The medium that Houellebecq uses to unify the two levels (the realistic and the existential), to melt all this uniquely sharp social material into an existential state, is paradoxically the "simple moral feeling." Feeling, always moral for Houellebecq, and always revealing of the being of things in his worldview, unnecessary, ridiculed, and banished in the modern rational liberal West, is the adhesive substance of his literary demands […] In other words, it is the absolutely emotional nature of Houellebecq's works that opens within us the crack to perceive not just our lack, but our radical despair when, to cover it, we produce as “meanings” for ourselves the products of our capitalism – something that altogether establishes the existential field in the Houellebecqian universe: every consumption, every fellatio, every work of art, every new or old religion, every successful cloning, all the “meanings” that Houellebecq’s characters affirm as children of the West, exude this mournful feeling with which their author permeates them: the awareness of their certain failure.

This book starts from Some Months in My Life as a rhetorical Apology of the notorious celebrity Houellebecq, to glide into the ethical and literary poetics of the author Houellebecq, and to remind that the true apology for a great author is his literary work itself. The first of the two texts brings to light the ethical poetics of the atheist Houellebecq as a Christian morality without God, which praises the – now impossible in the modern era – feeling (of love) as the means for the writer to reveal the essence of things. The second reveals his literary poetics as a union of the two most influential French prose traditions, realism and existentialism, where the realist with an existentialist soul Houellebecq shows us how we ourselves construct our existential void through the products of capitalism that we produce and consume as “meanings” of our existence. And it is the mournful feeling with which their author permeates them that describes to us the awareness of their certain failure, our awareness.