67 ‘La transgression ne m’intéresse pas, pour le dire brutalement’ : Michel Houellebecq, critic of transgression RUSSELL WILLIAMS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON INSTITUTE IN PARIS Abstract: Critics of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq have frequently used the adjective ‘transgressive’ in their descriptions of both the man and his work. There are, however, huge differences of both order and magnitude between the notion of transgression in the writing of the provocative novelist and that theorised systematically in the work of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, archetypical avatars of transgression. Houellebecq has even gone on record to declare his disgust at what he perceives as the synonymy between cruelty and transgression in their work and ‘transgressive’ visual art more broadly. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s fiction does display a constant preoccupation with both transgression and the transgressive: he is drawn to both the obscene and the unacceptable. This article, which forms part of my ongoing research into the less canonical or less explored strands of Houellebecq’s work, considers the representation of both sex and transgressive contemporary visual art as represented in Houellebecq’s fiction. It demonstrates how Houellebecq’s writing maintains a critical dialogue with transgression, in particular in the work of the Vienna Actionists, Damien Hirst and, more implicitly, Jake and Dinos Chapman. It also touches on the author’s writing about art and his description of his own death, at the hands of a crazed art collector, in La Carte et le territoire (2010). As a result, it demonstrates how the image of a moralising author emerges in his work. It also considers how Houellebecq’s stance can be closely aligned with those of critics Ovidie and Paul Virilio. To conclude, it considers how the author formulates a specifically Houellebecquian notion of transgression, or an aesthetics to which art and writing should aspire, which resonates with the Roland Barthes’ s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977). *** Amongst the many adjectives used to describe contemporary novelist Michel Houellebecq and his fiction in the numerous journal articles, collections of scholarly essays,