What happens when a person loses the ability to hope? What happens when cynicism becomes so deeply ingrained in one’s understanding of the world that even love, religion, and freedom cease to have any meaning? And what happens when the desire to escape the burdens of freedom becomes more powerful than the desire to be free?

These questions are central to Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (Soumission, 2015). But they also raise another question that has occupied me for years in my reflections on the schlemiel: What happens to comedy when hope disappears?

The schlemiel is often characterized by his inability to understand the world as it is. He dreams, hopes, and acts in ways that frequently contradict reality. His aspirations exceed his circumstances, and his failures expose the distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

But the schlemiel’s failure does not necessarily destroy his hope.

Indeed, one could argue that the schlemiel’s greatest virtue is his refusal to surrender hope, even when reality gives him every reason to do so.

Houellebecq’s characters, by contrast, often seem to have surrendered hope before they have even begun to act. They are not naïve. They are not dreamers. They know too much about the world, or at least believe that they do.

And their knowledge has become a kind of prison.

This is why I want to suggest that François, the protagonist of Submission, is a kind of anti-schlemiel.

Where the schlemiel believes too much, François believes too little. Where the schlemiel’s failures expose the limits of reality, François’s cynicism exposes the limits of a life without hope. And where the schlemiel’s vulnerability can open him to others, François’s vulnerability drives him toward isolation.

Yet the anti-schlemiel is not simply the opposite of the schlemiel. Both are comic figures, both are vulnerable, and both are unable to reconcile themselves with the world. The difference lies in how they respond to this predicament.

The schlemiel continues to dream.

The anti-schlemiel seeks a way to stop dreaming altogether.

And in Submission, Houellebecq imagines a world in which this desire might finally be satisfied.

What makes this novel especially interesting is that François is offered three possibilities for escaping his loneliness: religious transcendence, love, and finally political and religious submission. Each possibility involves a different relationship to the self and to others. And each reveals something about his inability—or unwillingness—to change.

From the Sexual Revolution to the Anti-Schlemiel

In my earlier essays on Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, I explored the relationship between cynicism, sexuality, loneliness, and the failure of modern freedom.

In “Cynical, Middle-Aged, Oversexed, and Alone After the Sexual Revolution — Part I”⁠, I considered how Houellebecq depicts the modern individual as someone who has inherited the promises of sexual liberation but finds himself increasingly isolated.

In Part II of that essay⁠, I continued to explore the relationship between sexuality, aging, cynicism, and the possibility of love.

And in “The Other Side of the Sexual Revolution: Sex, Violence, and History in Michel Houellebecq’s ⁠The Elementary Particles⁠”⁠, I examined the darker historical and psychological implications of sexual liberation.

What interested me most in these essays was not simply Houellebecq’s cynicism, but the way in which his characters struggle with the possibility of love in a world that seems to have lost its moral and spiritual bearings.

In The Elementary Particles, Bruno and Michel represent two different responses to modernity. While Bruno seeks redemption through sexuality, Michel turns away from the body toward science. Both are alienated. Both are incapable, in different ways, of sustaining love.

In Submission, Houellebecq takes this predicament one step further.

François, a middle-aged professor of literature at the Sorbonne, is not simply another lonely intellectual. He represents the exhaustion of the very ideals that were supposed to liberate the modern individual.

Like Bruno, François is sexually preoccupied, cynical, and incapable of sustaining meaningful relationships. But unlike Bruno, who desperately seeks something that continually escapes him, François seems to have lost the ability to desire anything beyond the immediate satisfaction of his needs.

He eats alone. He drinks. He watches pornography. He teaches literature. He has little interest in politics and even less interest in changing the world.

In many respects, François is a successful man. He has an academic career, financial security, and the freedom to pursue his desires.

But what does this freedom amount to?

Not very much.

