Reading Houellebecq with Malabou: How Cerebrality Supersedes Sexuality in Les Particules élémentaires

This article examines an often overlooked aspect of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires (1998): its engagement with neuroscience and trauma. It brings the novel into dialogue with the work of French philosopher Catherine Malabou, particularly her theory of trauma and her concept of ‘cerebrality’. In Les Nouveaux Blessés , Malabou defines cerebrality as a neuroscientific paradigm that supersedes the psychoanalytic approach focused on the aetiology of sexuality. This paradigm offers a new understanding of trauma, characterized by destructive plasticity and the post-traumatic symptom of disaffection. By examining the convergences and divergences between Malabou’s theories and Houellebecq’s novel, this article demonstrates how the novel, using a satirical tone, portrays the tensions between these two paradigms during the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century through the genre of science fiction. It argues that the novel reflects this paradigm shift, where the turn of the millennium signals the advent of cerebrality as the dominant discourse, alongside a movement towards asexuality. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .