people will just be happy. It also showcases just how much they don't actually care about anything beyond themselves. People who don't fit well into their standards are nothing more than dirt to them.
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 2:59:38 AM No.24519151
When the novel first came out people saw him as a leftist critiquing the neoliberal society of his time
It's ironic how now he's seen as a right wing author
Replies: >>24519291
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 3:03:05 AM No.24519161
1658771262938-1
1658771262938-1
md5: dfb5debb9c9f0b416de921e7d8ea7e4f🔍
>the real suffering is metaphysical, affective, and sexual
you are a pathetic little fag
Replies: >>24520366
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 3:13:01 AM No.24519185
>>24518627 (OP)
>le competition exists in a lot of places
very novel insight
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 3:19:43 AM No.24519199
>>24518627 (OP)
Of Hollabackgirl's shit is redundant if you browse /pol/ and/ or /r9k/ for a week. I guess it's for bluepilled normalfag liberals who don't know about this site.
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 3:52:01 AM No.24519291
>>24519151
That's not true at all, leftists in France were shocked by his cynical commentaries on psychoanalysis and feminism. There are still articles made by "academics" (basically lefties in daycare) criticizing Whatever
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 4:00:04 AM No.24519314
holl
holl
md5: e9b471269b3c7195b28048c498eaa66b🔍
i like this qoute from him about how he thinks the damage is done and nothing can change, but you can document it.

feels more like a pessimist than right winger
Replies: >>24519584
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 6:24:11 AM No.24519584
>>24519314
Skepticism is an archetype of right-wing thought. Hume, Burckhardt, Schopenhauer...
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 2:49:16 PM No.24520366
be844b1db649001a5bc1d48b52069c4d
be844b1db649001a5bc1d48b52069c4d
md5: fbf82ce44e816fc70ba67b163ec82c86🔍
>>24519161
>You WILL give up all valuable and meaningful experiences of life
>You WILL give up on intimacy, relationships, founding a family
>You WILL work 24/7 in a shitty BS job and participate in the rat race and be a fucking crab towards your colleagues
>just grind anon
>man up
Replies: >>24520382
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 2:53:55 PM No.24520382
>>24520366
you can also kill yourself, or do whatever else you want in this wonderful world
Replies: >>24523096
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 2:59:06 PM No.24520392
>>24518627 (OP)
Very good takes anon, as a frenchoid myself, I never understood why the english-speaking translators felt the NEED to dumb down the actual title like that.
It’s like they went
>uuuhhhh lots of long french words, so hard to translate… uuuhh whatever…
>wait… bloody brilliant
Replies: >>24520416
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 3:16:40 PM No.24520416
>>24520392
OP here I am also French
English-speaking audiences do not understand how realistic Whatever is and how it reflects French society. What characterizes life in modern French society is struggle in all areas of life, and therefore an "extension of the domain of struggle". The narrator constantly faces his sociopathic managers, bureaucracy, strikes, hostility from feminist and left-wing movements, etc. We then realize that the idea that Whatever is a novel about "sexual misery" is superficial.
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 8:26:12 PM No.24521172
>>24518627 (OP)
>>Feminists in the book are a cope-ideology. The "deux boudins" pretend clothing isn't for seduction because they have zero capital on the seduction market. It's a denial of reality.
But even attractive women pretend to wear sexy clothing for themselves. IIRC in 'The Elementary Particles' feminism is portrayed as a ploy to allow certain (elite) men greater access to sex. In a way a woman that thinks that she is empowered because she wears a skimpy dress has inadvertently turned herself into a sex object to be consumed by men. Another interesting aspect of the world that Houellebecq describes is the rampant consumerism, the people who spend their leisure time consuming products in order to feel like differentiated. One of my favourite bits of his is when he writes out an advertisement in full:
>The next day I didn't go to work. For no precise reason; I simply didn't fancy it. Squatting on the moquette I leafed through some mail order catalogues. In a brochure put out by the Galeries Lafayette I found an interesting description of human beings, under the title Today's People: After a really full day they snuggle down into a deep sofa with sober lines (Steiner, Roset, Cinna). To a jazz tune they admire the style of their Dhurries carpets, the gaiety of their wall coverings (Patrick Frey). Ready to set off for a frenzied set of tennis, towels await them in the bathroom (Yves SaintLaurent, Ted Lapidus). And it's before a dinner with intimate friends in their kitchens created by Daniel Hechter or Primrose Bordier that they'll remake the world.
