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What's the Difference? Knowledge and Gender in (Post) Modern Philosophy of Religion1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Grace M. Jantzen
Grace M. Jantzen
Affiliation:
Department of Religions and Theology, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL
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Extract

Donna Haraway, in her ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, issues a warning that in the postmodern world where grand narratives increasingly fail and subjects are seen to be irremediably fragmented, ‘we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making a partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology is about knowing the difference’. Such an account of epistemology, which sees its central task to be a knowledge of the significance of difference and a capacity to discern between innocent and oppressive forms of difference, is perhaps not one that would most readily occur to British philosophers of religion. It is, however, an account which has resonances both with many contemporary continental thinkers and with feminist epistemologists. Notwithstanding the many areas of divergence between and among these groups, on two points at least they converge: that the recognition and discernment of difference has become inescapable for epistemology, and that of the differences which must be dealt with, gender difference has a paradigmatic status.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 431 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

2 Haraway, Donna ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ in Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) pp. 202–3Google Scholar. First published in 1985 in Socialist Review, no 8.

3 For divergence in feminist epistemology, see (among many others) Lennon, Kathleen and Whitford, Margaret, ed. Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth, ed. Feminist Epistemologies (London and New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar. The variations and sometimes sharp disagreements in feminists' attitudes toward postmodern theory are illustrated in Benhabib, Seyla, Butler, Judith, Cornell, Drucilla, and Fraser, NancyFeminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar and Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar. For variations and divergences among thinkers loosely lumped together as ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructuralist’ see (again among many others) Bernstein, Richard J.A New Constellation: The Ethical–Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)Google Scholar and Descombes, VincentModern French Philosophy (Cambridge: University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. All these variations notwithstanding, the categories of ‘difference’ and ‘gender’ and the connections between them are central to all these writers.

4 Lyotard, Jean FrançoisThe Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington, G. and Maaumi, Brian (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984)Google Scholar. But anyone who reads this text will at once see vast differences between Lyotard and, say, Foucault or Derrida who are also often labelled ‘postmodern’ thinkers. See especially Foucault, MichelThe Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (Pantheon, New York, 1972)Google Scholar and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage, Random House, New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Derrida, JacquesWriting and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan (Routledge, London, 1978)Google Scholar.

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19 See especially Freud, Sigmund, New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, trans. Strachey, James (Penguin, London: Penguin Freud Library Volume 2, 1991)Google Scholar, and Lacan, JacquesÉcrits: A Selection, trans. Sheridan, Alan (London: Tavistock Press, 1977).Google Scholar

20 For a helpful exposition of this, see Grosz, Elizabeth, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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24 As we find, for example, in Davies, Brian, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion New edition (Oxford: University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

25 Irigaray, Luce ‘Divine Woman’ in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gill, Gillian C. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

26 See, among others, Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass, Alan (University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar where he investigates the ‘margins’ of philosophers such as Plato and Rousseau, and Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Porter, Catherine and Burke, Carolyn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar where she uses the technique on psychoanalytic writing.

27 Luce Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, in her Sexes and Genealogies.

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42 While these are abiding interests in the lives and thought of many French thinkers, they have received most published prominence in the work of Michel Foucault: see his Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard, Richard (London: Tavistock, 1967)Google Scholar; The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Sheridan, A. M. (London: Routledge, 1973)Google Scholar; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (London: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar; The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (London: Penguin, 1979).Google Scholar

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46 Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gill, Gillian C. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp. 191–240Google Scholar; and Julia Kristeva Tales of Love, op. cit.

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53 Irigaray, Luce ‘Women, the Sacred, Money’ in her, Sexes and Genealogies, op. cit. p. 75.Google Scholar

54 Thus for example David Macey in his otherwise excellent book, Lacan in Contexts, largely ignores Lacan's constant use of Biblical phrases and allusions, as also does Elizabeth Grosz in her, Jacques Lacan.

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