Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  Teresa, contrary to La Guyon, as you call her, merges with the divine placed at the luminous center of her dwelling places, whose depiction she refines by way of savors (gustos), ways, and foundations that forever lead her to new encounters. Outside the self or inside it, nothing but intrepid alterations of her emptied-out identity, which is, by the same token, not so much verbose as polymorphous, plural, pragmatic. Her manner of inhabiting her dwelling places, her multiple interior-exterior topologies, lead into a rebirth of the subject who writes “fictions,” which I receive as strings of alterations of the new Self into the Other: wars on the self, or transcendences of the self, through the deepening of elucidated desires and at the same time through the amplification of historical action. This nonsymmetrical reversibility between the “other Self” and the Other (Teresa and her Voices), just as between the Subject and the World, which characterizes Teresa’s experience, was for a long time misunderstood, indeed persecuted, before it was recognized and recommended by the Tridentine revolution. In reaction to the narrowness of both Protestantism and humanism, the Jesuits encouraged Teresa’s oscillation (which was also theirs) between interiority and spirituality, seclusion and the world, Being and Subject, religion and politics. Having cast themselves as the soldiers of a new logic, they quickly recognized themselves in the ecstatic foundress as she recognized herself in them, amid suspicions, tensions, and conflicts—for the blessings of dialectics are infinite.

  So you see, dear Maître, why I am so interested in a nun who might have been like yours but did not merely resemble her, or rather, resembled her not at all. Neither Rheno-Flemish nor a Fénelonian, Teresa operated a change in the mystic soul whose enigmas we, would-be modern subjects trapped between secularism and fundamentalism, have barely begun to plumb.

  When she raised the erotic body into the sphere of essential union with the Other-Being, she was not merely revaluing the flesh (which so tormented Marie-Suzanne Simonin) as the ultimate site of the experience of the divine. Rheno-Flemish mystics like Meister Eckhart had already done this, albeit intermittently. Fénelon and Guyon were to bring the desiring body back to the quiet of a child in its mother’s lap—mistaking narcissistic exaltation for serenity.

  Likewise Teresa did more than just ennoble “lust” by defensively making the Spouse into its sole object, and dispensing her personal seductiveness to a number of His servants of both sexes along the way.

  Even if she often got lost in the psychological labyrinth of those male and female attractions, Eros and Agape together, drives and idealizations combined, Teresa was not content, either, to rehabilitate an Aristotle of touch in order to sketch the outlines of a new Ethics: one that had remained embryonic in the Greek philosopher’s writings and that it is our task to develop, over and over again, in a modern world that doesn’t bottle up its desires.

  She achieved more.

  Body and soul, the Teresa-subject is torn apart and reassembled in and by the violent desire to both feel and think the Other, both at once. This desire, resting on the tactile contiguity of bodies, is recognized by its violence and endlessly alleviated through its elucidations. The touch of another, elevated into the principle of the Other, consecrates what is foreign to one as an intimate, indelible component of psychic and physical vitality from now on. Touch is at once the ultimate survival instrument of animals, betraying the persistence of animality in the human zoe, and tact—a supremely human quality, an acute attention brought to bear on the tolerable, a psychic flexibility. The Teresa-subject confers ontological status on the desiring body, while at the same time ascribing to it—via the ambivalence bestiality/tact—a certain polyphony, polysemy, with all the malleability of the many dwelling places of this new soul. You can see how such topologies are not chunks of a sunken continent, nor ruins awaiting an Infinity of abandonment, far from it: they are the points of impact of infinite desire, locations touched by and in desire’s unending motion.

  Your daughter Angélique would not have scorned my saint, since she once said, as you reported to Sophie Volland, “On fait de l’âme quand on fait de la chair”: “you make soul by making flesh.”34 In D’Alembert’s Dream (1769), you expounded something more than a materialistic doctrine. Could it actually be an experience?

  TERESA, NOW

  Teresa’s extraordinary innovation consists in this incorporation of the infinite, which, working backward, against the grain, returns the body to the infinite web of bonds. I could scarcely have gotten you to appreciate the magnitude of such a revolution, dear Maître, had Leibniz not perceived it first. The polyvalent soul-body ensemble, constructed and written with Teresa and thanks to her, is only possible so long as it refuses to be merely the sign of an Other-Being, affixed to it from outside (as we find in Fénelon-Guyon). This is possible if—and only if—the body-soul ensemble is experienced as a point in which the infinity of the Other-Being insists on impressing itself. If, and only if, the speaking subject, body-and-soul, is an infinity-point; and, conversely, if the infiniteness of the Other-Being “presents” itself in the point that I am. Indeed, Teresa the Bible reader (perhaps reluctant to admit it, and never acknowledging her Marrano genealogy) specifies that “He” is “graven.”

