The philosopher Auguste Comte haunts Michel Houellebecq’s body of work. The characters in his novels are often obsessive readers of Comte, a pretext for Houellebecq to weave substantial excerpts from the 19th-century figurehead of “positivism” into his narratives. At times, the novelist doesn’t even attempt to provide diegetic justification for inserting fragments of Comte’s work into his texts, most often in the form of epigraphs, and nor should he.
Houellebecq has long sought to delve into humanity’s “metaphysical mutations,” a term he coined in the prologue of The Elementary Particles (1998), taking inspiration from the Comte’s “metaphysical spirit”—a stage of knowledge characterized by the search for abstract causes that supersedes the earlier “theological spirit,” rooted in analogical thinking (allegory, parable).
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