the joy problem

Music: De/Vision: Fairyland? I've had quite a number of discussions this weekend, starting Friday night at the "graduate recruiting party" and continuing last night over dinner with some friends, about the increasing interest in religion among graduate students. Reportedly, one of my colleagues was "shocked" that over half of his term papers for a rhetorical criticism class concerned the rhetoric of religion, and some of my colleagues were surprised to hear I've been approached by a number of students of offer a graduate course on the topic. "Why religion now?" someone asked on Friday. The answer was so obvious it was hard to respond without the visage of incredulity.

Although I would very much enjoy putting together a seminar on the rhetoric of religion (I imagine I would use it as an excuse to teach myself Derrida's later work; we'd start with Augustine and end with The Gift of Death), I would worry about the (my) ethical scaffolding: would the spirit of hospitality—of a respectful agnosticism--really work with a prospective student whom some overheard saying, "I'm just not sure if God wants me to be at the University of Texas." We have some graduate students now who bob and weave in class and assignments (and who they will and will not "take") so as not to offend their religious habits and beliefs. Indeed, I think I'm seeing more of this relgio-graduate identity-building going on than I've ever noticed: they don't understand because they are godless; this is why they need me as a scholar and teacher. Of course, me against the system (or me against obfuscating jargon, or me against the corporate academy, or whatever) is central to the fundamental occultism of the academy, but the righteousness of the inner light has really never felt so emboldened, at least during my brief decade in higher education.

This morning Mirko forwarded a link to an Op-Ed in the New York Times penned by a favorite of mine, Slavoj Zizek. Titled "Defenders of the Faith." Zizek argues that we should "restore the dignity of atheism" because it's our only chance for peace. Zizek counters the argument that a godless society is nihilistic (e.g., "everything is permissible" without the divine cop) with the evidence of "terrorism": it is precisely because God is everywhere that blowing yourself up in a grade school hallway is permissible. Thus the godlessness of a political atheism that originally underwrote Auschwitz has realized itself in all kinds of fundamentalisms that I'll simply call the joy complex, following Jung's notion of the complex as a linguistic/symbolic knot. [LATER DAY EDIT: oh, I supposed "Joy Division" would do, but that's just a bit too much concentration-camp-brothel-cum-goth-band for my own tastes this evening.]

Joy is the word I've been looking for that best describes what we previously termed the "ecstasy of violence" (a term that has lost its shock appeal, here after the video game explosion). Joy is both the word for unbridled (often tearful) happiness as well as an object that causes such happiness (yup, you guessed it: it's the objet a)—as if to say, "you are my joy" (thank you Snow Patrol). The word derives from Old French, of course, as it is also the root of the much afeared jouissance, Barthes term for the texty orgasmatron and Lacan's designated function for the drives. I recognize this is not news, but I am somewhat joyful at having located a word that works for me (of course the pun is intended, just not when I first wrote the sentence).

That said, the problem with teaching a rhetoric of religion, or about the relation between rhetoric and religion, is "the joy problem." Why? Because joy is always a consequence of using an object to get off in some sort of transgressive (e.g., not law-bound) way. "I'm not sure if God wants me to be at the University of Texas" is another way of saying that this person is not so sure she will find the objects she needs to get off, as if to say, "I'm not so sure your department has enough self-righteous atheists to use for maintaining my own righteousness." You see, I think the department is quite open to religion in all its guises; this is a problem for the conviction of joy.

I guess that the thing which is troublesome to so many about fundamentalist Christians is that they get off thinking that us Godless agnostics and atheists are going to hell. This is to say, the professor is not a subject. The only corrective is a huge heap of depression, and by that I don't mean clinical depression, but rather, the depressive/paranoid position what recoils in the self as doubt and a capacity to constrain joy with guilt. To widen the gyre, this cultural obsession with banishing darkness—with pills, with the violent ministries of joy—is part of what's pushing up these transgressive emails from students. Again, yes, it's certainly an economic logic—but it's also the relentless jubilation of a recently emboldened civil religiosity. I don't know if I agree with Zizek that we need our atheism, but God (,) do we need our depression!

[LATE EDIT: ooh, I see The Sopranos are back; damn! I wish I had cable]