later—to adopt the well-known feminist “standpoint epistemology” of Nancy Hartsock
(1983) and Sandra Harding (1993), and claim a greater “objectivity” for the perspectives
of the oppressed (Jantzen 1998, 121–27; 215). Because, for Jantzen, any claim to “truth”
or “objectivity” is tainted by “phallocentrism,” it can thus only serve the deathly
agonistics of “male” power. This leaves her in a sticky position epistemologically, which
she seeks to alleviate by appeal to the intrinsic pragmatic worth of “struggle” (215), the
admission of an irreducible plurality of “perspectives,” and the need for discernment on
the basis of the criteria of “justice” and communal “trustworthiness.” Whether Jantzen
can ultimately avoid all appeals to “truth,” metaphysical or otherwise, is a question to
which we shall return. But certainly, it is her avowal, in the spirit of Foucault, that such
claims invariably hide devious attempts at power-mastery.
Notable, too, is Jantzen's complete disdain for the strategies of apophatic discourse,
which one might have expected her to employ as a feminist riposte to “literal” truth
claims about the divine from some analytic philosophers. But as she has discussed more
extensively in previous work (Jantzen 1995), so here again: she denounces “darkness
mysticism” in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius as yet another elitist “male” ploy to
establish the hegemony of the intellect and to prevent women's voices being heard at the
apex of the “ecclesiastical hierarchy” (1998, 174–75).
The remaining cluster of objections to analytic philosophy of religion, identified above,
are wielded by Jantzen as other parts of her argument unfold. The penchant among some
philosophers of religion (but by no means all) toward “evidentialism” is discussed by
Jantzen (1998, ch. 4) as a foil to her thesis that “desire” is repressed in the discourses of
analytic philosophy. To seek to “justify” religious beliefs by “evidences,” she argues, is
ostensibly a quest for objective “rationality” but actually hides a desire to project one's
own image into the divine: “A deconstructive reading of thisdiscoursereveals that
although the insistence on evidence is meant as a denial or repression of desire and
projection, these elements are always already operative” (77). Richard Swinburne (1979)
and Paul Helm (1994), especially, receive harsh criticism for failing to note the lessons of
Nietzsche and Feuerbach on power and projection; Swinburne's and Helm's concern
about the weighing of “evidences” ignores their own projective desire for divine power
and fatally “constructs desire as rationality's other” (Jantzen 1998, 81). Jantzen, in
contrast, marshalls the aid of Feuerbach and Irigaray to insist that the “path of desire” is a
necessary means to women “becoming divine” and to ousting the “male symbolic” in
favor of a new “feminine imaginary.” As we have already seen, however, a naïve appeal
to (female) “religious experience” is to be avoided here, according to Jantzen, since it can
already be part of a false objectification and privatization of religious piety, which merely
plays back into the hands of the “male symbolic.”^5
Unsurprisingly, we find Jantzen also launching an attack on analytic philos ophy of
religion's presumed tendency to a mind-body dualism, and its failure to acknowledge
gendered difference, as part of her theory about the discipline's occlusion of “desire”
(1998, 31–34). Once again, as elsewhere in this book, Jantzen does not stop to comment
on the great variety of views within analytic philosophy of religion on the mind-body
issue and other matters, and her wide sweeps of judgment about the Christian tradition's
views of the “self” (from Augustine to Descartes) also do not recount the internal
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