Why the MLA does not speak for me

I’ve been a member of the MLA (Modern Language Association) for over ten years. It has rarely spoken for me. The only publication I truly look forward to is the annual Profession magazine, which is a collection of essays on the state of the profession. So I was excited to see that there were several essays on the role of the intellectual in the 21st century, including one by Julia Kristeva.

Students of mine know that I take psychoanalytic theory such as that discussed by Lacan and Kristeva seriously. But every now and again I’m reminded that I take them perhaps more seriously than I should. In a piece entitled “Thinking in Dark Times” she writes:

“Contrary to what we’re led to believe, the clash of religions is in fact merely a surface phenomenon. The problem we’re facing at the beginning of this new millennium is not one of religious wars but rather the rift that separates those who want to know that God is unconscious and those who prefer not to, so as to be pleasured by the show that announces he exists” (16).

The rest of the paragraph clearly indicates (though it’s debatable that Kristeva is ever clear) that the only place to be in this dichotomy is with those who “want to know that God is unconscious” and not with those who “prefer not to”. Now, what kind of choice is this, really? What does it mean to want to know that God is unconscious? Best I can make out, it is to believe, contra gut instincts maybe, that God is only a force in our psyches, not external to us, a force we made up that is powerful nonetheless. The second choice is to know this (perhaps in your unconscious) but to prefer not to believe it, to choose an unenlightened state, so as to receive a kind of sexual pleasure from consumer capitalism’s promise of goods “guaranteed by the promise of superior good” in an endless Lacanian god-is-the-phallus-in-the-box deferral. Quite simply, this is ridiculous. I pulled out this paragraph to discuss it with my husband (who is a philosopher), and it reminded me how often I just let this kind of reasoning sneak by me, because of the way people like Kristeva write. The fact that the MLA would publish this without hesitancy is not surprising to me. Nor am I surprised that no one in its upper echelons can see (or care about) how truly contemptuous this kind of thinking is to the “other”---in this case, people with genuine belief. We have been reduced to self-pleasuring infants who never want to grow up. And because we are infantile, it is also our fault that things like 9/11 happen. If the MLA wants to be relevant, it needs to back away from this kind of self-serving contempt.