His freedom is largely negative. He is free from obligations, commitments, and responsibilities. But he is not free for anything. He can pursue pleasure, but he cannot sustain love. He can study religion, but he cannot believe. He can analyze literature, but he cannot find a narrative that gives meaning to his own life.

In the opening portion of the novel, François reflects on his relationships with students. What is striking is the absence of any real sense of romantic adventure. He does not describe himself as a great seducer or a man committed to sexual freedom. Instead, he explains that his relationships often ended because of discouragement and exhaustion.

He describes his condition with the words: “a sense of discouragement, of lassitude”

The phrase is revealing. His relationships end not because he has discovered something better, but because he cannot summon the energy to continue them. Even his desire seems exhausted. This is the predicament of the anti-schlemiel.

The schlemiel’s dreams exceed reality. François’s reality has extinguished his dreams. And this raises a question that runs throughout Houellebecq’s fiction: Is the modern individual unhappy because he cannot satisfy his desires, or because the satisfaction of desire has ceased to provide meaning?

Huysmans, the Black Madonna, and the Failure of Transcendence

One of the most interesting aspects of Submission is François’s relationship to the nineteenth-century French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans began as a writer associated with naturalism and decadence, exploring the aesthetic and sensual possibilities of modern life. But he eventually turned toward Catholicism. For Huysmans, religion offered a way out of decadence. It promised something that pleasure, aesthetic experimentation, and individual freedom could not provide.

François has devoted much of his intellectual life to studying this transformation. Yet he cannot repeat it. This becomes particularly evident in one of the novel’s most important scenes, when François visits the sanctuary of Rocamadour and encounters the Black Madonna.

The setting is significant. Rocamadour is not simply another historical monument. It represents a religious civilization in which faith organized the relationship between the individual, the community, and the sacred.

François sits before the Black Madonna and experiences something that seems to exceed his cynical understanding of the world.He senses a mysterious spiritual power. At one point, he feels as though he has stepped outside ordinary historical time. The statue appears to possess an authority that he cannot explain through his usual categories of understanding.

He describes its power as: “almost terrifying”

For a moment, François encounters something that might interrupt his ordinary existence. But the experience does not last.

The spiritual presence recedes. The Black Madonna becomes increasingly distant, and François finds himself returning to an awareness of his own body, his discomfort, and the material world around him. He cannot sustain the encounter.

The distinction is important. François does not simply reject the religious experience because he believes it is false. Something has happened to him. He has encountered something that he cannot fully explain. But he cannot remain open to it.

This scene becomes even more significant when we consider something Houellebecq said in a 2015 interview with ⁠The Paris Review⁠.

Houellebecq explained that the novel was originally going to be called La Conversion. In that earlier conception, François would have followed Huysmans into Catholicism. But Houellebecq could not make that conversion happen. He identified the encounter with the Black Madonna as the decisive scene in which the possibility of religious transformation disappears. This is extraordinary.

Even the author, it seems, could not make his character believe.

And this raises a question that goes to the heart of the anti-schlemiel. Is François incapable of belief because he is too intelligent, too modern, or too cynical? Or is he incapable of belief because he has lost the willingness to expose himself to something beyond his own desires?

The schlemiel often lives in a world of possibilities that others dismiss as foolish. He sees what is not there, or what is not yet there. François encounters something that may actually be there, but he cannot hold on to it. His problem is not that he cannot recognize transcendence. His problem is that he cannot respond to it. And this is what makes the scene both tragic and comic.

The scholar who has devoted his life to understanding conversion is incapable of converting. He knows the story of conversion, but he cannot inhabit it. His knowledge does not become experience. And his experience does not become faith.

The anti-schlemiel is not defeated by the world. He is defeated by his inability to imagine himself otherwise.

Myriam, Love, and the Refusal of the Other

If the encounter with the Black Madonna represents François’s failed encounter with transcendence, his relationship with Myriam represents his failed encounter with love.

