![]() ![]() It demonstrates how Houellebecq’s writing maintains a critical dialogue with transgression, in particular in the work of the Vienna Actionists, Damien Hirst and, more implicitly, Jake and Dinos Chapman. This article, which forms part of my ongoing research into the less canonical or less explored strands of Houellebecq’s work, considers the representation of both sex and transgressive contemporary visual art as represented in Houellebecq’s fiction. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s fiction does display a constant preoccupation with both transgression and the transgressive: he is drawn to both the obscene and the unacceptable. Houellebecq has even gone on record to declare his disgust at what he perceives as the synonymy between cruelty and transgression in their work and ‘transgressive’ visual art more broadly. ![]() There are, however, huge differences of both order and magnitude between the notion of transgression in the writing of the provocative novelist and that theorised systematically in the work of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, archetypical avatars of transgression. Critics of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq have frequently used the adjective ‘transgressive’ in their descriptions of both the man and his work. ![]()
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