The anti-utopian islands of Michel Houellebecq and Jean-Philippe Toussaint

The characters created by Michel Houellebecq and Jean-Philippe Toussaint end up by extracting themselves from our social and geographical world whose rules and limits are too difficult to bear. In this context, retreating to existing islands appears to be a legitimate solution. If, at first glance, they seem to be alternatives to the throes of the metropolis, Lanzarote and the island of Elba do not represent utopias as ideal societies but as non-places in the etymological sense of the term: the place of nowhere or which is in no place. The two authors do not cease playing with the codes of the island utopia, while depriving them of the history and the literary references which are usually associated with the concept. The article aims to analyze the effects and manifestations of Houellebecq's and Toussaint's anti-utopian islands, in a world whose limits and finitude of resources have been measured.