Michel Houellebecq against Michel Foucault: Contemporary representations of political Islam in France

Abstract

In Michel Foucault’s interviews and journalistic texts on the Iranian Revolution, written from late 1978 to mid-1979, and in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015), both authors seem to present positive representations of political Islam. This paper aims to argue this interpretation relies on a double mistake: Foucault did not create the notion of political spirituality as an alternative to the crisis of Liberal and Marxist political systems, as his critics wrongly accused him, but as a concept capable of describing the aspirations of Iranian people witnessed in the travels he made to that country. Nevertheless, Houellebecq did retake, in Submission, this supposedly positive representation of political Islam by the main theorist of French Theory, in order to present ironically the Islamization as the solution to the economic and sexual crisis of contemporary French society and, thus, to denounce the heirs of that representation as collaborationists.