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Paper short abstract

This paper reads Houellebecq’s novels through Foucault’s heterotopia. The Elementary Particles, Extension of the Domain of Struggle, and The Map and the Territory depict liminal spaces (offices, galleries) that expose alienation, emptiness, and the impossibility of utopia in contemporary society.

Paper long abstract

Michel Houellebecq’s work can be read as a critical map of the liminal spaces and subjects of late modernity. Impersonal hotels, suburban zones, offices, laboratories, and even the art world are not mere backdrops but instead condense tensions between desire and emptiness, belonging and anonymity, consumption and transcendence. This paper proposes to read these spaces through Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, understood as an “other space” that reflects, inverts, or subverts the social order. The intersection of heterotopias and liminal poetics in Houellebecq sheds light on how his literature is structured around thresholds of experience: bodies in transit, suspended identities, and impossible communities. In "The Elementary Particles", spiritual retreats and scientific laboratories emerge as heterotopias where utopias of sexuality and posthuman life are simultaneously projected and undermined. "Extension of the Domain of Struggle" presents offices, suburban landscapes, and anonymous hotels as heterotopias of alienation, where subjectivity is dissolved into routines of work and solitude. Finally, in "The Map and the Territory", the spaces of art galleries and exhibitions function as heterotopias of representation, exposing the commodification of culture and the fragility of identity within contemporary capitalism. In this sense, Houellebecq does not merely describe spaces but constructs a critical geography of modernity, where heterotopic experience translates into a poetics of emptiness, alienation, and transit. This paper therefore argues that his narrative can be read as a literary atlas of contemporary heterotopias, making visible the impossibility of utopia within neoliberal society.