Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  The brilliant novelty of the Counter-Reformation, whose signature saint Teresa became, was its way of placing the turbulence of desire in full view and in common, thanks to the transparency at work since the twelfth century: a turbulence that was sacred inasmuch as it was representable, secret inasmuch as sensual, and, not least, rhetorical. Erotic, tortured carnality would be magnified by composers and painters, Vivaldi57 and Tintoretto.58 And the city of Venice turned corpus mysticum in its entirety would deploy its perpetual therapy, the real presence of the desiring body indefinitely reborn, a renaissance in every painting and at every concert. It has been labeled an aesthetic religion. But it’s more than that: the “mystical body” and the “real body” come together in the art of the Counter-Reformation into an unprecedented blossoming of representation alive to the infinity of bodies. Inside-outside bodies, supple, mobile, baroque, transitive, contagious, the very bodies conjured up by Teresa of Avila; a sacred apprehension of God’s presence in that part of the soul where the sensible melds with the highest spirit. The mystical experience (Teresa’s experience, the one that intrigues me here), whether it lets itself be influenced by the mutations of the corpus mysticum while influencing them, or whether it is also subject to the course of secular history, never fails to cultivate, steadily and tirelessly, that third place, that mystical third consistent in union with the divine, hic et nunc.

  Imperceptibly, however, the content of this mystical union also mutated, in such a way that its protagonists (for me, here, Teresa) appear to us as the inventors of brand-new psychic spaces. Mysticism is the crucible of subjective diversities produced by the history of Christianity. With hindsight, several types of “interior castles” can be glimpsed, among which Teresa’s construction stands out for its extravagant originality: an unprecedented combination of total exile from self in the love match with the Other, acute lucidity, rhetorical exuberance, and staggering levels of social activity. This was before seventeenth-century medicine and investigative reason had neutered those firebrand negativists, those insurgents of the concept, those oxymoronic maniacs, the mystics, in order to install the empire of the cogito. Before eighteenth-century libertinism had cynically desecrated the innocent erotomania of nuns. Before today’s calculating mentality had stopped it up and shrunk it down, in benefit of the new maladies of the soul and the antipsychotics industry.

  Turned into a laughingstock, jeered at on church squares during medieval carnivals, mysticism retreated for good as soon as Renaissance and Enlightenment eroticism prised the sexual body away from its secret enclave in the shadow of cathedrals and let it loose to gambol in drawing rooms and boudoirs, in paintings, music, and books. The libertine consciousness definitively silenced the mystics who had opened the gates of desire. By dint of overrefining physical delights alongside those of words, colors, and sounds, the incipient sexual liberation whose apogee was reached in the French eighteenth century was impatient to cut free from the polychromatic journeys Otherward of the soul, and soon began to shut the numberless doors of the interior castle.

  Nowadays we might read the mystics much as we sniff the opium waft of moldy parchments, for they are merely the vestiges of a vanished humanity, fit to inspire some atavistic poet or a man like Heidegger,59 that deconstructor of metaphysics who saw himself reflected in Meister Eckhart: “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same.” But in that case, why is it mysticism that attracts me, that attracts us, when we attempt to break free of instrumental rationality, or to loosen the vise of fundamentalist manipulation and analyze the insane logic of the terrorist’s ecstatic drive?

  As he was finishing the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant hoped for, and glimpsed in a flash, the possibility of a world in compliance with moral law.60 But the proclaimed universality of the rights of man has still not given our global village an exemplary code of ethics, and the rolling news of the postmodern age brings home the persistence of barbarity more cruelly than ever. Perhaps this is because the Kantian promise was not to be imagined as the fruit of some inconceivable “intelligible intuition”; it could only be that of the “world of sense” linked to “practical reason,” and more precisely, of the “corpus mysticum of rational beings in it.” By corpus mysticum Kant understood a universal “systematic unity” (that “unity-union” again!) informing “the liber arbitrum of the individual…under and by virtue of moral laws”; a systematic unity “both with itself, and with the freedom of all others.” “This is the answer to the first of the two questions of pure reason which relate to its practical interest:—Do that which will render thee worthy of happiness.”