In my earlier discussion of sex, violence, and history in ⁠The Elementary Particles⁠, I considered the relationship between the liberation of desire and the increasingly destructive forms of competition and alienation that accompany it.

In Submission, Houellebecq approaches this problem from another direction.

Myriam, a young Jewish woman and one of François’s former students, seems to offer him something more than another temporary sexual relationship. There is affection between them. There is a possibility, however fragile, of intimacy. But François has difficulty recognizing what this possibility might mean.

Earlier in the novel, reflecting on his relationships, he acknowledges that he and his former partners had pursued sexual encounters without expecting lasting attachment. He recognizes that they have been left similarly disillusioned. This admission is important because it suggests that François is not entirely unaware of his predicament. He knows that something has gone wrong. But knowing is not the same as changing.

As the political situation in France deteriorates, Myriam and her family decide to leave for Israel. François loses her. He does not follow her.

He does not struggle to preserve their relationship.

He remains in France.

What makes this loss significant is not simply that he loses a sexual partner. He loses someone who might have offered him the possibility of a different kind of life. But he is incapable of responding to this possibility. Here, I think, we encounter one of the central tensions of the novel.

François can imagine a future in which women are provided to him through a new social and religious arrangement. But he cannot sustain a relationship with a woman who makes demands upon him as a particular person. The difference is crucial.

Love is not simply the satisfaction of desire. It involves responding to someone who is not reducible to one’s desires.

This brings to mind Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of ethics. For Levinas, the encounter with the Other interrupts the sovereignty of the self. The Other makes a demand upon me that I cannot reduce to my own interests. Ethics begins not with the satisfaction of my desires, but with the recognition that another person places me under an obligation. This is a very different kind of submission.

In Levinas, responsibility to the Other is not a means of securing pleasure. It is an interruption of the self’s freedom. François, however, seems incapable of accepting this interruption. He wants the benefits of relationships without their ethical demands. And the political system that emerges in Submission appears to offer him precisely that.

What he is being offered is not love but an arrangement that may relieve him of the need to confront love’s difficulties. There is also something historically and ethically significant about Myriam’s Jewishness. She leaves France because the political transformation threatens the future she imagines for herself and her family. François, by contrast, remains because he can imagine adapting to the new order.

Their different responses reveal a moral asymmetry.

For Myriam, history makes demands. It requires a decision, a departure, and the acceptance of uncertainty. For François, history becomes another set of circumstances to which he might accommodate himself.

Myriam acts. François adjusts.

And this difference brings us back to the schlemiel.

The schlemiel is often vulnerable because he remains open to others and to the possibilities of history, even when that openness leads to failure.

François seeks to eliminate this vulnerability. His submission is not a response to the Other. It is an escape from the Other. And this, I would suggest, is the ethical significance of the anti-schlemiel.

The Anti-Schlemiel and the Political Fantasy of Submission

The novel takes place in an imagined France in 2022. A fictional Muslim political party, led by Mohammed Ben Abbes, wins the presidency through an electoral alliance formed to prevent the far right from taking power.

The new government begins transforming French institutions, including the university.

The Sorbonne is reorganized under an Islamic framework. Female professors are excluded from teaching, and male professors who wish to remain in their positions must convert to Islam.

François initially loses his academic position. But he is eventually offered the opportunity to return under extraordinarily favorable conditions. He will receive a generous salary, professional prestige, and the possibility of several wives.

All he must do is convert.

The offer is almost comical. Here is a man who has spent his life pursuing sexual satisfaction and academic recognition. Suddenly, a religious and political system offers him both. The irony is striking. The modern secular world promised François freedom, but it left him lonely and dissatisfied. The new religious order promises him submission, but it also offers him the very pleasures he had been unable to secure through freedom.

But is this really religion?

Or is it simply another form of hedonism?

Houellebecq seems to suggest that the distinction between religious submission and secular pleasure may collapse when religion is approached primarily as a means of satisfying one’s desires. François does not appear to be attracted to Islam because he has discovered a profound theological truth. He is attracted to the life that conversion would make possible.

