Counter-terrorism feeds terrorism – put Michel Houellebecq’s play back on
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Version 0 of 1. Ever since the publication of his latest novel, Submission, it seems Michel Houellebecq has succeeded in achieving what in psychoanalytical theory is known as “the return of the repressed”. It is not by chance that the last cover of Charlie Hebdo before the deadly terrorist attacks carried a caricature of Houellebecq, with the strapline “In 2015 I lose my teeth, in 2022, I will do Ramadan.” What happened as tragedy in France repeated itself as farce in Croatia this week. A play, based on Michel Houellebecq’s novel Les Particules Élémentaires, was to open in Dubrovnik in July. But the Croatian interior ministry decided to cancel the premiere for security reasons after the police determined that staging the play would present a security risk. Although the play wasn’t based on Submission, the interior ministry estimated that Houellebecq’s attitude towards Islam could provoke a terrorist act in Croatia, a country hardly known for its history of Islamist terrorism. Croatian officials may have overreacted, yet one can easily imagine this sort of thing happening in any other European country today. And it’s precisely this sort of reaction that proves Houellebecq right. What happened as tragedy in France repeated itself as farce in Croatia this week Houellebecq has made some truly idiotic remarks about Islam in the past, such as “Islam is the most idiotic religion.” But Submission is not an idiotic book, and certainly not an Islamophobic one. His main thesis, overlooked in most reviews of his book, is that the submission of France to Islam that he imagines taking place in the future is in no case a violent event, but rather a voluntary submission. And – here comes the main point – it doesn’t come from outside, such as from a terrorist threat or immigrants, but from within. The submission – what Islamophobes such as the German politician and polemicist Thilo Sarrazin call an Abschaffung or “abolition” – comes from the decadence of the west. Houellebecq draws a parallel with the situation before the first world war: “This Europe, which was the culmination of human civilisation, committed suicide, which lasted several decades. At that time, anarchist and nihilist movements flourished across Europe, invoking violence, abandonment of every moral law. And then, several years later, it was concluded by the madness of the first world war, a madness that can’t be justified by anything. Freud was right, Thomas Mann even more: if France and Germany, the two most advanced and most civilised nations in the world, could engage in this mindless slaughter, it was because Europe was already dead.” What we have in Houellebecq’s ficitional scenario of Europe’s future in 2022 is a new fin de siècle: if France and Germany, the two most advanced nations in Europe, can engage in mindless austerity measures and financial dictatorship, impoverishing nations and opening the way for Islamism or foreign capital, it is because Europe is dying. What Submission shows is that the true threat to Europe comes from the inside. It is not the poor and violent immigrants from the banlieues that will penetrate the centres of our cities and destroy the hearts of liberal democracies. The centres of our cities are already committing a slow suicide on their own. When you leave 1,000 immigrants to drown on your shores in just one week, it is clear that the very principles on which western liberal democracies are supposed to be founded (Liberté, égalité, fraternité) are decaying. Or, to put it differently, each time a drone kills a “collateral victim” in Pakistan or Yemen, we create even more fertile ground for the further recruitment of new terrorists. It is in this way that the cancellation of Houellebecq’s play in Dubrovnik marks a “return of the repressed”: it embodies the repression of our own problems concerning immigration, integration and Islam. As we know from psychoanalysis, if you repress all that you can’t face in reality, it will probably hit back one day. And it will hit back hard. In the case of Croatia, it is precisely the removal of the play that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy and inspire terrorist acts in the future. The fight against terrorism feeds more terrorism. One way out of Europe’s submission would be to put the play back on. |