The Map,the Territory,and the Impossibility of Painting a Priest

Introduction

Anyway, we’re at a point where success in market terms justifies and validates anything, replacing all the theories. (Houellebecq, 2011: 135)

We were told, more than a few times, that modernity means increasing secularization, that it inevitably brings with it disenchantment and the disappearance of religion. And then again, seen in the prism of contemporary troubles, if there is anything that has not disappeared or ‘returned’ it is religion, to the extent that our ‘civilization’ today defines itself with reference to religion, accepting it as the main yardstick to differentiate itself from others. But how, through which mechanism, is this ‘return’ of religion experienced?

In so far as it is an experience of the sacred, of the holy, religion is about purification and immunization, about keeping the sacred ‘intact, safe, unscathed’ (Derrida, 2002: 61). Thus in modernity there appears to be an antagonism between the ‘miracle’ (religious faith) and the ‘machine’ (capitalist technology and science). The capitalist techno-science threatens religion with abstraction and disassociation, with uprooting, de-localization, formalization, objectification, telecommunication, and so on (Derrida, 2002: 43). Hence, in order to protect itself, to immunize itself, religion seeks to reject capitalist technoscience. The paradox, however, is that while reacting antagonistically to technoscience, religion also, at the same time, re-affirmatively outbids itself. While rejecting science it also appropriates science, and thus faith and science, miracle and machine, ‘overlap, mingle, contaminate each another without ever merging’ (Derrida, 2002: 63). Religion’s ‘drive to remain unscathed’ is therefore ‘auto-immune’: it is as if its zeal for immunity leads to the loss of immunity. The global ‘return’ of religion today takes place against the background of auto-immunity, in the form of a ‘strange alliance of Christianity, as the experience of death of God, and tele-technoscientific capitalism’ (Derrida, 2002: 52). Derrida calls this auto-immune process which is simultaneously hegemonic and in the process of exhausting itself ‘globalatinization’ – ‘in the process of exhausting itself’, for the ‘return’ of religion brings with it a ‘trivialization’ through which the core of religion, faith, is increasingly emptied out (see de Vries, 2005: 367, 370).

This development is mirrored in contemporary fiction. In The Possibility of an Island (Houellebecq, 2005), for instance, the protagonist Daniel flirts with the Elohimite sect, a cult religion that promises its members material immortality through cloning. Houellebecq stresses in an interview that this sect is modelled on a real one, the Raël, which is ‘a mix of total optimism about scientific progress and nonmoralism about sex’ (in Hunnewell, 2011). The religion of the Elohimite seems to be reduced to economy, not only in the sense that its spiritual dimension is minimalized, but also because of the ‘excessive’ emphasis it puts on rituals and material organization (see Houellebecq, 2005: 266). Indeed, ‘it seems as if the Elohimite religion is Christianity made accessible for a 21st-century world, materialized’ (Lloyd, 2009: 94). Only, as Derrida would add, this process brings with it a trivialization, an emptying out of faith, its reduction to ritual. If the core of religion is faith without ritual, the Elohimite religion, the only possible form of religion in Houellebecq’s late modernity, is ritual without faith.

In this article I focus on the ‘strange alliance’ between capitalism and religion through an allegorical double reading of social theory and fiction. The attempt at seeing capitalism as religion is an interesting intervention into the theoretical debate on contemporary society. Equally interesting is the popular discussion of religion in fiction. In this respect Michel Houellebecq’s recent novel The Map and the Territory is particularly remarkable. Thus I attempt to establish a dialogue between social theory and Houellebecq’s novel, allowing them to fertilize each other. Reality and fiction, after all, are not opposing realms; fiction functions as a support for the real.

If The Map and the Territory is a ‘novel of ideas’ (Kipnis, 2012), the pivotal idea that serves as its meta-plot is the total subsumption of the society under capital. Houellebecq’s is a late modern world in which capital tends to replace, like a map, the actual experience of life, the territory. A world in which everything is modelled on the logic of businesses, capitalism has taken the place of religion. As the novel gradually takes this idea to its logical extremes we find ourselves within a dystopia even darker than The Possibility of an Island, which was praised as ‘the first great, and thus far unrivalled dystopia for the liquid, deregulated, consumption-obsessed, individualized era’ (Bauman, 2012: 21).

All Houellebecq novels focus on contemporary problems, including the misery caused by commodification processes and the consequent breakdown of social bonds. Religion, too, is a significant topic always present in his work. In this regard Houellebecq sets the scene pretty much in the prism of classical sociology. Thus his is a society in which the processes of commodification has resulted in disenchantment (Weber) and anomy (Durkheim), a world in which the loss of the sacred brought with it a ‘one-dimensional’ life trapped in the iron cage of instrumental reason. As a consequence of accelerating commodification, a permanent condition of modernity, the totality of social activities is subsumed under a system of generalized market transactions. In such a society everything is exchangeable; one can pay for ‘Whatever’ (which is the title of his first novel). And so bonding outside the market is impossible. There is no outside:

I associate very little with other human beings …. The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible. (Houellebecq, 1998: 14)

Even religion has become a commodity, whose ‘introductory offer’ is the belief in eternal life (Houellebecq, in Houellebecq and Lévy, 2011: 166). However, The Map and the Territory distils the relationship between religion and capitalism anew, and this relationship, together with the political questions it invites, will be the leitmotiv for my considerations here.