Replies: >>24521264
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 8:58:51 PM No.24521264
>>24521172
>But even attractive women pretend to wear sexy clothing for themselves
In any case, it's a way to gain more power. The narrator implies that the two boudins' ideology is a posture, an attempt to redefine the rules of a game in which they are losers. For the narrator, their feminism is simply a solipsism that cuts itself off from the reality of interaction and the desire of the other i.e a cope .
Replies: >>24521360
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 9:37:46 PM No.24521360
>>24521264
True. See also how women tell each other how beautiful they are, especially when they aren't.
Anonymous
7/4/2025, 11:42:44 PM No.24521645
>>24518627 (OP)
Why would I read this when this is just the world we live in now
Replies: >>24521835
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 12:49:49 AM No.24521835
>>24521645
cause it's a kino and funny book desu
Replies: >>24522426
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 6:59:38 AM No.24522426
>>24521835
His humour is the only thing that gets you through his books
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 7:09:23 AM No.24522439
>>24518734
>young
he was like 38 when it was published.
Replies: >>24523085
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 1:16:49 PM No.24523085
>>24522439
38 is still cutting your milk teeth in writer years
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 1:20:12 PM No.24523091
>>24518627 (OP)
>The plot concerns a depressed and isolated computer programmer who tries to convince a colleague to murder a young woman who rejected the colleague's sexual advances.
tfw the plot is just your life
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 1:23:10 PM No.24523096
>>24520382
>you can also kill yourself, or do whatever else you want in this wonderful world
i cant do anything because everything I want to do is illegal or a herculian effort for something that was given a few centuries ago
Replies: >>24523673 >>24523922
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 6:40:15 PM No.24523673
>>24523096
you would've been a loser in the middle ages as well bucko
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 6:43:33 PM No.24523685
>>24518627 (OP)
Oh yeah? That's interesting, but... I'm just not gonna read it!
Replies: >>24523878
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 8:01:00 PM No.24523878
>>24523685
You should, its a good book
Replies: >>24523886
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 8:05:00 PM No.24523886
>>24523878
In seriousness, I'll get around to Submission eventually and go from there if I like him
Replies: >>24524319
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 8:16:02 PM No.24523922
>>24523096
>muh effort
killing yourself is easy
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 9:04:34 PM No.24524047
>>24518627 (OP)
I always thought this was the essential Houellebecq book, not the Elementary Particles. It's as close to a thesis as you can get from him and incredibly sardonic
Replies: >>24524319
Anonymous
7/5/2025, 11:11:39 PM No.24524319
>>24523886
>>24524047
The novels that followed Whatever are simply crap. Whatever was written by a Houellebecq unknown to the general public, frustrated and revolted by the society he lives in. Filled with bile, he wrote a short 200-page novel in which we see a sincere and lucid author about the world. The novels that followed had a distinctly commercial aim.
Personally, I find Submission a pathetic novel that tried to ride the Islamophobic wave in France this year. And I mean, it's just a cheap way to attack Muslims, Houellebecq openly declares himself anti-Muslim and racist. Besides, Submission was supposed to be a futuristic novel for 2022, but of course, nothing happened and Houellebecq showed himself to be completely out of touch with reality.

>Whereas, upon its publication, Submission was already outdated and out of touch with reality. A "visionary" novel contradicted by the facts on the very day of its release, and which clearly portrayed Houellebecq as a false prophet, that's bad news.