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 - the radical pessimist, the chronicler of human suffering, the lonely misanthrope - a powerful conception of the human condition and of the future that awaits us, and when Houellebecq-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 Schopenhauer-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 He thought of turning it into a book but soon abandoned the idea and the text remained unpublished until 2017.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 Schopen
