Hugh Graham concludes his exploration of Houellebecq’s dessicated terrain with the Stoic imperative to “bear up and do without”. PART THREE: THE INDIVIDUAL Every revival of philosophy begins with the individual. Today the individual, lulled by pop wisdom and popular culture, has little awareness of what it means to be one’s self outside of cultural […]
Philosophy in Rags: The Present Augustan Age: Houellebecq and Gnosticism
In the second of three parts, Hugh Graham examines the theme of atomization in Houellebecq’s novels, finding bad conscience in good intentions and fatal contradictions in the biometrics of happiness. PART TWO: THE PRESENT AUGUSTAN AGE A desert landscape flattened by positivism, by the belief that everything begins and ends in mechanics, forces and particles, […]
Philosophy in Rags: Rigour for a Dying World: Houellebecq and Gnosticism
In the first of three parts, Hugh Graham looks through the prism of Houellebecq’s novels and finds a Gnostic theme for our times. Deserts creep and sea-levels rise. Populations expand and resources are depleted amid poverty, wealth, and intractable war. Under these lowering skies it seems astonishing that we live in a world void of […]