Grace Jantzen

Redeeming the Present

Elaine L. Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754668237
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317125075
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Grace Jantzen was an internationally-renowned feminist philosopher of religion whose work has transformed the way we think about the interactions between religion, culture and gender in Western culture. Jantzen's aim was to 'redeem the present' via a critique and reconstruction of staple concepts of the Western imaginary. This unique book brings together many of Grace Jantzen's colleagues and former students in a wide-ranging exploration of her enduring influence, ranging across philosophy of religion, to literature, psychoanalysis, theology, ethics and politics. Part I assesses the ramifications of Jantzen's affirmation that Western culture must 'choose life' in preference to a prevailing symbolic of violence and death. Part II explores some of the key voices which contributed to Jantzen's understanding of a culture of flourishing and natality: Quaker thought and practice, medieval mysticism and feminist spirituality. Further essays apply elements of Jantzen's work to the politics of disability, development and environmentalism, extending her range of influence into new and innovative areas.

Chapter 1
Redeeming the Present

Elaine Graham

What does it mean to do feminist moral philosophy with notions of utopia and transformation as points of reference? What characteristics are necessary for moral philosophy to address, criticize and ultimately redeem the present – a present whose constitutive ingredients include massive inequalities of gender, ‘race’, and economic and cultural resources?1

Grace Jantzen, in whose honour this volume has been assembled, was John Rylands Research Professor of Religion, Culture and Gender at the University of Manchester. Born in 1948 in Saskatchewan in Western Canada into a strict Mennonite farming family, she studied at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Calgary before moving to Oxford, where she completed a DPhil – her second doctoral degree – on The Doctrine of Divine Incorporeality. She taught Philosophy of Religion at King’s College London for fifteen years until her move to Manchester in 1995. She remained there until her death from cancer in May 2006.

Her publications were many and distinguished, beginning with God’s World, God’s Body,2 a development of her doctoral work on the doctrine of God and the enduring philosophical question of God’s embodiment. Probably the most popular – in terms of best-selling and most widely-read – of her works was her study of the female medieval mystical writer and teacher, Julian of Norwich, as exemplar of a holistic, life-affirming theology. This contained many of the seeds of later work, brought especially to fruition in Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism3 which argued that conventional characterizations of ‘mysticism’ (Grace always tried to avoid ‘isms’) as privatized, interior and ineffable were calculated to silence the distinctive voice of women mystics, for whom such experience offered a powerful source of religious authority. Whilst Grace was not concerned primarily to rehabilitate the Christian tradition, her work provided a powerful demonstration of how ‘voices of dissent’ against the predominant weight of patriarchy had always existed, albeit on the margins of the institutional Church, and how those seeking alternative patterns of belief and practice today might learn from them.

Her next major book, Becoming Divine4 reflected her growing interest in the work of Luce Irigaray and the significance of continental philosophy and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis. She used these critical tools to develop a critique of Western modernity’s preoccupation with death and violence and the envisioning of an alternative ‘symbolic’, as earlier interests, of God’s corporeality and the possibilities of pantheism, fused with Irigaray’s Feuerbachian positing of a ‘divine horizon’ towards which women in particular, denied autonomous identity within the Law of the Father, might thereby realize new models of human flourishing. Latterly, and up to the time of her final illness, Grace had embarked on an ambitious project of tracing the roots of violence in Western culture from the Greeks to the present day. Foundations of Violence,5 volume 1 of the series Death and the Displacement of Beauty, was the only volume to be completed before her death, but further volumes, edited by Morny Joy and Jeremy Carrette, will be published posthumously. Yet the critical motif was, even to the end, complemented by the trajectory towards the articulation of an alternative: in Foundations of Violence, we see, alongside her customary exposure of Western symbolic of death and violence, the emergence of the articulation of a ‘new imaginary of beauty’.6

At the heart of her work was a concern for the way in which a preoccupation with death and violence had distorted the Western cultural imagination, with corresponding pathological implications. She argued that the central symbolic of necrophilia – a morbid obsession with death, as much by its neurotic avoidance and displacement as its explicit veneration – infused virtually every aspect of Western thought. In particular, she regarded Christianity’s veneration of a transcendent, disembodied, dispassionate God, its institutionalisation of a desire for other-worldly salvation as flight from immanent, material existence, serving as a major buttress to the ‘moral imaginary’ of death. Grace saw the exposure of the religious roots of violence as essential if Western culture was to come to a new understanding: a purely secular conception of culture, in which religion is ‘bracketed out’ of the public realm, would be incapable of addressing and rooting out the causes of the Western condition. Furthermore, the culture of death and violence was, in her view, implicitly but thoroughly gendered. An androcentric culture which defined its own exemplary understandings of virtue and human destiny around the assumption of violence and individualism as the norm, would inevitably determine such norms via the negation and subordination of their opposites – women, the feminine, nature – which represented to such a necrophilic culture the threat of contingency, embodiment and finitude. It was therefore appropriate that the title of Grace’s post at Manchester should reflect her insistence on the powerful triangulation of religion, culture and gender in shaping the distinctive contours of Western modernity.