The protagonist of The Map and The Territory is a commercially successful photographer and painter, Jed Martin. Like all other Houellebecq characters he is a weary loner who ‘never totally signed up’ to his own existence (Houellebecq, 2011: 290). Thus he spends all his time working. A hard-working artist, his greatest ambition is to represent reality as accurately as possible, ‘to give an objective description of the world – a goal whose illusory nature he rarely sensed’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 28). Initially he specializes in photographing manufactured objects. Then he starts to take pictures of Michelin maps, which plays a decisive role in his artistic career. His photographs sell for high prices to Chinese, Russian and Indian rich. But he achieves global fame when he starts to paint ‘Professions’ – a series portraying some typical professions, through which Martin studies contemporary society, trying to give an image of its functioning on the basis of the notion of work.

What defines a man? What’s the question you first ask a man, when you want to find out about him? In some societies, you ask him first if he’s married, if he has children; in our society, we ask first what his profession is. It’s his place in the productive process, and not his status as reproducer, that above all defines Western man. (Houellebecq, 2011: 101)

Work is the celebration of capitalist religion (see Benjamin, 1996: 288). It is perhaps due to the centrality of this idea that the book opens with describing Jed working on a painting that belongs to the ‘Professions’ series: Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market.

Necromancy and Pornography

Jeff Koons had just got up from his chair, enthusiastically throwing his arms out in front of him. Sitting opposite him, on a white leather sofa partly draped with silks and slightly hunched up, Damien Hirst seemed to be about to express an objection; his face was flushed, morose. Both of them were wearing black suits – Koons’s had fine pinstripes – white shirts and black ties. Between them, on the coffee table, was a basket of candied fruits that neither paid any attention to. Hirst was drinking a Budweiser Light. (Houellebecq, 2011: 1)

The painting describes the two best-selling artists in a luxurious hotel, perhaps in Qatar, or Dubai, discussing wealth and the art market. Hirst is painted skilfully, in a straight-forward manner, as a brutal, cynical rebel-but-rich artist ‘pursuing an anguished work on death’. But we realize that Jed has problems with painting Koons: ‘It was as difficult as painting a Mormon pornographer’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 2). Finally, he decides that he is ‘making a truly shit painting’ and destroys it (Houellebecq, 2011: 13). In spite of its destruction, however, this painting functions as a vanishing mediator, for through it Houellebecq defines the spirit of our times: concern with death (Hirst) and pornography (Koons).

First a few words on pornography. Since bonding outside the market is impossible in the society Houellebecq describes, love can no longer exist. Its disappearance is grounded in ‘the materialist idea that we are alone, we live alone and we die alone. That’s not very compatible with love’ (Houellebecq in Hunnewell, 2011). ‘Love … Love is rare. Didn’t you know that?’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 84). And if love is an exception, the rule is economy. What matters most is therefore one’s market value in the economy of love. Thus Houellebecq writes, with an allusion to the Communist Manifesto:

Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market’. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system, certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment in misery. In a totally liberal sexual system, certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. (Houellebecq, 1998: 99)

Pornography, in such a society, is the only way out for sexually pauperized people who demand ‘sexual social democracy’ (Houellebecq, 2001: 260, 265). Why pornography, why social democracy? Let us consult a beautiful fragment by Agamben, ‘The Idea of Communism’ (Agamben, 1995). Here Agamben states that pornography is basically parasitic on ‘the utopia of a classless society’ (p. 73). But the happiness it depicts is always ‘episodic’: it always describes ‘a story, a moment seized on’ against the background of a normality which is, in the same movement, affirmed (p. 74; see also Prozorov, 2011: 77). Paradoxically, therefore, in pornography the utopian promise of a classless society is coupled with an ‘insistence on class markings’ which affirm, rather than negate, normality (Agamben, 1995: 73). Hence Agamben compares pornography to social democracy: both suspend the very promise they represent.

The ‘promise’ at work here is profanation. Classical sociology (Durkheim, for instance) defines religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions – beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single community called a church’ (Durkheim, 2001: 46). In its originary sense, ‘sacred’ meant removing things from the domain of free use and commerce so that they could not be sold or bought nor held in as private property, that is, to ‘consecrate’ them for specific use in the religious domain. ‘Profane’, on this account, indicates returning that which is sacred to free use, making it common again (Agamben, 2007: 73). As such, religion is primarily what ‘removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere’ (p. 74). It is thus separation of the sacred and the profane that is the true paradigm of religion, not their relating together. ‘Religio’ is what keeps the profane and the sacred distinct; profanation, in turn, is what ignores and thus neutralizes this separation by ‘playing’ with the sacred, putting it into new, ‘inappropriate’ uses, and thus freeing humanity from the domain of the sacred without necessarily abolishing it (p. 76).

It is this profanatory potential that the apparatus of pornography seeks to neutralize. What it captures is the human capacity to let erotic behaviours idle, to profane them, by detaching them from their immediate ends. But while these behaviours thus open themselves to a different possible use, which concerns not so much the pleasure of the partner as a new collective use of sexuality, pornography intervenes at this point to block and divert the profanatory intention. The solitary and desperate consumption of the pornographic image thus replaces the promise of a new use. (Agamben, 2007: 91)

In pornography the promise of profanation (of delivering the human body from the uses ascribed to it) is coupled with the production of a pornographic body. This is the reason why most Houellebecq characters’ search for happiness through the consumption of pornography leads them back to frustration and loneliness.

