Television and other commercial visual media continue to be perennial obsessions for novelist Chloé Delaume. In her literature and performance art she actively explores and experiments with the various worlds the screen proposes, from writing about being a Sim City avatar— Corpus Simsi (2003)—to designing a hybrid graphic novel published by Seuil and downloadable on iTunes—Alienare (2015). Delaume, like Michel Houellebecq, is fascinated by television: she insists that, when she works, it is always with ‘la télé allumée à un mètre et demi de moi’ [the TV on, five feet from me] (Sulser, ‘L’apocalypse selon les femmes’). Most recently, in her Les sorcières de la république (2016), Delaume imagines a post-apocalyptic France where an ominous ‘Canal National’ broadcasts public service announcements reminding viewers that it is ‘interdit de se pendre, sous peine de poursuite de votre famille’ [prohibited to hang oneself, under penalty of prosecution of your family] (219). The eccentric and innovative Delaume often immerses her autofictional self in the worlds of the screen, dangerously injecting herself with an ‘intraveineuse du spectacle pur’ [intravenous injection of pure spectacle] (Corpus Simsi, 90). And nowhere is this experience pursued more deeply, and the logics of commercial visual media more vigorously revealed and confronted, than in her often overlooked ninth novel, J’habite dans la télévision (2006).

Patrick Le Lay, that French media mogul we encountered in Michel Houellebecq's La carte et le territoire, also figures prominently in J’habite dans la télévision. However, whereas Houellebecq fictionally placed his reader in a privileged position where he could brush elbows with the likes of Le Lay, Delaume keeps the then-CEO of France's TF1 in the position of power he truly occupies in an increasingly corporatized, globalized, and telecommunications-driven French culture. Indeed, she depicts Le Lay at his most megalomaniacal, referencing the infamous 2004 essay in which he stated that the true ‘vocation’ of TF1 television shows was to ‘rendre [le cerveau] disponible, c’est-à-dire de le divertir, de le détendre, de le préparer entre deux messages’ [render the brain available, to entertain it, to relax it, to prepare it between two commercials]