This paper treats Girardian themes in the fiction of the French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, considered one of the leading voices in contemporary European fiction. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously declared "Hell is other people," for Houellebecq hell seems to be the individual left to his (almost always his for Houellebecq) own devices.
Long a curiosity to Girardians, Houellbecq's most recent novel, Annihilation, takes up the claims of Girard, especially regarding mimetic or triangular desire, and rejects them wholesale: "Amusing on paper, the theory is in fact false." (p. 335). This paper argues that Houellebecq's portrayal of mediated desire in the main character, Paul Raison, contradicts the narrator's own claims. In addition, it highlights how Houellebecq's insights, while not exactly "novelistic" in the Girardian sense, incarnate several central themes in mimetic theory. These include his understanding of politics, the limits of secularization, and the history of French literature