However, pornography is only one aspect of contemporary life depicted in the novel. When Jed goes to Zurich to visit a euthanasia clinic where his father died, he discovers that the clinic and a brothel are situated almost next to one another. Suffering and death are sold together with pleasure and sex on the same ‘banal or sad street’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 252). Real life, in other words, is itself like a ‘shit’ painting. Yet Jed also notices here that the clinic is more busily attended than the brothel: ‘the market values of suffering and death had become superior to that of pleasure and sex’, which also explains why Damien Hirst had recently replaced Jeff Koons as the top of the global art market (Houellebecq, 2011: 252). For this reason Hirst has a more special place in The Map and the Territory, the first part of which gives a description of neoliberal social decay in France. The real reason behind Jed’s financial success following his exhibition ‘The Map is More Interesting than the Territory’ is, in fact, fetishization or mortification of the territory. Because:

for the first time in France since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the countryside had become trendy again. French society seemed to suddenly become aware of this through its major dailies and magazines, in the few weeks which followed Jed’s vernissage. And the Michelin map, an utterly unnoticed utilitarian object, became in the space of those very weeks the privileged vehicle for initiation into what Libération was to shamelessly call the ‘magic of the terroir’. (Houellebecq, 2011: 54)

In this ‘territory’ obsessed with dead identity traditional inhabitants have been replaced by incomers from urban areas who are motivated by business interests and had ‘a precise knowledge of the laws of the market’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 282). Thanks to this process, the post-industrial France displays economic ‘robustness’ but gradually becomes a ‘tourist country’ (p. 283):

From Duisburg to Dortmund, from Bochum and Gelsenkirchen, most of the old steel factories had been transformed into places for exhibitions, shows, and concerts, at the same time as the local authorities tried to set up an industrial tourism, based on the re-creation of the working-class way of life at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, the whole region, with its blast furnaces, slag heaps, abandoned railway tracks where freight wagons rusted, its lines of identical and neat and tidy terraced houses, sometimes brightened up by allotments, was like a conservatory of the first industrial age in Europe. (Houellebecq, 2011: 291)

Factories turning into museums; this idea brings us back to capitalism. Capitalism per definition sets into motion a process of consecration, through which objects are separated from their use and function as the embodiment of a fetish object in the spectacle. Consequently the social world gradually turns into a museum and as spirituality (art, philosophy, religion …) are ‘docilely withdrawn’ into museums, even whole cities become ‘World Heritage sites’ (Agamben, 2007: 84). As such, the museum signifies the impossibility of use, the increasing difficulty of experience in modern culture.

The Museum occupies exactly the space and function once reserved for the Temple as the place of sacrifice. To the faithful in the temple … correspond today the tourists who restlessly travel in a world that has been abstracted into a Museum. (Agamben, 2007: 84)

Whereas the pilgrims’ sacrifice revolved around an exceptional object removed into the sacred sphere, in the tourists’ world, in which everything is commodified, exception becomes the rule. Thus, unlike the faithful who through pilgrimage can mediate the relationship between this world, in which they are strangers, and the divine, ‘true’ world, the tourist’s is an anxious experience with ‘no homeland because they dwell in the pure form of separation’ (Agamben, 2007: 84). Consequently the more tourists travel the more they experience the impossibility of experiencing, the more they become spectators to objects that have become property/commodity, the more they are confronted with their incapability of profaning them (p. 83). In this sense, the becoming museum of the ‘territory’ signifies the impossibility of profanation, the uncanny confrontation with the ‘unprofanable’.

The Church and the Mystic

While working on the ‘Professions’ series, Jed Martin envisions doing a portrait of priests as well. ‘But he had failed, and hadn’t even managed to comprehend the subject’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 61). But why does he fail? Why is he unable to paint a priest? One obvious reason is that all of Jed’s profession paintings express a ‘sensible goodwill, where submission to professional imperatives guaranteed in return … a mixture of financial satisfaction and the gratification of self-esteem’ (p. 61). And since priests today mostly survive ‘in miserable material conditions’ (p. 61), one wouldn’t expect them to be part of the ‘Professions’ series. Yet, on further reflection, this explanation is not really convincing. Not only because the church historically has had close links with wealth and power but also because Jed realizes that he is looking for religion in the wrong place, in theological categories, that is, in the church and in the priest. This brings us to the second part of the novel, and to another painting, Jed’s ‘masterpiece’, where we effectively meet a priest.

The title of Jed’s masterpiece is ‘Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology’. In this painting Jed’s attention turns from manufactured products to their producers. Again, Jed’s style is minimal and exact, reflecting his usual detachment and coldness. In the painting Bill Gates is sitting comfortably in a wicker chair, smiling and spreading his arms out wide while talking to and playing chess with Steve Jobs. Dressed casually, he is ‘relaxed, manifestly happy’. The painting shows ‘a Bill Gates on holiday’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 123).

Let us open a parenthesis related to ‘holiday’ here. It is well known that in Microsoft the employees were ‘paid for playing with computers’ (Salecl, 1998: 171). But this often meant the erosion of the difference between ‘work’ (rule) and ‘play’ (exception). As the exception became the rule the employees tended to work all the time. This brings to mind one of Benjamin’s main points in the fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’:

Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans rêveet sans merci [without dream or mercy]. There are no ‘weekdays.’ There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper. (Benjamin, 1996: 288)

But is it not the case that Bill Gates is often perceived as a symbol of cynicism for he is ‘free of the obsession to hold on to things … he has the ability to let go’ (Sennett, 1998: 62)? In this context The Map and the Territory refers to Gates’ autobiography ‘where he confesses quite plainly that it is not necessarily advantageous for a business to offer the most innovative products’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 124). It might be more profitable to mass produce what others have invented – ‘to observe what the competitors are doing … to let them bring out their products, confront the difficulties inherent in any innovation, and, in a way, surmount the initial problems; then, in a second phase, flood the market by offering low-price copies of the competing products’ (p. 124). In other words, Bill Gates is cynical – but this apparent cynicism is not ‘the true nature of Gates’. His true nature is:

his faith in capitalism, in the mysterious ‘invisible hand’; his absolute, unshakeable conviction that whatever the vicissitudes and apparent counterexamples, the market, at the end of the day, is always right, and that the good of the market is always identical to the general good. It is then that the fundamental truth about Bill Gates appears, as a creature of faith, and it is this faith, this candour of the sincere capitalist, that Jed Martin was able to render by portraying him, arms open wide, warm and friendly, his glasses gleaming in the last rays of the sun setting on the Pacific Ocean. (Houellebecq, 2011: 124)

As a ‘creature of faith’, with a dogmatic belief in the market economy, Bill Gates is the true priest in contemporary society.

