Pour une morphologie de lʼironie post-humaine : le cas de Michel Houellebecq

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the way in which a fundamental concept of Western culture, irony, is re-substantiated in the posthuman episteme, starting from the symptomatic example of Michel Houellebecq. Whether it assumes a programmatic dimension or receives axiological connotations, the irony in question concerns the ideological, social or ontological challenges of contemporary reality. It is, in fact, an innovatively instrumentalized discursive mechanism in the context of “European posthumanism”, a paradigm that is structurally different from the North American version of the current.