Follow me. It was thought that there was another way to emancipate oneself from the supreme Being, the Creator God, supreme in majesty and in power of command: it sufficed to apply the equality principle, making others into our fellows and placing a “point of honor” on charming, serving, and helping them (you dislike that “point of honor” that ensnared you for so long, Teresa, you hate it in fact, you, a saint!). Compassion, in the guise of political solidarity, would eradicate faith for the benefit of short-haul democracy. This juridical humanism, whose great feat was to promise an existential collaboration between the various “social actors,” ran to ground in the impotence of the welfare state, when it did not degenerate into an atheist terror that was, sadly, just as bad as the wars and inquisitions of religion. Today, however, a new humanism seeks to emerge, one that cannot avoid paying attention to your delusions and bedazzlements. For this humanism, interaction with others, all the others—socially marginalized, racially discriminated, politically, sexually, biologically, or psychically persecuted others—is only possible on condition of immersing oneself in a new idea that I shall formulate as follows, translating into my language the ancient experience you took to its height: an irreducible otherness is conceivable, which, being plural, and the blazing pole of singular desires, makes us speak, reflect, enjoy: therefore it exists.
The self-perception of this otherness, as the founding moment of humanity, is what gradually transformed gangs of “great apes” into speaking, thinking societies. All religions celebrate this otherness in the form of a sacred figure or limit (a deity), ruling the desires of the vital flow while remaining separate from it or else by associating with it (as in the Chinese Tao, for example). To discover the frontier where that otherness dawns in me, to nurture and respect it in my dealings with other people will finally allow me, perhaps, to approach these others as beings of desire, rather than objects of need.
Your nuptials with God, that joyous reversal of your fears, your revulsions, like the horror of toads and sundry serpents of sexual-political persecution forever assailing you, this reconciliation with the impossible—not with this or that ideal, law, or institution, but with the impossibility of desire for the Other in other people—all of this seems to me to converge, like rippling watercourses (that was your element, was it not?), mingled in the mighty, troubled waters of that humanism in search of itself, a tide the earth is thirsting for, of which I dream.
Just one quibble, though: your effusive love for Christ’s wounds and the mortifications you inflicted on yourself rather obstruct the current that interests me, if I may insist on that point. Actually, had you lived two centuries later, reading the Marquis de Sade might have delivered your imaginary from its crudest and most morbid fantasies—the ones you dared not articulate but instead embodied, literally, until you almost died of epilepsy.
I will grant, however, that you were never the most assiduous at those exercises, and advised against them altogether, you wrote, for the more “nervous” and “melancholy” of your girls. John of the Cross himself went too far for your taste in terms of purgative zeal when he lived in the mountains at Duruelo. The Passion, by all means; Calvary, of course; but all of it cheerfully, if possible. “Be merry, my daughters”: may I take those words to sum up your vision of “Christ’s humanity” and…your own?
I am far from suggesting that only the Catholic Church is capable of realizing the corpus mysticum of modern humanity, unlike those theologians convinced that their own tradition meets all the requirements for ministering to humans without exception—whether they believe in the Eucharist, like the pope, or in nothing, whether they be Taoists in China, rabbis in Jerusalem, Buddhists in India, or psychoanalysts at the MPH who occasionally publish with Zone Books, like yours truly, Sylvia Leclercq. Extrapolating from your experience, Teresa, which led you from ecstasy into a blossoming that was political, pragmatic, and often downright humorous, despite its travails, I imagine a humanity that cares about the desire for the Other in every other, seeking itself through and in all our histories, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Confucians, Shintoists, the lot—without being blind to their antagonisms, or reduced to their divergences, or compliant with their institutions.
A pious hope? Perhaps; but then again, perhaps not. Because we agree that Otherness exists, don’t we, Teresa; such is the biblical message with which you, a Marrana in denial, tacitly keep faith. And if the principle that Otherness exists resides in us in various forms—Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Confucian, Buddhist, Shintoist, and the rest—then our discourses are not necessarily prayers but certainly hopes and wishes, wagers, sharings-out.
I have to confess to another, even more radical infidelity that estranges me from your experience, and I say so “in all humility” (using this expression in the same way you do, I believe, to wit, with a hint of cheekiness, am I right?) I am out of love with love. After years of listening to my analysands, not to mention everybody else, I’ve come to the conclusion that crazy love is a disease if ever there was one. A sickness that the three monotheisms, much more explicitly than other religions, revealed to be the hidden core of wisdom as well as of the bellicose passions. It was Freud’s brain wave, once he had grasped this, to make his patient relive his or her malady on the couch, while he interpreted it by probing into the way “it” spoke.