In contrast to Bill Gates, in the painting, Steve Jobs appears like an embodiment of Protestant ethics of austerity; ‘nothing Californian’ in his gestures except an ‘expression of disarray’. He looks ill, ‘reminiscent of one of those travelling evangelists who, on finding himself preaching for perhaps the tenth time to a small and indifferent audience, is suddenly filled with doubt’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 124). The same difference is ascertained by the chessboard between the two men, where the game seems to be interrupted ‘in a stage unfavourable to the blacks – namely to Jobs’ (p. 124). Paradoxically, however, at a closer look the viewer notices in Jobs’ eyes a ‘flame common not only to preachers and prophets but also to the inventors so often described by Jules Verne’ (p. 124). Similarly, re-considering the position of the pieces, one

realised that it was not necessarily a losing one; and that Jobs could, by sacrificing his queen, conclude in three moves with an audacious bishop–knight checkmate. Similarly, you had the sense that he could, through the brilliant intuition of a new product, suddenly impose new norms on the market. (Houellebecq, 2011: 124)

If Bill Gates is the priest, Steve Jobs is the mystic/prophetic supplement to the organized religion (capitalism) and its church (the market). Together, the priest and the mystic represent a parallax view of the same religion, sometimes complementing, sometimes hunting each other. ‘Jed Martin could have entitled his painting A Brief History of Capitalism; for that, indeed, is what it was’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 125). This is a beautiful way of saying that today capitalism has become a religion and religion has become capitalism, that one should no longer look for religion in theological categories but in capitalism.

Are we then ‘in a period of transition’ in which old gods have grown old and died ‘and others are not yet born’ (Durkheim, 2001: 321). Or are we, in a more straightforward manner, within a Nietzschean horizon of dying gods and the twilight of idols? At any rate, the enlightened rejection of religion does not amount to a consistent atheism. Indeed, contemporary subjectivities often merely replace monotheistic religions with an earthly, decaf deity, a cult. Towards the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we meet some of Zarathustra’s guests who all think they have ‘unlearned’ from Zarathustra the religious sentiment, the despair that follows from feeling weak in this world and that prompts humans to imagine a transcendent heaven in which pain and antagonism no longer exist. They are therefore in a carnival mood. Yet Nietzsche makes it clear that killing God is not enough to get rid of him. A materialist, hedonist world is prone to new, this-worldly illusions, even new gods and idols. At one point in the carnival, therefore, the noise abruptly stops and, precisely when they think they have overcome it, the crowd falls back upon a religious mood. ‘They have all become pious again, they are praying, they are mad!’ (Nietzsche, 1961: 321). But what they worship is a this-worldly God: an ass. They explain that the ass carries their burden, he is patient and never says ‘No’, indeed he never speaks, and so on. ‘Better to worship God in this shape than in no shape at all’ (p. 322). In Zarathustra, it is the ‘ugliest man’, the passive nihilist, who has murdered God and delivers the tribute to the ass that has ‘created the world after his own image, that is, as stupid as possible’ (p. 322). In the work-centred late capitalist world which Houellebecq describes, too, providence takes its cue from men: the ass is embodied in utilitarianism, and the desire for change, for transfiguration, has disappeared into the cry of the ass. It is in this sense that religion is central in Houellebecq’s work.

Capitalism as Religion

In Politics, Aristotle makes an effort to differentiate between economy and the chērematistikē. That is, between the ‘natural’ form of acquisition, which consists in attaining ‘true wealth’, property or goods that are necessary for the life of the household or the state, on the one hand, and the ‘unnatural’ form of acquisition, which consists in selfish profit gain, on the other (Aristotle, 1995: 23, 326). What we have in the first case is the simple circulation of commodities whereby the household manages the availability of the supply of use-values, by selling and buying commodities. As Marx articulates it, the logic here operates in the form of C-M-C: Commodity is sold for Money in order to buy another Commodity (1976: 252). In the second, ‘unnatural’ case, however, one is solely concerned with money. Here the main objective is no longer to accumulate necessary use-values but to accumulate wealth in the form of money-capital. Aristotle makes two essential points here: first, referring to Midas, he says that money is a ‘nonentity’ that is ‘useless’ and ‘worthless’ in itself (1995: 26). This is also why wealth accumulated only in terms of money is ‘unnatural’. And second, he adds that whereas the art of household management has a natural limit, in this second logic ‘there is no limit to wealth’ (p. 24). That is, with the invention of money, the art of acquisition which was originally focused on necessity and use-values gradually ‘grew into chrematistics, into the art of making money’ (Marx, 1976: 253). Now money becomes both the beginning and the end of the process of exchange: M-C-M. ‘The movement of capital is therefore limitless’ (p. 252).

But the problem is that, despite the differentiation, there is an overlap between the two forms, between ‘economy’ and the ‘Chrematistic’ principle. As Aristotle himself admits, the two modes are ‘not identical yet … not far removed’ (Aristotle, 1995: 24). It is as if what is ‘unnatural’, the accumulation of money-capital ad infinitum, is already at the heart of ‘natural’ oikonomia, and has a potential to become its ultimate aim. The contradiction between the two modes, in other words, remains unsettled. And as such, Aristotle’s discussion serves as locus classicus both for a generic concept of capital and for its moral-ethical critique (Albertsen, 2012: 2).