The distinction is important. Houellebecq’s fictional political order is not an adequate description of Islam as a lived religious tradition. It is a provocative literary construction through which the novel explores the exhaustion of French secular society and its intellectual elites.

The real object of the satire may not be Islam alone.

It may also be the modern European individual who is willing to exchange his freedom for comfort, sexuality, and security. And this is where the anti-schlemiel becomes a particularly useful figure. The schlemiel often refuses to surrender his dreams, even when reality makes those dreams appear foolish. François, by contrast, is willing to surrender his freedom because he has no dreams worth defending.

He does not resist the new political order because he has no compelling vision of an alternative.

The anti-schlemiel does not struggle against reality.

He adapts to it. And his adaptation may be the most disturbing aspect of his character.

Freud, Cynicism, and the Desire to Escape Freedom

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggests that civilization necessarily involves the repression and regulation of human desire. The individual must surrender certain pleasures in order to live with others. But Freud also recognizes that civilization does not necessarily make us happy. Indeed, it may produce new forms of unhappiness. Houellebecq’s fiction seems deeply indebted to this Freudian insight.

As I explored in Part II of my earlier essay on ⁠The Elementary Particles⁠, the sexual revolution promises liberation from traditional moral constraints. Yet the result is not universal happiness but new forms of competition, humiliation, loneliness, and suffering.

In Submission, Houellebecq reverses the problem. What happens when the individual becomes tired of liberation? What happens when freedom itself becomes a burden? François does not seem interested in defending the secular values of French society. He does not care enough about them to resist their transformation. His indifference is not heroic. Nor is it tragic in the conventional sense.

It is banal.

He is more concerned with the arrangements of his daily life than with the political future of France And this banality is central to Houellebecq’s comedy.

The great political transformation of French society is experienced through the perspective of a man who is preoccupied with food, sex, money, and his academic career. The contrast between historical upheaval and personal triviality produces a peculiar kind of humor. One might even call it schlemiel-like.

But there is something deeply unsettling about this comedy.

The traditional schlemiel often fails to understand the historical forces that surround him. His innocence makes him vulnerable to history. François understands enough to recognize what is happening, but he does not care enough to resist it. His vulnerability is not the result of innocence. It is the result of indifference.

This is what distinguishes the anti-schlemiel from the schlemiel.

The schlemiel’s failure often exposes the cruelty or absurdity of the world/ The anti-schlemiel’s failure exposes his own inability to respond to that world. And perhaps this is Houellebecq’s most powerful indictment of modern intellectual life. Knowledge does not necessarily produce responsibility. One can understand history, literature, religion, and politics and still remain incapable of making a meaningful ethical decision.

The Comedy of Conversion: Can the Anti-Schlemiel Become Happy?

The conclusion of Submission brings all these questions together.

After failing to sustain a relationship with Myriam and failing to experience a religious transformation at Rocamadour, François begins to imagine his conversion to Islam.

His new position at the university would restore his professional status and provide considerable financial benefits. His new religious identity would also make possible a domestic and sexual life organized around multiple wives.

The offer appears to resolve many of the difficulties that have defined his existence. He would no longer have to endure the same humiliations of sexual competition. He would no longer have to confront the same professional uncertainties. And perhaps most importantly, he would no longer have to struggle to find a meaningful relationship. But the ending is more ambiguous than it first appears.

Houellebecq does not give us an unequivocal account of François’s completed conversion. Instead, the final pages imagine the life that would follow such a decision.

The novel concludes with the words: “I would have nothing to mourn.”

In the French original, the final sentence is Je n’aurais rien à regretter—a conditional formulation that can also be rendered as having nothing to regret. The conditional tense is crucial. François imagines that he would have nothing to mourn or regret.

But has he actually reached this condition? Or is he simply imagining another form of happiness that will ultimately elude him?

