Is France’s leading novelist, Michel Houellebecq, conservative? His 2015 novel Submission, about an Islamic party winning French national elections, resonated with conservative anxieties about Islamic immigration and the cultural transformation of the West. Houellebecq’s In the Presence of Schopenhauer, however, helps conservatives see he is a false friend.
This is a physically small 50-page book, but there is no reason good philosophy needs to be longer. Aquinas’s On Being and Essence, Descartes’s Meditations, and Leibniz’s Monadology are works for the ages shorter than a standard academic article today. Paragraphs by Schopenhauer make up the majority of the text—Houellebecq did the translations himself—and he follows up each with a brief commentary. His principle of selection: passages personally important to him. The book is not meant as an academic overview but think of it as a primer on how to think with Schopenhauer made by one of the most acute intelligences in France today.
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