Weber’s discussion of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is well-known in this context. Since capitalism is a world without value, an inherently nihilistic system, it is constantly in need of moral justification, which can only come to it from outside. This external source is the Protestant ethic, which originally provided capitalism with a religious basis, with a ‘spirit’, although the pact between capitalism and Protestantism has later weakened to the point that ‘victorious capitalism … needs its support no longer’ (Weber, 2003: 181–2). Secularization brings with it disenchantment.

However, theology persists as an active force in modern economy for capitalism and Christianity are structurally linked together. The concept of guilt or debt is particularly relevant in this context; guilt is what establishes the link between capitalism and religion. Seen in the prism of guilt, capitalism has not only found support in religion but it is itself a religion (Benjamin, 1996). Yet, in contrast to other world religions, capitalism is a cult religion which does not expiate but produces guilt:

A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in atonement. (Benjamin, 1996: 288–9)

Just as the religious economy presupposes a guilty god, ‘capitalism as religion’ presupposes a god in debt. It is through the mechanism of debt (credit) that value begets surplus-value, a process that resembles ‘a god’s genesis out of something that is not’, a god’s self-generation out of nothing (Hamacher, 2002: 92). Thus, in Marx, the law of value functions as an abstract law that governs the relations of equivalence among commodities, as a transcendent moment within the immanent relations of equivalence. ‘Money is therefore the god among commodities’ (Marx, 1993: 221). The paradox here consists in the movement through which the abstract value becomes totally value-free, or, ‘valueless’: abstract capital that seeks out further accumulation of capital whenever, wherever, regardless of whatever. Ultimately, therefore, the concept of value can say nothing on value. In this sense, the capitalist concept of value is nihilistic and the world of capitalism is essentially a world without value. Money, as a general equivalent of value, has a ‘capacity to reduce the highest as well as the lowest values equally to one value form and thereby to place them on the same level, regardless of their diverse kinds and amounts’ (Simmel, 1978: 255). With the money economy, the differences between values tend to disappear; all quality is reduced to quantity. Indeed, this nihilistic levelling runs even deeper than an indifference to the possibility of different evaluations. Ultimately, money makes difficult the ‘existence of values as such’ (p. 255).

However, this cynicism, which is related to exchange relations based on money, must not be mistaken as the absence of a religious dimension in capitalism. It is coupled with the cult, with ‘a strange piety’ which enables the illusion that all production in a capitalist society emanates from ‘God-capital’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 225). Capitalism posits an infinite debt to capital, which is the fetish object, the ‘body without organs’, of the capitalist society from which everything appears to emanate and to which everything returns. Just as the sovereign miracle in political theology, capital is that which performs miracles in economic theology. Thus already Spinoza emphasizes that money can appear as ‘cause’, that is, as God: money provides a short-cut to everything and therefore the multitude ‘can scarcely imagine any kind of pleasure unless it is accompanied with the idea of money as the cause’ (Spinoza, 1993: 192).

The specificity of capitalism as religion derives from the role credit plays in it. Significantly, credit (debt) is an uneven relation: even though the relationship between the creditor and the debtor is a ‘contractual’ relationship, there is always an asymmetry of power involved in it (Nietzsche, 1996: 45). While money functions merely as a measure of value in market exchange, in the form of capital it functions as a measure of the value of values. Thus the power of abstract capital – value producing more value – is not reducible to its market function, to exchange. Money is, above all, ‘a power for prescribing, ordering, that is, a set of possibilities for choices and decisions with regard to the future, which anticipate what the production, power relations and forms of subjection will be’ (Lazzarato, 2011: 84). The real significance of money, in other words, derives from its power to destroy existing values and to create new ones, rather than merely measuring commodities with respect to existing values. This power at the origin of measure is a creative power because it involves time. Capital appropriates not only existing values but future potentialities (2011: 47). Capital is always something ‘to come’, the promise of a future-return in the form of profit. Hence the capitalist religion has its own eschatology, the ‘anticipation of an imagined future’ (Goodchild, 2005: 143). In this context capital (credit, debt to the future) appears as kairos, that which mediates ontology and praxis.

This is why the role of debt in the genealogy of morality is crucial. All religious morality is grounded in debt, which involves the creation of a moral subject who is able to give promises and remain responsible for them, that is, ‘made calculable’ (Nietzsche, 1996: 40, 43). In other words, debt is a factor of sociality. As society produces debt, debt produces society. In this sense debt is not only an ‘exceptional’ catastrophe (as in the case of ‘financial crises’) but a dispositif, a technique of governance which imposes a particular conduct, a model of truth and normality, and a ‘soul’, on sociality. Thus what we have in contemporary society are two inter-linked processes. On the one hand, we have capital, which demands everything, the re-modelling of the whole society according to the logic of businesses. And on the other hand we have subjects expected to continuously re-format their souls and to glorify the cult. One must adapt to radical transformations, modify one’s life strategy in tune with the flexible demands of the market, and be always prepared to try new options. The capitalist religion needs a society in which constant systemic dis-embedding demands a meta-stable subjectivity in continuous transformation. Everybody must be mobilized according to the demands of God/capital.

Religion, Feuerbach had said, takes over the best qualities of humans and allocates them to God, affirming in God what is negated in man (1989: 27). Hence the paradox of religious alienation: the more God is glorified or valued, the more human life is depreciated and devalued. Marx repeats the same logic in 1844 Manuscripts, where he depicts capital as a source of economic alienation: the more wealth the workers produce in capitalism the poorer they become (Marx, 2007: 119). But where does this process originate? Marx says that ‘primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology’ (1976: 363). In this fictional phase (reminiscent of the ‘state of nature’ in political theology), we are told, while the diligent and intelligent accumulated wealth, the ‘lazy rascals’ were condemned to poverty (p. 363).

