{"id":4415,"date":"2021-08-21T23:17:01","date_gmt":"2021-08-21T20:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yalpertem.com\/blog\/?p=4415"},"modified":"2021-08-22T09:25:53","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T06:25:53","slug":"some-abstracts-on-houellebecq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yalpertem.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/21\/some-abstracts-on-houellebecq\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Article Abstracts on Houellebecq’s Serotonin"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been some time since I read Houellebecq’s earlier novels. A week ago, I read Serotonin (2019) with bewilderment and discomfort. While trying to gather my senses, I thought I can store some ideas about his literature here, maybe to come back in the future. His interview<\/a> after the publication of the novel in Denmark was also interesting. I was unable to notice the weight of the agricultural crisis in France in the novel before encountering the interview. Also, the story of the initial disappearance from one’s own life overlapped with the villain of the documentary I recently watched, Don’t F**K with Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer (2019).<\/p>\n

Random keywords: depression, sexuality, capitalism, agriculture, commodification, memory, Europe<\/p>\n

\n

Article:<\/strong><\/a> Gut feelings: depression as an embodied and affective phenomenon in Houellebecq\u2019s Serotonin
\nAuthor(s):<\/strong> Jenny Slatman<\/span><\/a>, Inge van de Ven
\nAbstract: <\/strong><\/span>Current debates about the possible causes of depression reinforce the age-old body\u2013mind dualism: while some claim that depression is caused by psychological or societal stress, others underline that it results from a shortage of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the central nervous system. This paper shows that Michel Houellebecq\u2019s latest novel\u00a0Serotonin<\/em>\u00a0can be read as an account of depression that goes beyond this body\u2013mind dualism. Moreover, we will argue that his way of narrating invites us to reconsider the restorative power of narrative in \u2018pathography,\u2019 a genre that is a primary focus within medical humanities. The first section of the paper discusses, while drawing on Wilson\u2019s work on new materialism, that although the title of the novel\u00a0Serotonin<\/em>\u00a0may suggest that Houellebecq takes sides with those who believe that depression is a brain disease, the protagonist of the novel suffers mainly from his gut feelings, which affects his entire embodied existence. Against the background of Merleau-Ponty\u2019s philosophy, the second section specifies this existential disruption in terms of an embodied \u2018I cannot.\u2019 In the third section, we make clear how Houellebecq\u2019s way of narrating\u2014plotless and episodic\u2014reinforces these embodied feelings of incapacity. The final section, then, traces how Houellebecq, by means of his style of writing and his choice of themes, succeeds in transferring gut feelings onto the reader. If illness narratives aim at sharing experiences of illness, the \u2018narrative\u2019 of depression, so we argue, had better take the form of an anti-narrative or a chaos story. Indeed, Houellebecq\u2019s anti-narrative succeeds in passing on to the reader the experience of a debilitating gut feeling, and a gradual loss of grip that manifests itself as a temporal and spatial disorientation.<\/p>\n

Article:<\/strong><\/a> \u00c0 la recherche de l\u2019amour perdu : S\u00e9rotonine de Michel Houellebecq
\nAuthor(s):<\/strong> Eva Vold\u0159ichov\u00e1 Ber\u00e1nkov\u00e1
\nAbstract:<\/strong> Serotonin (2019) undoubtedly represents Michel Houellebecq\u2019s most \u201cProustian\u201d novel. His narrator, a forty-six-year-old agricultural engineer, who became desperately impotent by a regular absorption of \u201cnew-generation anti-depressants\u201d, scrutinizes his \u201cphallocentric memory\u201d to revisit all his missed appointments with the great Romantic Love that could have saved him. Our analysis proves that Serotonin is not just a \u201cprefiguration of the Yellow vests movement\u201d, an \u201cillustration of European agricultural crisis\u201d or a \u201cconservative flirt with Christianism\u201d (which commentators are accustomed to identify in Houellebecq\u2019s work) but also a somewhat astonishing reflection on the functioning of memory and the mechanisms of love.<\/p>\n

