Kristeva in MLA's 'Profession'

In an annual publication of the MLA, Profession (2006), Julia Kristeva asks whether or not we're facing a global threat of religious war, and what a renewed literary/philosophical humanism can do about it. What spurs her to these questions are the riots in France late in 2005 -- or at least she takes these riots as a specific instance of the (only apparent) clash of religious cultures tearing at the fabric of the postmodern global order. Her argument, it seems to me, is a contribution to recent versions of the secularization debate, in which she comes down on the side of reason v. religion. I'm oversimplifying to a very great extent here, not only because Kristeva rejects this binary, but also because (in my reading at least) her psychoanalytic models are just as fully an instance of belief as is religion itself. But reading her pithy analysis of the present moment, it's difficult not to conclude otherwise: "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." As for those youthful Parisian rioters, Kristeva has this to offer: "beneath the vandalism, there is the long-neglected [and, moreover, 'prereligious'] need to believe" in ideals typical of adolescents. She even hints, through a couple of oddly unnecessary references, that there's something "primitive" or at least "Medieval" about these prebelievers. And while she doesn't return to the questions with which she began her essay to consider whether or not Sunni v. Shia violence in Baghdad is equally adolescent, the notion is there for the reader to consider.

I don't mean to disparage Kristeva's essay (entitled "Thinking in Dark Times") entirely. It doesn't withhold a certain sympathy for the "pyromaniacs" torching Paris, nor is it without political awareness of the real sources of the crisis. Still, it's brought me a new appreciation for friends who work, ever so creatively, at the fluid margins of theology. For a long time I've wondered why non-religious thinkers would want to engage in theological discourse; but if the alternatives are an increasingly irrelevant rejection of religious belief, or worse, a Kristevan condescension, then theology becomes rather more attractive as an option. At the very least, I think the humanities can do a far better job than this to mend wounds and build bridges.