As such, the starting-point of capital is divorcing the producer from the means of production. Just as religion captures what is profane and sacralizes it through glorification, capitalism captures the commons and commodifies them through the spectacle. Just as religion demands the infinite increase (subjective glorification as infinite guilt) of what cannot be increased (objective glory of God), capitalism demands infinite accumulation (subjective glorification of capital) of what is beyond human agency (‘objective glory’ of abstract capital). In both cases ‘glorification is … what produces glory’ (Agamben, 2011: 216, 227). And in both cases the paradox is a cover for the fact that the centre of the machine is empty. In both cases, what is at stake is human life, which is inoperative, that is, without purpose. Its essence is non-utilitarian ‘play’. The human is ‘the Sabbatical animal par excellence’ (p. 246). What religion does is to capture this inoperativity and inscribe it in a religious sphere by sacralizing it, only to ration it, to partially return it in the form of the ‘Sabbath’, a situation in which all ‘work’, all economy, ceases to exist and everything falls back upon inoperativity, which eschatology awaits. What capitalism does is to capture the multitude’s inoperativity, its freedom, and inscribe it in a utilitarian sphere, only to partially return it as permitted freedom, as holiday, which is the main promise of work in capitalism. A post-governmental promise, in which work (hell) is replaced by play (paradise).

The Real and the Fictive

One of the most interesting twists in The Map and the Territory occurs when Jed secures the involvement of a ‘great writer’ to pen the guide for his exhibition of the Professions series. The name of the writer turns out to be Michel Houellebecq, ‘a famous writer, world-famous even’, whom even Jed’s old father has read (Houellebecq, 2011: 9). So Jed plans a visit to Houellebecq’s residence in Ireland where he lives alone. ‘It was public knowledge that Houellebecq was a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies: it was rare for him even to say a word to his dog’ (p. 81). Then we meet a drunk, depressive Houellebecq, scratching at his athlete’s foot and jabbering, rather comically, about his ‘love’ of industrial products:

‘In my life as a consumer,’ he said, ‘I’ve known three perfect products: Paraboot walking boots, the Canon Libris laptop-printer combination, and the Camel Legend parka. I loved those products, with a passion; I would’ve spent my life in their presence, buying regularly, with natural wastage, identical products. A perfect and faithful relationship had been established, making me a happy consumer. I wasn’t completely happy in all aspects of life, but at least I had that: I could, at regular intervals, buy a pair of my favourite boots. It’s not much but it’s something, especially when you’ve quite a poor private life. Ah yes, that joy, that simple joy, has been denied me. My favourite products, after a few years, have disappeared from the shelves, their manufacture has stopped purely and simply – and in the case of my poor Camel Legend parka, no doubt the most beautiful parka ever made, it will have lived for only one season …’ He slowly began to cry, big tears streaming down his face, and served himself another glass of wine. ‘It’s brutal, you know, it’s terribly brutal. While the most insignificant animal species take thousands, sometimes millions of years to disappear, manufactured products are wiped off the surface of the globe in a few days; they’re never given a second chance, they can only suffer, powerless, the irresponsible and fascistic diktat of product line managers who of course know better than anyone else what the customer wants, who claim to capture an expectation of novelty in the consumer, and who in reality just turns his life into one exhausting and desperate quest, an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines.’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 110)

Having established the mythical status of commodity, Houellebecq’s self-parody continues: ‘We too are products’, and as such ‘will become obsolete’ (p. 111). What is to be done, then? Such questions are not raised in the novel. Instead, Houellebecq is savagely murdered in the third, final part. This imagined murder is interesting if we relate Jed and the fictive Houellebecq to one another.

Jed is content with reality; he merely wants to ‘represent’ it: ‘I want to give an account of the world … I want simply to give an account of the world’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 286). But this is a futile aim for, as Borges says, even if it were possible ‘to struck a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire’ (Borges, 1998: 325), then it would have been necessary to produce a map for the map itself. In other words, ‘the most scrupulous representation of reality – the one-to-one map – is also the most useless’ (Kipnis, 2012). Jed’s work receives acclaim only because it coincides with the romanticization of the countryside which characterizes the terroir movement.

The fictional Houellebecq, in turn, seems to be a combination of Hirst and Koons; a ‘thinly veiled character of Houellebecq himself’ (Bettridge, 2102: 7). Unsurprisingly, he is contemptuous of and disgusted by the world that surrounds him. But the most important clue about him comes through another painting in Jed’s Professions series:

In Michel Houellebecq, Writer, as most art historians stress, Jed Martin breaks with that practice of realistic backgrounds which had characterised his work all through the period of the ‘Professions’. He has trouble breaking with it, and you can sense that this break comes with much effort, that he strives through various artifices to maintain the illusion of a possible realistic background as much as possible. In the painting, Houellebecq is standing in front of a desk covered with written or half-written pages. Behind him, at a distance of some five metres, the white wall is entirely papered with handwritten pages stuck to one another, without any interstices whatsoever. Ironically, those art historians stress, Jed Martin seems in this work to accord an enormous importance to the text, and focuses on it detached from any real referent. (Houellebecq, 2011: 119)

‘Detached from any real referent’. Here Houellebecq turns Borges’s story ‘The Map and the Territory’ upside down: ‘there is nothing left but a map (the virtual abstraction of the territory), and on this map some fragments of the real are still floating and drifting’ (Baudrillard, 2000: 63). As such, the ‘map’ is no longer an abstraction, doubling or mirroring, it is the generation of the hyper-real, a real without reality or origin:

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory … and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. (Baudrillard, 1994: 1)

Simulacrum is what Jed cannot avoid even though he tries to maintain the ‘illusion’ of realism. Consequently, Houellebecq is painted ‘in the middle of a universe of paper’, without any statement about realism in literature, nor, for that matter, about any formalist position. He is ‘possessed’ by a ‘fury’ described as ‘demonic’ (Houellebecq, 2011: 119). And in this perspective, the murder of Houellebecq can be interpreted as the aesthetic triumph of the mediocre (Jed), which is contrasted to the demonic (Houellebecq). Nihilism, after all, signifies the triumph of the mediocre, also aesthetically. But is it possible to interpret the fictive murder of Houellebecq by the author (real Houellebecq) in line with the ‘demonic’ anger above, as an act of symbolic terror (against Jed’s realism, to be sure, but also against the surrounding society)?