Article:<\/strong><\/a> S\u00e9rotonine ou la qu\u00eate du bonheur selon Michel Houellebecq
\nAuthor(s):<\/strong> Ruth Amar
\nAbstract:<\/strong> In this article I will analyze the quest of happiness in Serotonin, the latest book by Michel Houellebecq. But first, it will be necessary to consider the aspects of happiness as they appear in his work. Being an avid and intellectual reader, Houellebecq summons many authors in his novels, which he quotes more or less literally. Two of them, namely Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, and Schopenhauer, the spiritual master of Houellebecq, are seemingly the major influences of the conception of happiness in the work. Apparently, these two philosophers have nothing in common, but it is possible to identify some similarities in relation with the idea of happiness expressed in Houellebecq\u2019s novels. In his latest book Serotonin, the interest in happiness is even more precise, but this time, it is no longer a question of philosophy: the scientific title emerges in the form of a hormone: a neurotransmitter influencing our mood, used in antidepressants for better mental health. Does this mean that Houellebecq has given up? Or is it, on the contrary, a new effort of resistance? In this article I will try to answer the question and understand if the quest for happiness persists in his latest novel.<\/p>\n

Article:<\/strong><\/a> Get Hard or Die Trying: Impotence and the Displacement of the White Male in Michel Houellebecq’s S\u00e9rotonine
\nAuthor(s):<\/strong> Andr\u00e9 Pettman
\nAbstract:<\/strong> Taking up Paul Preciado’s theories in his book Testo Junkie (2013) concerning contemporary biocapitalism, this essay argues that Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, S\u00e9rotonine (2019), represents a radical move away from the hegemony of the white cis-male, heterosexual body depicted in his earlier literary corpus. The narrator of S\u00e9rotonine is stripped of his sexual capacity by an antidepressant that makes him impotent. Once unable to escape the stimuli and commodities designed to incite pleasure, thus leaving the body in a constant state of arousal, Houellebecq’s male subject is now unequivocally portrayed as being flaccid. Rather than disclose a sense of reconciliation or resignation with the market, the novel reveals an expulsion from it entirely. The narrator’s futile attempts to reinstate his male dominance further demonstrate the totalizing presence of sex, pleasure, and pharmaceutical drugs in Houellebecq’s novels and attest to the notion that the once-hegemonic male body of his literary universe is now simply hanging on to life itself as contemporary biocapitalism careens forward on its never-ending quest to maximize pleasure and desire.<\/p>\n

Article:<\/strong><\/a> A Matter of Life and Death: Michel Houellebecq’s Vibrant Materialism
\nAuthor(s):<\/strong> Gai Farchi
\nAbstract:<\/strong> Michel Houellebecq’s fiction is often perceived as essentially materialistic, in the sense that it follows the decline of humanity in the loss of transcendence, while every human interaction, including love and sex, is reduced to the logic of the capitalist market. Taking on a new materialistic approach, this article aims to challenge this presumption with readings that emphasize the vibrant, subversive nature of materiality in Houellebecq’s fiction, particularly in the novels\u00a0La carte et le territoire<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0S\u00e9rotonine<\/i>. Drawing on recent new materialistic thought, I show that the shared destiny Houellebecq ascribes to both humans and objects under the logic of late capitalism makes, at times, this interdependence challenging to political economy. Vibrant matter, or the ex-nihilo rise of the “thing” from within the “object”, becomes the ultimate rescue of both the human and the non-human in his novels. This perspective enables us to conceive of Houellebecq not merely as a pessimistic voice lamenting the decline of the human, but one that presents affirmative posthuman ethics, undermining the circulation of commodities, and of people\u00a0as commodities<\/i>, from the margins of the system itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been some time since I read Houellebecq’s earlier novels. A week ago, I read Serotonin (2019) with bewilderment and discomfort. While trying to gather my senses, I thought I can store some ideas about his literature here, maybe to come back in the future. His interview after the publication of the novel in Denmark … Continue reading Some Article Abstracts on Houellebecq’s Serotonin<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[671],"tags":[52,680],"class_list":["post-4415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-michel-houellebecq","tag-serotonin"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WYIs-19d","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2728,"url":"https:\/\/yalpertem.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/20\/sollers-merkezdeki-houellebecq\/","url_meta":{"origin":4415,"position":0},"title":"Sollers, Merkez’deki Houellebecq","author":"yalpertem","date":"20 November 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"\" TA\u015eRALILAR Psikanalize kar\u015f\u0131 d\u00fc\u015fmanl\u0131k\u00a0normal, ama bazen tuhaf boyutlara ula\u015f\u0131yor. 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