binaries of the regnant symbolic and the marginalized semiotic. At times, as we noted
above, she speaks of a hope for a “fusion”—some sort of sublation of the linguistic (and
gender) binary that so exercises and afflicts Western culture; when following Kristeva's
leads on the creativity of semiotic expression, she will voice a hope that “women can and
do become speaking subjects” (Jantzen 1998, 203). At other times, she writes as if the
heavy hand of masculinism is a cultural given that is simply immovable.
The same indecision affects Jantzen's attitudes to binaries in general. Following Derrida
(Jantzen 1998, ch. 11), she would ostensibly seek to up-end and subvert the binaries of
symbolic/semiotic, male/female, or death/life. Yet her own argument is curiously
ambiguous on this front, at times generalizing incautiously about the male symbolic,
while simultaneously insisting on a deconstruction of generalizing claims about women;
at times accusing the entire Western religious tradition of an obsession with death, while
also refusing the possibility that life and death might need to be considered together in a
religion committed to the doctrines of incarnation and resurrection (life through death). If
only natality is acceptable for Jantzen, and death suppressed, has she not precisely
recapitulated the binary she is seeking to overcome?
In sum, if the Lacanian view of language is as repressive as Jantzen would have it, and
Irigaray's and Kristeva's solutions for adjustment are inadequate, then a more confident,
mediating, and robust strategy for cultural escape from the symbolic is needed than
Jantzen appears to provide. This, indeed, is the final irony of her poststructuralist
commitment: if the symbolic is as pervasive and as powerful as she avers, there is
seemingly little hope for feminism except to withdraw into an alternative sectarian world.
Jantzen's last chapter on process thought, and the world as “God's body,” represents
views she came to hold long ago (see Jantzen 1984), before her interest in deconstruction
and French feminism developed; it is somewhat hard to see how these older interests
cohere with the new
end p.503
theoretical perspective: how exactly does process thought relate to the semiotic, or indeed
escape the taint of making realist claims? Jantzen brushes this objection away by
claiming that the realism/nonrealism debate is a stale and unproductive one. Yet her new
commitment (with Irigaray) to a Feuerbacherian form of “projectionism,” in which
women themselves “become divine,” disposes of a transcendent divinity and of realist
truth-claims in a way that is unlikely to satisfy many Christian believers spiritually and
may cause them to worry about new forms of “feminine” idolatry. Her answer to such
critics can only be that they are suffering from the delusions of masculinism—and so the
circularity of the argument repeats itself.
Jantzen's further claim that all appeals to truth or rationality smack of feminist false
consciousness and necrophilic obsession seems self-defeating granted that she herself
makes many “truth” claims, en passant, in her book. For instance, as we have already
noted, her commitment to pantheistic process thought is definitely recommendatory and
“realist” in tone, and her view that women are universally marginalized and repressed is
not, surely, expressed as a mere relativistic “perspective.” Further, her insistence that
there is no God's-eye view (even for “God”?) has all the paradoxicality of a passionate
conviction voiced by one who has ostensibly disclaimed all truths. But even Jantzen