Abstract

SILVA, Gislene Maria Barral Lima Felipe da. O desespero contemporâneo em Extensão do domínio da luta, de Michel Houellebecq. Rev. Mal-Estar Subj. [online]. 2003, vol.3, n.2, pp. 292-310. ISSN 1518-6148.

In the contemporary society, dominated by money and unbridled erotization, human relations go toward to annihilation. The current period of evolution of the capitalist system characterizes itself by the substitution of merchandises by images as mediating of the human relations, and the spectacle became the most developed form of relation between people. In social spaces, individuals confuse themselves in amorphous crowds, without faces and feelings, unable to resist to the impositions and appeals of the scheme of the cultural industry, that reduces them to passive consumers of goods an images, incessantly produced. In this eschatological context, the narrator of the novel Extensão do domínio da luta, by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, moves himself, in a work that he classifies as a novel of learning of the disgust, and where he shows his disenchantment with humanity and his despair in respect to the proper life. In a world that promotes the individual massification, the literary writing represents a privileged space of manifestation of the subjectivity, as it is observed in the analyzed work. In it, the narrator gives his reply, from the condition of massacred by the dynamics of this world, to a homogenized society: in the fiction, the individual reigns free and solitary, but triumphant and concentrated in the experience of existing. Based in the chaos and the barbarity of the contemporary life, the language of the work absorbs the crudity of the content, synthesized in the disenchantment with a highly ruled, previsible and standardized quotidian in all its aspects. In this way, the literary text constructs a severe critical to the "technological progress" and to the informatization of everyday life, that bring in themselves a accented existential poverty, with the reification of man and the fossilization of the human relations, and take the narrator to a tension and despair situation.

Keywords : French literature; despair; contemporaneousness; malaise; subjectivity.

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