  There is nothing to connect Kant with Teresa of Avila. And yet, notwithstanding the gulf between their times, cultures, vocabularies, and projects, this corpus mysticum appearing in the last pages of the Critique of Pure Reason doesn’t strike me as foreign to the saint’s experience, or even to my submarine nights. Where does this resonance come from?

  If Kant’s ultimate aspiration to “reunite” morality and freedom speaks so strongly to me, it’s because the final metaphor of unity—the union with the self and with all others, the All-Other—cannot be understood merely in the present trite and bankrupt sense of solidarity, or even fraternity. Such a diminishment not only clips the wings of the adventure; too many heads have also rolled along the way. If freedom is synonymous with desire, how can I enter into union with the centrifugal, centripetal forces of my own desires, let alone with those of others? This question is still searching for an answer. “Seek yourself in Me,” said the Other to Teresa, and they never ceased answering each other. How? On the analyst’s couch? At a meeting of the UN Security Council? At a rock concert? At the Beijing Olympics? At a Gay Pride march? By playing Mozart operas at Ground Zero, in Tel Aviv, in Baghdad? Contrary to all rational expectation, Kant invites us to update an ancient European experience, the theology of the corpus mysticum. Is this possible? What if it were?

  It would seem that at the dawn of the third millennium we are still waiting for this new “corpus mysticum of rational beings” to show up. But perhaps the old corpus mysticum of inordinate and excessive beings, alumbrados, lovers of the Absolute and of nothing, has not said its final word…Perhaps Teresa keeps some surprises up her sleeve.

  Chapter 3

  DREAMING, MUSIC, OCEAN

  Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.

  Sigmund Freud, Findings, Ideas, Problems

  At the start of the twenty-first century, under the drones of the new crusades brought to us by globalized satellite TV, that Old Continent of godly lunatics whose memory Teresa is reawakening for me, far from disappearing into abstruse mists, appears strangely contemporary. The commodification of the sacred by various sects, alongside that of hard-core porn DVDs by an industry that does not blush to seek spiritual endorsement from the Moonies, Scientology, or Soka Gakkai, fail to discredit, for me, the regressus animae in search of true interiority. The language I inhabit like a curious foreigner bids to seep into the folds of the disparate writings known as “mystical” texts. My first move is to unify their polysemy under the generic term mysticism, ignoring the plural of its outlandish singularities for the time being. A common logic subtends those bodies in their exultant “meditations,” those “poems” and “narratives” unintelligible to today’s profane culture-mart and beyond the scope of religious competition. Later I will discern the suns and skies, the hills and gullies, the rivers and deserts, the plants and animals of this promised land of sacred lunacies: Teresa will guide me to them. For now, I survey the terrain from afar: another time, another space. My viewpoint is not that of a bird or the stars but chiefly that of psychoanalysis.

  “The mystics, eh? You know the score, don’t you. A bunch of narcissists who get off on manque à être, on lack of being itself!” The speaker is a colleague who might be my alter ego on a guided tour of Mystic Country. He’s far more solid, intellectually speaking, than Bruno. I haven’t seen Bruno since he cam
e back from Aceh. He sends me kisses by e-mail and over the phone but devotes most of his time to the NGO that helps tsunami-hit fishermen to build new boats, neglecting his editorial duties at Zone. Jérôme Tristan, on the other hand, has just published a piece in a journal specializing in the contemporary vicissitudes of mystical thought. I’m impressed!

  “Hold on, slow down. Narcissists, yes, clearly they are: the withdrawal from the world of other people, the denial of external reality, the retreat into traumatic, therefore unnameable, desire. And the refusal of language—again, I’m with you—following hurt, separation, or bereavement. Unhappy Narcissus invents imaginary nuptials with lost Object, transformed into an ideal but just as imaginary Object, not even by now an ‘object’ separate from the ‘subject,’ but the Great Totality in which loser and lost are both subsumed. Whether you want to call it ‘fundamental principle of Being,’ Being, Other, God, Cosmos, Mother Goddess, Tao, God-man, who cares, it’s about ‘unbridled jouissance,’ as we used to say in ’68 on the way out of our Lacan seminar. No me, no you, communicating vessels, denial of separation, the interior swallowing the exterior in one gigantic orgasm. I know that stuff. And you? Vaguely, okay, but it rings a bell. Now. My problem is with the way you assume that they obtain jouissance from separation itself. You’d have to be more than ordinarily masochistic, wouldn’t you?” I try to sound naive.

  “Think about it. To counter the fear of death, and the tiny deaths and losses of every kind that are the milestones of life, religions invented a major consolation: the afterlife, in a Beyond where the ideal Father awaits. More subtly, a space both radiant and eternal. This mystical location, we’ll call it Heaven, contains Daddy and Mommy reconciled at long last and granting me permission to enjoy immortal pleasure, because this is the point: pleasure for ever. Others prefer the cosmic breath of yin and yang, in their equally harmonious cohabitation. Why, people can reunite what they like, to stop the flight of time…But the mystics, you see, weren’t satisfied with this promise. Too easy. Not that they rejected it, either. You will concur, oh dearest”—my colleague can be a little precious at times; there are still plenty of his sort who want to sound like Lacan—“that they were given to piling up the most with the least, the same with its opposite. Refusing to choose, you see. ‘Apophatic’ thought, to use a fancy word, was extremely common among mystics, as the experts in the field will tell you. Because, not content with the mirage of Heaven, our seekers after the Holy Grail identify with separation itself, which Heaven will heal, even when they are not into death as such. As if lack, absence, Nothingness were the final, most secret and precious legacy offered by the elusive love-Object, the lost or inaccessible partner. Sinuous Nothingness is the absolute essence of the desire they felt, feel and always will feel for this unknown, unknowable, impossible object of desire, the Beloved.”

  “You make them sound like psychoanalysts avant la lettre!” I’m being provocative here, I haven’t read his piece; he may as well explain it to me face to face.

  “They were, in a way…” A meditative pause. “At any rate they never ceased to utter the insatiable truth of desire. That’s it: they knew that death or Nothingness make pleasure, tireless as it is, work harder, and unlike ordinary believers they weren’t content with the promise of a Beyond that would negate this negative machinery. What’s more they never failed to thoroughly annihilate themselves in death and Nothingness, against and because of which the promise of Heaven was constituted. But since they were apt to think in paradoxes, they didn’t miss out on the benefits of the promise, either. In short, the mystical perspective is nothing less than the corpse, which is no different from Nirvana! A splendid paradox! That’s why all their insights are built on antithesis. Like this outstanding phrase, wouldn’t you agree, from the Koran: ‘He is the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden.’”1

  “All very interesting, but to get back to business, what are the psychic advantages for them in all this?” I have to remain pragmatic: our job as mind doctors is to treat people.

  “Elementary, oh dearest! Man’s access to nonbeing is what achieves his divinization, according to theologians and to some philosophers, because the creature has got to be put to death so as to clear a space for reaching the Creator and dissolving into Him. But that’s not all. Let me explain the relevance to your everyday practice, although I suspect you’ve worked it out already and you’re just letting me talk: ah, women, flatterers vile! Where was I. Seen from our analytical bubble, this psychic disturbance, which reacts to the anguish of separation and death by identifying with the death that threatens it, is a way of detaching oneself from the Mother—because we all agree, yes, that the mother is the first object of separation?—without fixating exclusively on the ideal Father. Neither father nor mother: I settle on nothing, to preserve my desire for both. This trick of indefinitely prolonging the ‘depressive position,’ as Klein calls it—whom you’ve just discovered, and about time, too—allows the child to distance itself indefinitely from the mother while postponing, indefinitely, the merger with the father…You’re not vexed, I trust, you’re still on board? Delights of infantile omnipotence, perverse* [*French père-vers: Lacanian pun meaning toward-the-father.—Trans.] traps of a regression that only indulges in infantile behavior the better to merit the grace and power of the father! Well, then, the mystical solution is similar, but goes further. It succeeds in inhabiting, psychically and physically, the extreme tension that binds the subject to her and to him, the Mother and the Father, the feminine and the masculine, until the annihilation of that tension and with it of the loved objects and of the subject itself. They called it ‘peace.’ Or ‘serenity,’ if you prefer.”

  “Of course I do…” I put on a compassionate smile.

  I find myself wondering how Jérôme Tristan handles Mrs. Tristan, Aude Tristan to be precise, also a therapist, and a militant feminist. Couples in general are a mystery to me, I grant, but a couple of analysts defies comprehension. Shared monomania, complementary neuroses, hetero gender gap filled by some alleged “homo” harmony…Wisdom or tedium? My colleague looks uneasy and somewhat glum. Back to the mystics.

  “Come on, Jérôme, these men and women must have been awfully vulnerable, besides possessing amazing psychic plasticity and towering strength of soul, in order to wrestle the terror of death into a triumph like that!”

  “Yes, but the triumph is dogged by setbacks, from way-out mental derangement to being literally put to death, not to mention a paranoid hatred for the world that plainly overtakes many visionary individuals and groups whose ritual practices accentuate passivity, resentment, dolorism; in a word, castration. The Nazis themselves attempted to recruit the German mystics to ‘resist’ the ‘Syrian Yahweh’—on whom they blamed all Europe’s ‘misfortunes’—and launch a new religion stripped of every alien concept from Syria, Egypt, and Rome, as the National Socialist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg would have it.2 Rosenberg actually claimed, in horribly twisted fashion, to be an admirer of Meister Eckhart!”

  “But this loving exaltation of their status, as they see it, of chosen ones, how is it not downright hysterical erotomania, rather than narcissistic regression? If you’ll pardon my crudeness. Remember that eighteenth-century saint who projected herself so entirely into Christ’s holy foreskin that she experienced feverish fondlings, a burning in her breasts, and even the sensation of being fellated…”

  “As you know, oh dearest, male mystical subjects perceive themselves as feminine. Look at Saint Bernard, who starts lactating beneath the loving rays of God. Whereas female mystics become masculinized, like Hildegarde of Bingen, Elisabeth von Schönau, Teresa of Avila herself…well, to a degree, correct me if I’m wrong…This psychic bisexuality, avowed and paraded, appears to me instead as a clear-eyed acceptance, also a traversing, of the common instability of the hysteric, always wondering which sex she belongs to. More than a common or garden hysteria, I’d say this is a hysteria mounted on a psychosis—mounted as befits these Amazons for G
od!—and prompting the outbreak of body symptoms like stigmata, convulsions, hallucinations, levitations, comas, and ‘resurrections.’”

  My colleague’s admiration for the intrepid horsewomen is plain, as is his appreciation of their rare “hysterical” panache. Aude Tristan must be an ace at such defenses and illustrations of bisexuality! She must stalk him into every last recess of virility. I raise the stakes.

  “Some practitioners manage to slow down their heartbeats and respiration, like in the heart prayer of the Orthodox Church, and even more clearly in yogic meditations. Subjects who have a long history of meditation can lower their metabolic rate, you know, carbon dioxide and oxygen, and alter an EEG reading of alpha rhythms—nine to seventeen cycles per second—to theta rhythms, six to seven cycles per second.” It’s my turn to impress him, with a flourish of very recently acquired knowledge.