Only a different, “feminine imaginary” can provide a God who does not repress, but
sustains, women's “flourishing.”
It is Jantzen's claim from early on in her book that analytic philosophy of religion,
specifically, is incapable of acknowledging the existence of the “Rule of the Father” to
which it is nonetheless enslaved (1998, 24). Even when an analytic philosopher of
religion occasionally mentions the significance of the “unconscious” (a rare enough event
in itself),^3 there is a “deafening silence,” she says, about the relation of this realm to
questions of gender and the problem of
end p.497
women's subjectivity. Jantzen applies at this point the pragmatist criterion of what is
“helpful” to further women's goals. Women must rejoice in their “natality” rather than
becoming absorbed in questions of death, judgment, and afterlife. They must develop
what Irigaray has called a “sensible transcendental,” that is, a new vision of the divine
which does not abstract from the earthly and physical but rejoices in them. Indeed, the
ultimate solution for Jantzen is for women to see themselves as “becoming divine,” a
projective and imaginative task that she links (at the end of her book) with process
thought and a pantheistic metaphysics (ch. 11).
These are the central themes in Jantzen's work, and together form what we might call the
“bookends” of Becoming Divine (1998, chs. 1 and 11). As Jantzen herself recapitulates
the core thesis of the book in chapter 11 (254): “The central contentionhas been that it is
urgently necessary for feminists to work towards a new religious symbolic focused on
natality and flourishing rather than death, a symbolic which will lovingly enable natals,
women and men, to become subjects, and the earth on which we live to bloom.” But the
intervening chapters of the book greatly complexify the picture and allow Jantzen to draw
on a wide range of continental heroes and heroines from post-Kantian philosophy, social
theory, and feminist thought. Interestingly, Jantzen has little time for the work of the
pioneering feminist theologians (Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elisabeth Schüssler
Fiorenza, Daphne Hampson, for instance), whom she regards as making philosophically
naïve appeals to “women's experience” as privatized and generically female, and as
failing to acknowledge the “irreducibly diverse” nature of the many variables in women's
lives (race, class, sexual orientation, and so on; see Jantzen 1998, ch. 5). Indeed, besides
the French feminists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, and the German American ethicist
Hannah Arendt, it is noteworthy that Jantzen's main intellectual heroes are all male:
Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Michel Foucault, while the
“enemy” is represented repeatedly as analytic philosophy of religion and its major male
exponents (Richard Swinburne, Paul Helm, Alvin Plantinga, Brian Davies, Vincent
Brümmer, D. Z. Phillips, and John Hick are all singled out for trenchant criticism, despite
their own many differences of opinion). Because much of the force of Jantzen's book
depends on how one reads this further disjunctive binary (between male continental
social theory/philosophy and male analytic philosophy of religion), we need to examine it
in a little more detail in order to assess the success and consistency of Jantzen's proposal.
What we shall find here is that the occasional calls made by Jantzen—in the spirit of
Derrida—to overcome all disjunctive binaries (Jantzen 1998 62, chs. 3 and 11), are
seemingly rendered merely rhetorical by the relentless force of her dismissal of the