Indeed, for all the discontinuities between Houellebecq’s previous novels and The Map and the Territory (less sex, more focus on artistic commitment and on artists …), there is a visible continuity with respect to ‘fury’. Nothing seems to obsess Houellebecq more than destruction and disappearance. Thus, Platform ends with a terrorist attack on a tourist camp in Thailand. In The Possibility of an Island we witness the disappearance of the species in a post-apocalyptic, pro-fascist world. Similarly, Lanzarote’s is literally a post-volcanic, ‘burned-out’ topology. The ‘murder’ of Houellebecq by Houellebecq must be placed in this series.

The paradox of his fictive self-destruction is that it invests destruction itself with desire. In this respect Houellebecq follows a long tradition of misanthropic social satire in literature that goes back to Roman, Juvenal tradition. As Bernstein (1992) shows, the ‘abject hero’ is in fact a character that originated in the carnival, in Saturnalian dialogues, in which the roles of the master and the slave are reversed. Crucially, the structure of the dialogues has a deeply bitter and negative strand that has survived throughout modern times. In contemporary culture, the abject hero remains a socially peripheral but symbolically central figure who refuses to conform to the society which he despises. Almost all Houellebecq’s characters adopt the discourse of the abject hero in this sense. Thus they can denigrate themselves in order to be able to denigrate the society. There is therefore in Houellebecq an uncanny echo of Horace’s satires:

All right, I admit I’m easily led by my belly, my nostrils twitch at a savoury smell, I’m weak, spineless – if you like, a glutton into the bargain, but you are exactly the same, if not worse. (Horace, 2005: 67–8)

Houellebecq’s characters are always already prepared to debase themselves, to accept their misery. In The Possibility of an Island, for instance, Daniel, the protagonist who is a stand-up comedian, admits that he is ‘cynical’, that he is a ‘clown’. One should not, however, be misled by this ‘modesty’ for this move only serves the argument that the society that surrounds him is even more cynical. For instance, when he tells jokes like:

‘Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina?’

‘No’

‘The woman’ (Houellebecq, 2005: 11)

He is quick to add, however: ‘Strangely, I managed to throw in that kind of thing, whilst still getting good reviews in Elle and Télérama’ (p. 11). I am bad, but you are worse. In The Map and the Territory, the comedian is replaced with the comic Houellebecq, who knows how to belittle himself, but does so in order to criticize the late capitalist consumer society.

How about the ‘real’ Houellebecq? Certainly, as a character in The Map and the Territory, he is ‘detached from any real referent’ and we are left ‘with a collection of ideas that don’t really stick to anything, because the relation between ideas and consequences has been so offhandedly obliterated’ (Kipnis, 2012). But as is well-known, Houellebecq often refers to his fictive characters, edits life, and mixes fictive and real figures in real life as well. It is therefore interesting that his non-fiction is similar to his fiction in spirit. Perhaps the best place to look for it is Public Enemies: In the beginning of the book, which is conceived together with Bernard Henri-Levy, Houellebecq presents himself as a ‘contemptible’ individual, as a ‘nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist’ (Houellebecq in Houellebecq and Lévy, 2011: 3–4). Shortly after, ‘provocative’ ideas follow. For instance, Houellebecq describes himself as an ‘absolute atheist’ – ‘not simply religious … but political’ atheist (in Houellebecq and Lévy, 2011: 164). Elsewhere:

I don’t believe much in the influence of politics on history. I think that the major factors are technological and sometimes, not often, religious. I don’t think politicians can really have a true historical importance, except when they provoke major catastrophes Napoleon-style, but that’s about it. I also don’t believe individual psychology has any effect on social movements. You will find this belief expressed in all my novels. (Houellebecq in Hunnewell, 2011)

He grounds his ‘lack of political commitment’ in ‘consensus’ politics (Houellebecq and Lévy, 2011: 82). This critique of post-politics is difficult to disagree with. But then what seems to be critical reverts to its opposite: ‘I’ve always had the sense of living in a sort of technocracy, though without necessarily feeling that this was a bad thing’ (p. 83). So, there are ‘honest engineers who build railway viaducts and office buildings; and bloodthirsty clowns who seize on any pretext, ideological or religious, in order to destroy them’ (p. 87).