Not only did he find that “yearning” or “craving” in love (Sehnsucht), whether thwarted or joyful, is the condition of all speech, but also that the listening that is able to receive its truth is the most disengaged and rational of all experiences.3 Listen to love, and you will hear a sickness the human brotherhood cannot dispense with. We psychoanalysts call it transference: lover melts into loved and loved into lover; you know all about that, Teresa. That is why there is no way to treat the lovesick except by listening lovingly, a response known as countertransference. The therapist in love with her patient embarks on it because only thus can she pick up the other’s truths. Now she must tell those truths back, return them to the patient, before disengaging from this countertransferential love (you know all about that too, Teresa, as we will see). And then she will start all over again, because there’s no end to this lovesickness, only eternal beginnings, for as long as “it” is speaking.
Thus felt and understood, not only is Eros (your cherub, the angel with the dart sculpted by Bernini) a self-analyzing jouissance, it also reveals its inseparable double, Thanatos, alias hate, alias the death drive that your “little Seneca” explored more deeply than you did, in Duruelo. Yet he forbade himself your sensuality, as you were quick to point out. How well he understood you all the same, your friend John of the Cross; we shall have much to say about him.
If we too unfold the speech of love for years on the couch, if we unearth its “carrier wave,” which is the death wish (remember the threat uttered by that young, veiled engineer at the secularism debate, eager to be a kamikaze, the Islamic brand today and tomorrow sold on any fundamentalism you care to name, for it’s not about Islam, you understand), what do we have left? I can see you coming, my honorable prioress. Who said anything to you about “left”? It’s not a question of getting rid of love and its twin, hate, in order to escape to the heights of “pure noetic joy” or into the grave of a spiritual marriage stripped of the scoria of sensation. In psychoanalysis there is no retreat into Nothingness, that bleached lining of Being, but simply (so to speak) a journeying through the self: not settling into any one dwelling place, but passing through them all, there being no other way to become infinitely familiar with the plasticity of the soul, of its peculiar “wax,” “flame,” or “fragrance,” its malleable desires and inconstant identities, the unbearable lightness of being and of the being; scatterbrained freedom. But you’d said all this already, Teresa, perhaps without knowing. Still, I like to believe that you weren’t fooled, given how restless, obstinate, and droll you were.
You relied on the sacred texts and on the counsel of your confessors. These doctors of the faith, while sensibly curbing
the prayers, visions, and raptures that were making you so ill, were determined to guide you in your transports and hallucinations. The most inspired of them, in tune with you, the ones you loved the best, advised you to follow the teaching of Ignatius of Loyola: never overdo the praying, and above all pin it on Christ’s example—preferably during the Passion—as the best way to avoid an always dangerous surfeit of personal emotion.
To tell of your raptures, or better still, to write them down came to you with disconcerting ease, with amazing felicity, a success that startled you as much as it impressed your supervisors. And yet for them to confess sensitive women in the grip of demonic desires and channel their hysteria into writing was common in those days. Priestly wakes were aswirl with female lives, feelings, and secrets. In the twentieth century Freud could still inquire: “What do women want?” But he did not wonder about the wants of men. Maybe because, like the priest, he already knew the answer: female souls and bodies to guide.
But your genius was not only to make the most of that ecclesial strategy to restore your health. You took possession of the writerly space thus constituted, and your discourse was forged in perfect accord with that scriptorial dynamic whose quintessence you had extracted and into which you drew your scholarly directors of conscience. You confected a mobile idiom that took shape on the page at the same time as in your body.
Hence you were less intent upon what might make a book, and more concerned with the actual transformations this writing worked in your physiology and your relationships with other people: “I shall give you a living book,” as the Lord told you. That “living book” was yourself and your monastic foundations, in the wash of a text made incarnate in actions. Between the loss of your selfhood in a drive whose very frustration was gratifying, and the thought that absented itself from that regression at the moment of the event, only to join it again a moment later: such was the oscillation of your life in writing, a thinking that immersed itself in desire and nevertheless gained mastery over it.
You deployed the whole gamut of psychic capabilities. And you named the sufferings and the pleasures embedded in the palette of sensations—visual, aural, olfactory, tactile, motor—without omitting to bracket them with the intellect, that is, with the ideals of your family and religious upbringing. On the wings of exaltation or in the abyss of despond, you were illusion itself, and yet without illusions. Outside yourself, ek-static, you caught and recentered yourself once more by talking about it, sure that whatever you might have to report was better than the unspeakable. For it has not merely to do with Nothingness, and has certainly nothing to do with death, but rather concerns a “to die,” in the infinitive. Your infinitive dying endures in the range of perceptions that separate the Self from its Self in order to pour it into the Other, to make it become Other. It mutates into rebirth in this Other, but never once and for all, because this infinitive dying is spoken and written indefinitely, in the flux of time and waters. And so your written word paradoxically imbues Truth itself: a floating Truth, programmed but indefinite, infinite.
Such an ambition was folly in the sixteenth century, when many were burnt at the stake for far less. You dodged the Inquisition by persuading the Church that in order to comply, both with the reformed branch’s call for cleansing and with the yearning for miracles proper to an economically and sexually deprived congregation—in order to trim reason to fit faith, in other words—what this era of Lutheran heresy required was an ascetic, ideally female, who happened also to be a supernatural wonder.