In this introductory essay, I have chosen to take a thematic approach to Grace’s work, complementing Morny Joy’s more chronological treatment in Part One, in order to identify some of the major motifs of Grace’s ground-breaking work. I once argued in the context of a discussion of Western feminist theology that it was characterized by a dynamic of ‘critique’ and ‘reconstruction’.7 It denotes an approach which exposes what is assumed to be taken for granted and objective knowledge as androcentric, before moving on to develop a more representative or authentic tradition, often founded on the inclusion of formerly excluded voices and experiences.8 In re-reading Grace’s work, and engaging with the essays collected in this volume, I am struck by her adoption of a similar approach, which she characterized as one of ‘diagnosis’ and ‘transformation’.9 This constitutes a strong thread throughout the various phases of her career: from her refusal of the inevitability of the habitus of necrophilia and the exposure of dualistic systems of thought, to the telling of alternative stories about women’s religious experiences and voices and the celebration of the radical possibilities of life and beauty. Grace used the sharpest tools of philosophical critique to read against the grain of the present in order to ‘redeem’ it.10 With its intention both to destabilize the present and to envisage radical alternatives, Grace’s life-long intellectual endeavours did indeed resemble a kind of utopian thought, or as she put it, ‘sketches towards a counterhistory’.11

We can perhaps begin to see how by the end of her life Grace felt the need to move to the foundational work of mapping the genealogy – the origins and inter-relationships – of the Western moral imaginary, as ‘deeply rooted in competition, death and gendered violence’.12 Yet it was its very constructedness and contingency that demanded its exposure; and the devices of psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy and Foucauldian cultural history were consistently deployed in strategies of critique and reconstruction. I will return to this theme later when considering key elements of Grace’s critical methodology.

This introductory chapter is therefore structured around a series of binary constructs which formed recurrent motifs in Grace’s work, and seem to me to exemplify her strategy of diagnosis and transformation: Necrophilia and Natality; God as Transcendence or Immanence; Salvation or Flourishing; and knowledge as dispassionate or transformative. Yet in taking this approach, I have no wish to portray her work as simply reinscribing the dualistic systems she sought to deconstruct. Thus, in my final section, I will focus on her adoption of key methodological tools, and argue that her use of Foucauldian cultural history, psychoanalysis and continental philosophy demonstrates how she sought to transcend such dualisms in favour of a truly dialectical approach. This rejection of binary thinking extended to her attempts to dissolve the dichotomy between theory and practice, since she also refused to allow her intellectual pursuits to become hide-bound by the relative security of the academy. Indeed, she regarded her intellectual endeavours as imperative if the grip of what she termed the ‘moral imaginary’ of the West was to be rooted out.

This culminated in Foundations of Violence, where the mapping of historical examples as indicative of the broader analytical framework of necrophilia/natality becomes central. As Jeremy Carrette points out in his essay, however, it was necessary to provide a full theoretical exposition of this task before embarking on the historical project. From her early forays into the nature of God as an embodied, immanent being, to her alliance of feminist and ecological thought in God’s World, God’s Body, through to the sustained engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis and its feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray, to the final ambition of her last (and now continuing posthumously) project which seeks to put historical flesh on the theoretical bones, therefore, Grace’s career was dedicated to a demonstration of the power of thinking differently in order to act differently.

Necrophilia/Natality

Birth is the basis of every person’s existence, which by that very fact is always already material, embodied, gendered, and connected with other human beings and with human history … If anyone will become divine, it will be as an embodied, gendered, situated self: there can be no other selves than selves of woman born.13

At the heart of Grace’s work, as we have seen, was the contention that Western culture is defined by what she termed the ‘moral imaginary’ which is grounded in death and gendered violence. Death is the ‘guiding motif in the construction of rationality’14 which shapes the logic of the Western moral imaginary.

The tradition of Western philosophy from Plato onwards has been to represent the human condition as one bounded by death. It reaches its epitome in the work of Martin Heidegger, who argues that death guarantees the authenticity of our lives. The anticipation of the rupture of death defines our individuality – but as Grace argued, this was a subjectivity founded in isolation and violence: psychoanalytically speaking, it evokes the separation from the mother that denotes the formation of the ego in the infant and ultimately the establishment of gender identity.

The motif of death as the defining event for our humanity is echoed elsewhere in Western culture. But Grace’s question was why this resulted in a culture of anxiety and repression. Psychoanalytical theory is often deployed to demonstrate how the unspoken ubiquity of death is repressed and yet constantly threatens to disrupt our security. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Redeeming the Present
• PART ONE ‘THE GIFT OF LIFE’
• PART TWO ‘IN THE NAME OF LIFE’
• PART THREE ‘CHOOSE LIFE!’
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects