undergirds Jantzen's whole book and imparts to it a deep pessimism about the cramping
restrictions of the existing status quo in Anglo-American philosophy. Right from the
start, it is hard to see how Jantzen actually could build a “bridge” between her position
and that of analytic philosophy of religion, for the latter, according to her, hides under its
“cool, guarded, ostensibly neutral” approach a “modern,” “Protestant,” and “scientific”
obsession with “truth” and “belief” that can lead only to “patriarchal necrophilia” (18,
20–23). The only solution to this state of affairs is for women to construct for themselves
(with explicit debt to Feuerbach and to the French feminist Luce Irigaray) a new so-called
feminine imaginary. This must be a vision of the divine that will sustain women's
interests and release them from the “masculine symbolic,” which, from the moment of
their very entry into language, has enslaved them in “masculinist” modes of thinking.
end p.496
Why exactly is the interest in “truth” in analytic philosophy of religion associated with
“masculinism,” and especially with death? And why is any language system thought of as
intrinsically tainted by such “masculinism”? The answer lies in the theoretical
underpinnings provided by French post-Freudian psycholinguistics, especially in Luce
Irigaray's feminist adjustment of Lacan's contrast of the so-called symbolic and semiotic
realms. As Jantzen explains (1998, ch. 1), Lacan's understanding of the “symbolic” realm
explains the child's entry into language (and thence into civilization and culture), and the
achievement thereby of a conscious “subjectivity”; in the case of the male child, this is
associated, according to Lacan, with a crucial repression of his desire for the mother and
a more or less unconscious identification with “phallocentric” goals: order, control,
“system,” and “truth.” The “semiotic” realm, in contrast, is that which disturbingly
interrupts the “male” or “phallocentric” thought-forms of the “symbolic” and brings a
disruptive reminiscence of identification with the maternal. (It is often expressed in
poetry, art, or music that defies “order,” or it may be theorized in psychoanalytic or
cultural theory.)
Once this basic psycholinguistic gender binary between symbolic and semiotic is taken as
given, it takes a feminist critique, provided most notably by Irigaray (1985a, 1985b), to
point out that “feminine subjectivity” is fatally occluded by the dominance of the
“symbolic” in this theory. For as in Freud, so also in Lacan, woman is fundamentally
defined as “lack” (of the penis in Freud, of “phallocentric” consciousness in Lacan). And
if the normative entry into independent personhood is conceived of as “male,” and the
repression of the maternal presumed to be a necessity of such growth, how could the
theory possibly accommodate an adequate account of “feminine” personhood? If a young
woman follows the directives of the “symbolic,” she can at best achieve a false “equality”
with men on their own terms; her own distinctive subjectivity will remain undeveloped
and unacknowledged. For Irigaray, Lacan's “Law (or Name) of the Father” is assumed to
be so deeply inscribed into Western culture that, despite pervasive secularism, it still
summons the authoritative power of a male “God.” Jantzen adds to this insight her
insistence that the “Law of the Father” is also death-obsessed: “necrophilia” is
intrinsically bound in with the “Law of the Father,” since it ceaselessly seeks to conquer,
master and subdue the “other”. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the quest for
“truth,” which, for Jantzen, equally assumes this competitive and destructive attitude.