  The “mystical marriage” and other inordinate formulations, such as “I am transformed into God,” among countless equally extravagant metaphors-metamorphoses, herald this modulation of the subject that consists in and with Infinity—though Teresa herself disowns it at times as a piece of pure “folly.” I am not a “sign” that “suggests” an external Being (whether Creator or Savior, loving or judging). I form part of Him, I participate in Him, I seek myself in Him, I am Him, for all that I do not equate with Him. I, the subject, belong to a symbolic sequence where nothing is a mensuration of the whole part by part. As an infinity-point, I obey a different logic: I follow laws of transition and continuity where nothing equates with anything else and every coincidence conceals an infinitely small distance. An irreducible gap always obtains between Being and the broad ensemble of “subjects,” “singularities,” “numbers” able to express it, among which I disseminate myself by writing and doing. I belong to a geometry that is no longer algebraic, but analytical. I am a site of the limitless signifier. In this my dynamic of perpetual transit, knowledge (connaissance), as in joint birth (co-naissance), is not a totalization so much as an exhaustive process of subtraction whereby the infinite moves closer to an always retreating term. Why do you talk of “lack,” “suffering,” “persecution”? I’ve escaped your algebraic world of “selves” orphaned of the Whole, because I am the very impact of the Infinite, ad infinitum.

  But, let’s be clear, this infinity at work in the infinity-point that I am never reaches fullness: that is how I avoid misidentifying the Nothingness that so beguiles you and brings you peace, or so you say. My All, which is Nothing, has nothing to do with the full Whole. Because if lack there is, it’s that very plenitude that is incomplete: the Whole is limited by being a non-infinity, a privatory concept, a “lack,” if you prefer. Whereas my tiny point—my nothing—contains infinity.

  Such is, then, the Teresa-subject (or her soul, she would say), provided we consider that “subject” as an infinity forever developed across points; as a subject neither external nor internal to the Other-Being, but instead deictic/anaphoric: Ecce (Behold); Haec (This). Its function is demonstrative, to designate—and de-sign—infinite plurality. A sign is normally independent of its referent, but that’s not the case in the anaphoric economy: the “sign” (I) and the “referent” (other) are a single differentiated continuity. One should not conceive this subject as a Cartesian number value, conferring space and time on the entity that thinks it. On the contrary, let us imagine it as the infinitesimal, giving back to the number its infinity-point, and therefore without space or time. If nowhere and no-time coincide with eternity, then the infinitesimal subject, constructed according to infinitesimal logic, can only be a set of plural, contingent transitions and continuities. Its co-na
issance or joint emergence in narrative elucidation cannot take the form of connaissance, knowledge, in the Cartesian sense of calculus or algebra; it can only appear as a game. In Teresa’s terms, a “fiction.”

  Thus the Teresa-subject does not end up “absorbed” into the divine, like Jeanne Guyon, who compares herself to “a drop of water lost and dissipated in the sea.” You will find no trace in La Madre of that “pure love” that aspires to be “work without effort,” “passive night,” “the privation of all things,” “demise,” “disapproval”; instead Teresa rejoices while reflecting, and vice versa; the infinity-point she has become freights an indomitable energy, it’s a big bang in female form. Nor do feelings take precedence over language: spoken-and-written words together entertain the felt at the very instant of its emergence, to confer real existence upon it. Raptures are preceded and followed by words that are always redolent of biblical, evangelical, or biographical signifiers—precisely because those signifiers are not, or are no longer, rational signs referring to external realities, but rather “fictions” that touch the Other-Being and are themselves touched by that infinity, those metamorphoses of I into Other. Since the monad is coiled inside infinity, it is by infinity that it is penetrated, and it will never resort to Nothingness as a retreat for injured affections or a bandage for melancholic annihilation.

  There is no “communication of silences,” either. Only a constant preoccupation with narrating dissemblance—that region of human sin and deformity, according to Saint Bernard—in order to open it up to mystical marriage, boost the exercise of contemplation, and metabolize both into political action. Teresa knew all about words and silences and made good use of them in writing and founding. Her way of perfection did not, however, seek after taciturn quietude to fill in as an artificial mother. She was the Mother. This is how her sacred femininity was crystallized, the same in every particular as the sacred humanity of the Spouse, and recognizing nothing of the sexual female body but its gaping excitability, the avid seduction that Her Majesty the female Subject deploys so actively. Incommensurate with any “numerical” unity or “me-like” identity whatsoever, it is rather a perpetual becoming, forever in progress, forever en route. This contact of the subject with infinity, in the region of dissemblance itself, is the source of its jouissance, as it is of the libidinal energy, supervised writing, and historical action that account for such a genuine, noninfantile serenity—not to be confused with passive quietude, whose narcissistic fulfillment springs from the satisfaction of the infant’s need to be mothered.

  Although the subject aspires toward the Other-Being, which insists and consists in it, the two cannot be equated: as a signifying differential of infinity, I am never filled or fulfilled, and such an awareness of my dissemblance protects me from madness at the same time as it guarantees my limitless singularity. My “identity,” like any other “unity,” is thereby dislocated and the Subject that I am is constantly in process, driven to act in view of what is as yet unaccomplished and may be accomplished later, or never. I do not aspire to any “performance” or “efficiency,” for no sequence of unities or actions adds up with others to form a Whole, whether an “oeuvre” or a “program.” Not that I reject them, either, far from it. There is nothing but the soft slide of infinity, modulating the word (la parole, by definition finite), and transfiguring the experienced affects—henceforth ek-static, and, in keeping with this logic, necessarily so—of my body (by definition mortal).

