analytic school. Likewise, the more eirenic moments when Jantzen calls for some kind of
“fusion or healing of the rift between semiotic and symbolic” (203) ring rather hollow
given the repetitive fury commonly manifested by her against the “symbolic” realm tout
court. Let us now scrutinize these
end p.498
paradoxical dimensions of the book a little further, and in so doing relate a number of
important subthemes in Jantzen that have bearing on our assessment of the possibility of
any future fruitful interaction between feminism and analytic philosophy of religion.
It is important, first, to explicate in greater detail why Jantzen associates analytic
philosophy of religion specifically with “necrophilic” imagination. As we have seen, the
very commitment to truth and clarity tars the discipline with the “male,” “symbolic”
brush at the outset, as far as Jantzen is concerned; the first thing we need to examine is
why she presumes that analytic philosophers of religion necessarily fall into male idolatry
by claiming “the God's-eye view.” But Jantzen has other objections to the concerns and
thought-forms of analytic philosophy of religion, which are related to the charge of
necrophilia. Five (other) such objections appear paramount in Becoming Divine,
according to my reading: Jantzen's profound distrust of evidentialism (including her
analysis of what she sees as question-begging appeals to “religious experience”); her
identification of a recurrent mind-body split in analytic philosophy of religion (which she
thinks involves a fatal occlusion of “desire”); her charge of a covert identification of the
male subject with God (which leads on, rather oddly, to a radical critique of “analogy”);
her claim of an unhealthy obsession with “salvation” and life after death; and finally, her
accusation of an equally morbid interest in theodicy and the problem of evil. Many of
these charges are entwined with one another in a way that makes them difficult to
disentangle, but a brief examination of each in turn will draw out the further subthemes of
the book before we attempt an assessment.
First, Jantzen's appeal (1998, 205) to Thomas Nagel's (1986) celebrated dictum about the
“God's-eye view” being nothing but the “view from nowhere”^4 indicates her strong
commitment to dissolving the realism-antirealism binary and replacing it with criteria of
“justice” and “trustworthiness” (Jantzen 1998, ch. 9). Likewise (ch. 10), “ontotheology,”
as critiqued by Heidegger, must be replaced by primary ethical concerns for the “other”;
yet Levinas' ethical “first philosophy” also must be adjusted—with the help of Arendt's
stress on action and community—to acknowledge how gendered “otherness” can easily
be forgotten. This pragmatist and ethical “turn” supposedly rebuts the epistemological
realism of most analytic philosophy of religion by a quick rejoinder of false
consciousness: any claim to such privileged access to the “real” must be playing “God”
from the platform of the “male symbolic”—“the phallus as universal signifier” (Jantzen
1998, 204). It would appear, then, that “Any claim to objective (let alone universal)
truthwould have to be abandoned in favour of a respectful pluralism” (214). But here
Jantzen wavers; she has to acknowledge that not all epistemological “standpoints” are
equally valid (else we would have to be “respectful,” likewise, to the perspectives “that
slavery is acceptable” or “that lesbians should be killed”). Yet Jantzen refuses—and here
is an important contrast with Anderson, which we shall explore
end p.499