Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom

Download or read book Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 7 January 2015, the day of the murderous attack on the offices of the Paris satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the cover of the current issue showed a drunken Michel Houellebecq in a wizard’s cap making two prophecies: “In 2016 I will lose my teeth. In 2022 I will observe Ramadan.” Houellebecq had previously described Islam as “the stupidest of religions.” But on that day, as terrorists sought to bring the justice of Islam to blasphemers for whom Michel Houellebecq was insufficiently anti-Islamic, Houellebecq’s novel Submission, depicting the democratic conquest of France by the Muslim Brotherhood, was published by Flammarion. In this collection, an international cast of authorities on politics and literature discuss the meaning and unprecedented impact of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission.