Abstract

By examining the works of Naomi Goldenberg, Demaris Wehr and Julia Kristeva, this dissertation focuses on a problematic of irony in feminist theological and psychological discourse. Even as feminist discourse demolishes the linguistic structures of Western patriarchy, so it reinscribes them. It is argued that a change in style in feminist discourse, which relinquishes the hope of change in language in any ultimate sense, can have the effect of bringing consciousness to an inevitable complicity in Western patriarchal structures of power and can have the function of undercutting this ironic "double-bind." ;Although this dissertation is in the field of religion, it is from arguments of depth-psychology that a critical analysis of the problematic is developed. Goldenberg's style of "resurrecting the maternal body" through the appropriation of Freud's theories by way of object relations theory and Wehr's style of "removing the dimension of the Sacred" from Jung's religious language are both curtailed in the "double-bind" of ironic discourse by the lack of critical recognition of the self-referential quality of language and by the unquestioned identity of the unitary subject. Kristeva's style of "getting out from 'among women' " dissolves that "double-bind" through a recognition of a radical quality of irony made possible by her analysis of language and of the subject as endlessly en proces. Kristeva's analysis releases ironic "double-binds" into laughter, into new production of texts. ;For Goldenberg, Wehr and Kristeva, the question of style of feminist discourse is also the question of religion. This dissertation concludes that in being for religious discourse that is loosed from the oppression of patriarchy, Goldenberg's and Wehr's language is against religion; whereas Kristeva's discourse in being against a feminist, religious language is for religion where religion is understood as language that is an endless questioning and deferral of meaning. It is also concluded that only insofar as religion remains a question is there a possibility of feminist discourse and vice versa. Further, when language is understood as endlessly deferring meaning, it is necessarily "religious" and "feminist.".