according to Kristeva, the evocations of the “maternal” break through the gaps of male,
symbolic discourse and return us to the unspeakable sense of original union with the
mother. Anderson thinks we can draw richly on these poststructuralist and psychoanalytic
insights to demonstrate that the discourses of analytic philosophy of religion, too, occlude
female desire and the maternal in their quest for God; but she does not thereby
recommend a straightforward acceptance of Irigaray's or Kristeva's thought as “theology”
(Anderson 1998, 117); nor, as we have seen, does she embrace the problematic, dualistic
epistemology that accompanies their insights.
Hence, what remains for Anderson to indicate in the final sections of her book (1998, chs.
4–5) is that desire and reason are capable of some new alignment, which in turn could
transform the shape of philosophy of religion in creative and liberating ways. To
demonstrate this possibility, Anderson argues that only “mythology” has the power to be
the medium of this realignment, and that “mimesis” (understood by Irigaray as a creative
reconfiguration of the hierarchy of gender) must be the means by which that power is
enacted to disrupt male-neutral distortions and to bring forth the impassioned “woman of
reason” (135–47). We note in this exposition of mythology and mimesis that Anderson's
(1993) earlier work on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur strongly influences her view that
radical changes in philosophical thinking cannot be effected without the mediation of
these (apparently more subliminal) forms of expression and practice. For it is also Le
Doeuff's philosophical imaginary that is at stake here, with all its previously
unacknowledged cargo from the male unconscious; the mere taking of thought is
insufficient to shift the key of the discourse. For similar reasons, another category that
becomes important for Anderson's exposition of the transformation of female desire at
this point is bell hooks's (1990) notion of “yearning.” Anderson adopts this term as a
means of rethinking the notion of female desire as a desire precisely to transform
rationality through passion. Later she can speak of the “substantive form” of reason as
consisting in yearning (1998, 213).
A final twist in Anderson's argument at the end of her book links to this attempt to
mediate between passion and intellect, and presents a fascinating contrast with Jantzen's
attack on necrophilia and the patriarchal culture of death.
end p.511
Rather than avoiding the subject of death, or simply identifying it with male obsession,
Anderson sees the acknowledgment of death as a sign of embodiment accepted, of
“death's intimate connection with yearning for love between fully embodied men and
women” (1998, 247). Perhaps this may stand as the final, and most revealing, contrast
between Anderson's and Jantzen's construal of the philosophical significance of the
French feminists. For Jantzen, the feminine imaginary should flee from death and
embrace natality, whereas for Anderson, the presence of death in the philosophic
discourse is, at worst, a reminder that embodiment cannot be denied and, at best, a signal
of the necessary presence of desire in the discourses of reason.
As we have seen from the start of this exposition of A Feminist Philosophy of Religion,
Anderson, unlike Jantzen, does not reject analytic philosophy of religion tout court;
instead, she seeks to build feminist bridges toward it, and so to transform its thought-
forms, goals, and interests. But it must be said that her final proposals for change in the