dealing here with materials more latent in the text than overt (the “often unrecognized use
of figures and imagery”; Anderson 1998, 25), and thus presumably always subject to a
response of blanket denial by the male-neutral author. To this issue we must return, when
we examine Anderson's revealingly “suspicious” reading of some of the influential texts
of analytic philosophy of religion.
By now we have spelled out in some detail the first, and central, epistemological
divergence of Anderson's views from those of Jantzen. Anderson is a standpoint
epistemologist rather than a poststructuralist; thus, we are not surprised that, en passant,
she can remark that her views clearly diverge “from the extremes of postmodernism” and
that she does not “give up completely the modern, Enlightenment project of epistemology
and its claims concerning the autonomous reason” (1998, 53). In the same breath she
forecasts the second way her project differs most obviously from Jantzen's; this lies in the
fact that she does not “assume that an essential female desire exists which should be
valued more highly than an essential male reason” (53, my emphasis). In other words,
more clearly and consistently than Jantzen, Anderson seeks to find a way of integrating
desire and reason. It is to Anderson's particular construal of desire, then, that we now
turn, for in it is encapsulated much of what she proposes in the latter part of her book for
a renewed, feminist philosophy of religion. Anderson's understanding of the category is
different not only in substance from Jantzen's, but also in range of application. While
Anderson, too, draws extensively on Irigaray and Kristeva at this point in her book, she
not only reads them rather differently from Jantzen, but supplements and adjusts their
views by superimposing insights from Le Doeuff's concept of the philosophical
imaginary.
The arguments in this second major portion of Anderson's book (1998, chs. 3–5) are
somewhat diffuse and unfinished, by Anderson's own admission, but perhaps the central
theses can be summed up in the following way. First, Anderson utilizes her own reading
of Irigaray and Kristeva to argue that “feminist poststructuralism does not necessarily
privilege desire over reason, irrationality over rationality” (246, my emphasis). Anderson
realizes that she is apparently backtracking here on what she has said critically about
feminist poststructuralism in her previous chapter on standpoint. But her point now is that
we can still learn from the psycholinguistics of the poststructuralist school, without
subscribing to its apparently fatal epistemological binary; for “it offers feminist
epistemologists the psycholinguistic tools to begin to unearth what has been buried by
patriarchal structures of belief and myth” (246). Accordingly, she uses Irigaray's work,
first, to illustrate how male “scientific” rationality may draw on the erotic power of
female desire while also repressing it out of sight: “In [the male's] quest for God,” as
Irigaray puts it, “he takes her light to illuminate his pathHe [has] stolen her gaze” (1993,
209–10; see Anderson 1998, 99). Anderson's use of Kristeva's writing is rather different
(and indeed, she is more careful than Jantzen not to elide the views of the two thinkers, or
to subsume one in the other). Thus, whereas Anderson reads Irigaray as conjoining the
quest for God with repressed female desire in the unconscious motivation of the male
subject, Kristeva, in contrast, is seen as focusing more on the “repressed maternal” in
patriarchal culture, and its link back to the divine through the figure of Mary, the “mother
of God.” And whereas Irigaray hypothesizes the absolute need for a projected “feminine
divine” in order for women to claim their full (“feminine”) identity, Kristeva looks more
subtly to the saving irruptions of the semiotic for the location of divine power. Here,
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