For Paul Virilio, as the consumption of commercial visual media increasingly defines everyday existence, as ‘la vue’ [‘vision’] becomes ‘la voie’ [‘the way’] (L’horizon négatif, 159; Negative Horizon, 116), so too does the ‘particulier’ [‘inhabitant’] become the ‘particule’ [‘particle’] (129, 98). Few have depicted as brutally as Michel Houellebecq this modern-day ‘atomization’ of society (cf. Houellebecq, Les particules élémentaires [The Elementary Particles] (1998)). Moreover, commercial visual media, notably in the form of television, figure prominently in Houellebecq's novelistic world, and their presence has not been sufficiently studied. In his most recent novel, Soumission [Submission] (2015), TV even ascends to the ranks of those precious few pleasures of existence, along with sex, alcohol, and cigarettes, that can, at least momentarily, make life worth living in the Houellebecqian world. As the protagonist of Soumission, François, settles in to watch the historic election that will bring an end to the French Fifth Republic and usher in an Islamic French state, he muses: ‘Dès que David Pujadas prit l’antenne à 19 heures 50, je compris que la soirée électorale s’annonçait comme un très grand cru, et que j’allais vivre un moment de télévision exceptionnel’ [‘As soon as David Pujadas went on the air at 7:50, I knew this election night would be top-notch, and that I was about to experience some exceptional TV’] (75, 58). What exactly might it mean to live a moment of television, as Houellebecq puts it in the original French? We must take such a statement at its word, coming from an author who describes himself as ‘more visual than anything else,’ and who promotes ‘staring at things fixedly, without any project,’ as an ‘exercise of non-existence’ (De Loisy, 17); an author who enthusiastically, and enigmatically, states: ‘I am a real fan of war images on TV. Reality interests me’ (De Loisy, 26, my italics). In this non sequitur, as with the notion of living a television moment, Houellebecq nonchalantly and no doubt provocatively conflates reality with commercial visual media, as though, in a decidedly hyperreal vein, there were essentially no distinction to be drawn between phenomenal and televised worlds.