Posthuman Nostalgia? Re-Evaluating Human Emotions in Michel Houellebecq’s La possibilité d’une île ..

Abstract

In Michel Houellebecq’s novel La possibilité d’une île (translated as The Possibility of an Island), the reader is confronted with a bleak future for humanity: the main characters are posthuman creatures who live in secluded compounds and seem incapable of understanding and feeling human emotions. The novel consists of two strands of narrative – the memoir of Daniel1, a comedian living at the beginning of the 21st century, and the commentaries by the clones Daniel24 and Daniel25, his successors in the distant future. Bearing in mind the context of Houellebecq’s work as well as the posthuman(ist) discourse, this novel should be understood neither as a straightforward prognosis about the future of human beings nor as an unambiguous evaluation of human cloning. A consideration of certain recurring topics in Houellebecq’s works and his stylistic characteristics highlights the specific scenario for the posthuman being developed by Houellebecq. Posthuman(ist) theories on the concept of the human being “after humanism”, at the beginning of the 21st century, and its possible future developments help to position the novel’s scenario within a wider theoretical context. In this article following, I discuss these contexts in order to analyse what could be called the nostalgic representation of emotions in this novel and the functions of writing and narrative connected to it.