De Volkskrant — A mud-slinging match over Houellebecq

The Week in Books. Ariejan Korteweg. 20 April 2023.

How wonderful it would have been if writer Michel Houellebecq and actor Gérard Depardieu had marched together across the white marble of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal on the IJ on Tuesday, ready, like Asterix and Obelix, to teach the Dutch barbarians a lesson. Houellebecq had suggested the idea himself. Sadly, they did not come. According to his lawyer, the writer was not up to it.

Perhaps just as well. The appeal hearing was a mud-slinging match featuring dispiriting videos and lawyers who could not stand one another. This was the third round in Houellebecq’s legal battle to prevent Stefan Ruitenbeek’s Amsterdam art collective Kirac from making a film — Kirac27 — showing him having sex with Dutch girls. A French court and an Amsterdam judge hearing the application for an injunction had already ruled against him. He signed a contract that binds him.

The judge and her two fellow judges heard the descriptions descend to a dubious level: according to his Dutch sexual partners, Houellebecq was ‘half a corpse’ and ‘a dirty old man’. Lolita, Jean Kwok and children’s author Pim Lammers were invoked to demonstrate that Houellebecq was engaging in censorship. But according to Team Houellebecq, it is Kirac that uses people and leaves them broken.

The video clips shown were saddening too. We saw the writer lying confused on a bed, claiming that only sex could keep him from smoking. We saw him huddled in his coat and hood on the platform at Amsterdam Central Station.

The judge took it in with a frown. ‘Surely two creative artists ought to be able to understand each other’s views,’ she said, almost despairingly. Houellebecq and Ruitenbeek were given a week to work things out together; the writer’s attendance is urgently desired for that purpose.

No, it did not look promising.

Yet the solution is within reach. Kirac was founded to expose hypocrisy in the art world, not to make life miserable for one of the most important living writers. Let them make a film about the intersections between manipulation, naivety, abuse of power and genius: there are said to be 600 hours of footage, so no shortage of material. In it, they can also explain why they are refraining from showing footage of Houellebecq in various sexual positions, even if they have the right to show it.

Kirac27 is scheduled to premiere at the Betty Asfalt Complex in Amsterdam in late May. Meanwhile, Houellebecq is making good progress with the pamphlet he is writing about the affair. Add together the income from the film and the book, and divide by two.

Something good could still come of it.