This is where the ending becomes particularly interesting in relation to the anti-schlemiel. The schlemiel often imagines possibilities that reality refuses to fulfill. François also imagines a possibility. But unlike the schlemiel, whose imagination often preserves the possibility of hope, François imagines a future in which he will no longer have to hope.

His fantasy is not one of transcendence. It is one of accommodation. And this is what makes the ending so darkly comic.

François may finally become happy.

But his happiness may depend upon the surrender of everything that makes genuine transformation possible. The irony becomes even more striking when we return to the earlier scenes with the Black Madonna and Myriam. In the first, François encounters the possibility of transcendence. In the second, he encounters the possibility of love. In the third, he encounters the possibility of submission.

Only the third seems to offer him a future that he can imagine accepting.

Why?

Because the first two possibilities require him to change. The third promises to change his circumstances without necessarily changing him. The Black Madonna demands an openness to something beyond the self. Myriam demands an openness to another person. The new political and religious order offers François the possibility of satisfying himself. And perhaps this is the fundamental distinction between genuine transformation and the fantasy of submission.

Transformation requires the self to become otherwise.

Submission, as François imagines it, allows the self to remain fundamentally the same.

The Schlemiel, the Anti-Schlemiel, and the End of Hope

In my work on the schlemiel, I have been interested in the relationship between comedy, vulnerability, and hope. The schlemiel is not simply a fool. Nor is he simply an innocent victim of history. He is a figure whose dreams fail to coincide with reality. But this failure does not necessarily destroy his capacity to hope. Indeed, the schlemiel often continues to believe in possibilities that the world has already dismissed. His comedy emerges from this tension.

François represents something different.

He is a man who has surrendered the possibility of hope before he has even begun to act. He does not believe that love can redeem him. He does not believe that politics can transform society. And he does not believe that literature can provide a meaningful response to the crisis of modern life. Yet he remains dissatisfied. His cynicism has not liberated him from suffering. It has merely deprived him of the resources with which to respond to it.

Perhaps this is why Houellebecq’s novels are so difficult to read. They present us with characters who are often repulsive, self-absorbed, and morally compromised. But they also expose forms of suffering that are difficult to dismiss. We recognize something of ourselves in these characters, even as we recoil from them.

This tension between identification and repulsion was central to my earlier reflections on Houellebecq’s cynical characters⁠.

The reader approaches the character, recognizes something familiar, and then withdraws in disgust. This movement produces a kind of literary alienation.

We become, like Houellebecq’s characters, atomized.

But Submission raises another possibility. What if the reader refuses to withdraw? What if, instead of responding to François with disgust or cynicism, we ask what kind of responsibility his suffering places upon us? This is where I would distinguish Houellebecq’s cynicism from the ethical possibilities of the schlemiel.

The schlemiel may be foolish, but his foolishness does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of an encounter.

François’s cynicism, by contrast, threatens to foreclose it entirely.

His submission is not a response to the Other. It is an escape from the Other. And perhaps this is the greatest irony of Houellebecq’s novel.

The man who has spent his life seeking freedom from responsibility finally discovers a system that promises to organize his life for him. He may no longer have to struggle with love, freedom, or the uncertainty of human relationships. He may finally become happy.

But what kind of happiness would this be? Would it be the happiness of a man who has found meaning? Or the happiness of a man who has finally given up looking for it?

Houellebecq leaves us with this possibility, and I think we should resist the temptation to resolve it too quickly. For the schlemiel, failure is not necessarily the end of hope. For François, however, happiness may be the end of hope.

And that, perhaps, is the darkest joke of Submission. The tragedy is not that François fails to become happy. It is that he may become happy without ever learning how to love.

The schlemiel fails because he refuses to surrender his dreams. The anti-schlemiel succeeds because he has surrendered them.

And if that is the case, we are left with one final question:

Is submission the overcoming of modern alienation, or is it simply alienation’s final, most comfortable form?