You alone could satisfy this double requirement. You—that is to say, the talking and writing that refurbished your body and in which you yourself became embodied. Skillful, astute, indefatigable, energetic, you lobbied the entire Church hierarchy: alumbrados, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Carmelites, naturally, the Vatican, obviously—nobody escaped, including the Spanish monarchy and its satellite nobles.
Transcending historical eras to beguile me today, your writing reaches us in the manner of that liquid matter you adored, in watery spurts and streams. The Spanish word agua flows freely from your pen. Water is not so much a metaphor as a sign for the metamorphoses of your supposed identity in the very act of writing: you cascade from one state into another, from convulsion to jubilation, from sensations to their comprehension, from Gospel stories and characters to the virtuosity of the next overwhelming insight, from disclaiming the understanding to claiming knowledge, from looking to listening, from savor to skin and thence to so delicate an intellectuality that it barely brushes the mind before eclipsing it. Movement, flux, dipping and diving, all the facets of a butterfly forever returning to its chrysalis are folded into the dwelling places of the garden: fragments of everything, flashes of nothing.
As a child you evoked “the nothingness of all things [todo nada],”4 now you say yes to this all which is nothing, this nothing which is all. Yes to your visionary opus, which is not an obra, an object, thing, or product, but a continual metamorphosis. Your writing, which prefigures and accompanies your commitment as a founder, is really an infiltration of words into things and things into words without collapsing the difference between them. By writing, you hold psychosis in suspense. Your love madness is nuanced, filtered through a mesh of perspicacity in the very midst of swoons and comas, with a clarity that’s infectious.
For all their subtleties, your interior and exterior experiences do not by any means make you into a precursor of psychoanalysis. Still, the precision with which you record your visions of the Beloved, that blend of sexual sensation and fragmentary thought, all dissected by the scalpel of your watchful intelligence and wit, have much to teach the stalkers of the unconscious. It could even instruct Lacanians, who already know a thing or two about those excesses of yours that defeat, I fear, most other colleagues—including Jérôme Tristan, if he will excuse me for saying so.
Indeed it was Jacques Lacan, himself born into the Roman and Apostolic Church, who first extolled the jouissance he thought he detected in you and defined it as other. For it twines around the paternal phallic axis a novel way of being aroused: sensory, forever unsatisfied, and for that very reason outside time, on a cosmic scale. You not only experienced this female jouissance but also, and more importantly, recorded it. Otherwise how should we have known? Your great exploit was not so much to feel rapture as to tell it; to write it. Lacan saw you less as a “case” than as the intrepid explorer of that desired, desiring otherness that used to be called the divine and is at work, according to psychoanalysts, in all human beings, believers and unbelievers alike, as soon as they speak or refrain from speaking.
Nevertheless, unlike some academic critics (such as the great Jean Baruzi) for whom the mystics were forerunners, giants- manqué of the metaphysics to come,5 I do not regard you as agiant- manqué of future psychoanalysis. In your “I live without living in myself,” the “psychic domains”—those constitutive spaces of the soul you so elegantly laid out into seven dwelling places of your “metapsychology”—were in reality more often crushed on top of one other.6 But though this collapsus plunged you into great mental confusion, catatonia, or coma, you proved capable of making your way through and lifting it up as a thought-body, in an unprecedented, exceptional body-thought. You rose there to a grandiose sublimation that most of us have only known in fragments, faltering words, hazy approximations. Few have ever achieved so complete a convergence of regression and reason.
You knew that sexuality is the carrier wave of love, especially the love of God, even if you only said so indirectly, through fiction, fable, and metaphor. You heard the Other whisper: “Seek yourself in Me.” This certainty, this truth was so enthralling that you no longer dared to think outside of Him, in your own name, alone: ego Teresa. Except for a handful of pages (that you cut from the final draft of The Way of Perfection), your thinking was always to unfold with Him and from Him, and that is why it is a love thinking, rather than reasoning pure and simple. You are not quite a Cartesian, God forbid, but your lucidity
prefigures the love in transference and countertransference. And if the narrative of the moods of your soul hardly constitutes a novelistic plot, it is nonetheless a novel about the consciousness/unconsciousness of love.
I understand your qualms about thinking for yourself, as if no I could exist apart from Him. Anyone with the presumption to say “I think, therefore I am” (but only after 1637, with Descartes) is too apt to forget the Other whom I desire in thought, and who splits the thinker’s very being in two. The ego’s audacity risks turning into a simplification: highly convenient for purposes of cogitation but inadequate to tease out the delicious, pernicious unison of body and mind that it is the business of psychoanalysis to complicate, in its best moments taking a cue from your vow, Teresa, that there shall be no me without thee.
Teresa, My Love Page 9