Is this, then, the core of my beliefs? Is it as simplistic as this? Sadly, I fear it is. I have always felt the deepest mistrust for those who take up arms in the name of whatever cause. I have always felt there was something deeply unwholesome about warmongers, troublemakers, rabble-rousers. What is a war or a revolution, in the end, but a hobby fuelled by spite, a bloody, cruel sport? (Houellebecq, in Houellebecq and Lévy, 2011: 88)

Did we then reach the end of history, a point of no return, where capitalism has become a religion and the technocrats continue the work of angels? To be sure, Houellebecq gives a convincing account of the world, but his ‘despondency and defeatism’ vindicate Fukuyama’s verdict (Bauman, 2102: 23). The problem, however, is not only related to ‘politicians’ and ‘individual psychology’ – it is a political problem:

The yawning gap between the grandiosity of the pressures and the meagreness of the defences is bound to go on feeding and beefing up sentiments of impotence as long as it persists. That gap, however, is not bound to persist: the gap looks unbridgeable only when the future is extrapolated as ‘more of the same’ as present trends – and the belief that the point of no return has already been reached adds credibility to such an extrapolation without necessarily rendering it correct. It happens time and again that dystopias turn into self-refuting prophecies, as the fate of Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s visions at least suggests. (Bauman, 2102: 24)

Not surprisingly, therefore, Houellebecq politically comes across as a nihilist. But his nihilism is about simulation, even of himself. Whereas previous forms of nihilism addressed the destruction of the imaginary (e.g. the moral, philosophical illusions) or the destruction of the symbolic order (e.g. meaning or ideology), contemporary nihilism is realized through simulation. For it, ‘the apocalypse is finished’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 160). Consequently, Houellebecq’s characters inhabit a world that has lost illusions – a world without values, utopias, ideals, a depressed and depressive world. The very proliferation of neutrality and indifference is therefore itself a source of fascination. Ours is, after all, a system that cancels out differences, upon which politics is based: an obscene system in which dialectical polarity no longer exists, a simulacrum, where acts disappear without consequences in indifferent ‘zero-sum signs’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 16, 32). Houellebecq’s fiction, too, is contemporary in this sense; its ‘fury’ is a product of indifferent forces rather than political antagonisms. It emanates in the form of metastasis, bringing with it transparency (disappearance), a flattening process characterized by the exacerbation of indifference and the indefinite mutation of social domains (Baudrillard, 1990: 7, 50). Hence the obscene indistinction between Hirst and Koons, Gates and Jobs, Jed and Houellebecq.

All Houellebecq fiction takes nihilism as a given, without being able to detect any crack, any line of flight, in the world it depicts. His fiction is a nihilistic portrayal of nihilism from inside, trapped within the triangle it mocks: religious nihilism (the idea of transcendence), passive nihilism (life without values) and radical nihilism (values without life). There is, to be sure, a fourth type of nihilism that, on the basis of the idea of immanence, opposes all these three forms of nihilism: Nietzsche’s ‘perfect nihilism’, a nihilism that seeks its own limits, turns against itself and destroys itself, to create immanent values. Which involves profanation. And it is precisely this, the attempt at profanation, that Houellebecq mocks in the sociologist Comte who sought to replace religion with sociology:

Comte … failed; failed totally and miserably. A religion with no God may be possible (or a philosophy, if you prefer; something that carries in its wake, like so many delightful corollaries, a code of ethics, a sense of ‘human dignity’, maybe even a political theory, if compatible). But none of this seems to me to be conceivable without a belief in eternal life. … Comte wasn’t offering anything like that; all he proposed was one’s theoretically living on in the memory of mankind. He gave the concept a slightly more high-blown twist, something like ‘incorporation into the Great Being,’ but it didn’t change the fact that what he was offering was a theoretical perpetuation in the memory of mankind. Well, that just didn’t cut it. Nobody gives a shit about living on in the memory of mankind (not even me, and I write books). (Houellebecq in Houellebecq and Lévy, 2011: 166)

Comte’s religious project is an ‘easy-to-satirize’ failure (see Wernick, 2001: 5). Perhaps Durkheim’s sociology of religion, which, similarly, found a ‘higher reality’ in the social, could have been a nobler target (see Durkheim, 2011: 18). Or, going back to the origins, we could recall Spinoza’s profanation of religious categories such as the soul, immortality, salvation, and blessedness. Against the postulates of conventional theology Spinoza famously asserted that the soul, like the body, has extensive parts such as affections and memory. In this sense the soul only exists while the body exists. However, the soul in Spinoza is also an ‘idea’ that expresses the body’s essence. In this sense the soul is inevitably eternal and we do not need any revelation in order to know the ways in which it survives. In this way Spinoza profanes the idea of immortality while preserving its affirmative core. Consequently, ‘blessedness’ becomes an outcome of a philosophical pursuit, the intellectual love of God:

And this love or blessedness is called in the Scripture ‘glory’ – not without reason. For whether this love has reference to God or the mind, it can rightly be called contentment of mind, which in turn cannot be distinguished from glory. (Spinoza, 1993: 214)

What is called ‘glory’ in religion is in fact something natural, the ‘contentment of mind’, which is grounded in intellectual love (of God or Nature). Effectively, ‘glory’ can no longer be considered to be the property of a sovereign God and becomes a common, universal virtue that is immanent. It is only when glory is captured by religion and institutionalized as a ‘sacred’ property of religion, separated from the domain of the commons, that it starts to function as an instrument of regulation and domination, as a dispositif. And seen in this perspective, the intellectual love of God is an idea that seeks to untie glory from the domain of religion and refer it back to immanent life. The problem it articulates is how to think ‘contentment’ as an immanent category outside the religious apparatus (see Agamben, 2011: 249).

This is what is at stake in profanation and what is screened out in Houellebecq’s treatment of religion. For he reduces the attempt at profanation to the sacralization of the social, that is, to secularization:

Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact. Profanation, however, neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized. (Agamben, 2007: 77)

Schmitt’s political theology is paradigmatic regarding secularization in this sense. ‘All significant concepts’ of modern politics are, according to him, ‘secularized theological concepts’ (1985: 36). But one must insist, contra Schmitt, and contra Houellebecq, that theology itself has always been a political theory of sovereignty and governmentality. The history of religion is the history of how a political theory of power and government emerged in the guise of theology. If modern political and social theory has any significance, it is its attempt to profane the religio-theological mindset, a mindset which is deeply rooted in our culture, and which still defines the human condition today. Its strength is what proves why profanation is a significant category.