In the Presence Of Schopenhauer

The work of Michel Houellebecq; one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time; is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was bowled over by it and he hunted down a copy of his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation. Houellebecq found in Schopenhauer edash; the radical pessimist, the chronicler of human suffering, the lonely misanthrope mdash; a powerful conception of the human condition and of the future that awaits us, and when Houellebecqgsquo;s first writings appeared in the early 1990s, the influence of Schopenhauer was everywhere apparent.  

But it was only much later, in 2005, that Houellebecq began to translate and write a commentary on Schopenhauertsquo;s work. He thought of turning it into a book but soon abandoned the idea and the text remained unpublished until 2017. Now available in English for the first time, In the Presence of Schopenhauer is the story of a remarkable encounter between a novelist and a philosopher and a testimony to the deep and enduring impact of Schopenhaueros' philosophy on one of France's greatest living writers.