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2006 Northeast Modern Language Association Panels |
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Christopher Roberts "A Sensible Transcendental: Jantzen, Irigaray, and a Feminist Philosophy of Religion"
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This presentation will explore the work of Grace Jantzen, a contemporary feminist philosopher of religion, as she marshals the resources of continental philosophy to correct the androcentric and nihilistic premises of traditional philosophy of religion. Even before Hegel used the example of Antigone to argue, in essence, that religion is woman's work, Enlightenment discourse has been troubled by the obdurate persistence of religious devotion. The recent academic return to questions religious seems puzzling, however, only to scholars who retain the Enlightenment notion of religion as so many failed attempts to explain the puzzling phenomena of nature. With religion as a kind of proto-science, scholars can only express dismay at the fact that science has not yet fully displaced religion in the lives of humans everywhere. On this terrain, scholarly discourse would remain trapped in the dead-end of an elite/mass dichotomy. Fortunately, there is another definition of religion with an impeccable academic pedigree that not only helps to make sense of religion as both a residual and an emerging phenomenon, but also provides an opening for academic voices to engage the devout in dialogue and debate. For Emile Durkheim, religion has provided the historical means for communities to reflect upon the nature of community itself. Through fundamental categories such as the sacred and the divine, communities address the realities of social structure and reproduction, as well as the utopian desire for the ideal community that serves as the means for social transformation. This Durkheimian notion of religion as a phenomenon that primarily addresses not nature but society (and through this, of course, that society's concept of nature) passed through the work of his nephew, Marcel Mauss, whose exploration of primary social transactions such as sacrifices and gifts influenced generations of scholars such as Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, and Bourdieu. The one shortcoming of this tradition, however, is that the problems of race and gender have played little part in the analysis. Lately, however, this tradition has been taken up into contemporary theory by figures such as Kristeva and Irigaray. With these as a bridge, the feminist theologian, Grace Jantzen, has brought the Durkheimian tradition into dialogue with Anglophone philosophy of religion. Notoriously phallogocentric and necrotelic, Jantzen challenges this discourse's obsession with the afterlife and an omni-God by developing a processual symbolic that reconstitutes the divine as a utopian object of desire in a feminist symbolic of natality and flourishing. In linking this contemporary theorist to the French tradition of social philosophy, my presentation would both underscore the importance of this neglected tradition, and explore an exemplary instance of a scholar whose innovative work promises to refashion received notions of the feminine and the divine.
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