  You will have perceived, Mister Philosopher, that the Teresa I am attempting to share with you is the Teresa read and understood by Leibniz. We are moving away from your Nun; but not so much, perhaps, from that medical vignette of yours that Freud appreciated so much: “A woman dominated by hysteria experiences something infernal or divine. Sometimes she makes me shudder; I have seen and heard her carrying within herself the fury of a wild beast! How much she felt! How wonderfully she expressed it!”35 I am confident of following your diagnosis, except I also listen to, and hear, precisely what this “wild beast” is feeling and expressing. I strive to plumb the “hysteria” you evoke, that region where the felt and the expressed, fierce bestiality and pure divinity, live side by side. Because the human adventure, at the intersection of desire and meaning, is simultaneously linked to and distant from the two shores between which you frame us, the two metaphors tradition has bequeathed for thinking about thinking. Teresa’s autoanalysis, extraordinary for how deeply it goes into what she “felt and expressed,” indicates a way through obscurantism that differs from yours as it does from that of the French Enlightenment. I boldly claim that my interpretation, undoubtedly less caustic than yours, is more profound, while operating on a continuum with your unbelief: such is my conviction, at this point at any rate.

  LOVE IN QUESTION

  I don’t take myself for an infinity-point, believe me; I just do the best I can here in the MPH, which is to say, not much. The good old home is in full-blown crisis these days, “as is its wont,” Marianne points out. Funds are low, nobody wants to be a psychiatrist anymore, there’s a shortage of nurses, and our crowded premises are overflowing with patients suffering from unspeakable pathologies, according to the insane reports and other assessments thrown at us by demented technocrats at the helm of a society that would rather not know madness exists.

  “Listen, honey, the cloister is what you choose when you’re at your wits’ end to defend yourself from the primal scene! And from the revulsion it arouses in the hysterical subject, male or female, toward their own excitement—unless it’s toward their frigidity, the other side of the same coin. And what do they replace it with? A fantasy proximity to the ideal Love Object, Daddy and Mummy fused into one big Whole, with a capital W! That’s the lush paradise of pure spirituality for you, where lurks the phobia of sex fed by sexual hunger! Religious vocation is in love with the phallus, or if you like it overidealizes the paternal superego in whose name the cloistered guy or gal is prepared to undergo maximum frustration. And more, in case of affinity. I gather that even the masochistic orgy of penance takes less of a physical form, these days. It’s kept on the moral level! That’s allowed! Not to say highly promising, liable to take you beyond perversion into full-blown psychosis.”

  Marianne has come to the end of her analysis and has enrolled for further study at the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society. Her views on vocations and cloistered confinements ring with beginner’s self-assurance. She plows on:

  “Mind you, the cloistered woman—your Teresa was a woman, riiight—can easily accept her subordination to one or several bossy mother superiors, just to tickle her latent homosexuality, not half as unconscious as one might think. Next thing you know, the path of these handmaids of the ideal Phallus is paved with pleasures that are out of this world. In fact, once they run out of excitement they jettison the Word itself, which likely panics them by becoming flesh, and these halo-hunters take refuge in the Void: pure love, cult of silence, take or leave a whiff of Buddhism. Did you see yesterday’s Monde? Apparently more and more monks and nuns are raring to drop Our Father who art in Heaven and even the Name of the Father, and move to India instead. Faith is getting with the decentralization program at long last. All roads lead to India, you’re behind the times, sweetheart!”

  The new Marianne is unrecognizable: energetic, outspoken, confident, briskly efficient. Shall I get her to have lunch with Bruno? That would be a scream. She’s given up the cigs and scruffy jeans; today she’s modeling a shimmery silk ensemble. I don’t take her up. My smile can only be read as agreement.

  “Still, I think you’re doing the right thing, getting stuck into your saint like that. So I changed my mind. Can I? You’re too kind. Because what I said about vocations, enclosures, and co doesn’t just apply to a handful of visionaries. That lot, who survive by stopping time, only succeed in aggravating the soul distress we find in milder form—let’s be thankful for small mercies—in our own everyday hysterics, do you see? Actually, I don’t understand why the PPS ins
ists on saying hysteria is on the wane and that most cases count as borderline. First of all, it’s not true; second of all, they’re not mutually exclusive. Take what I just said about the disgusted hysteric, male or female, hiding from the primal scene, and apply it to a Marie or a Chloe, model wives and mothers who wipe their brats’ noses and get depressed at the office and dream of a higher love, or even better—it’s forbidden to forbid—a romance with Patrick Bruel or Brad Pitt or some TV anchor, yeah? When it comes to the eternal call of infinite love, the possibilities are infinite…QED! You’re so right to devote yourself as you do. I applaud you from the bottom of my heart.”

  She blows me a kiss, sashays away, leaves me.

  Marianne is triumphant, and I applaud with her. Just one damper on my side: Is there any hope of Marie or Chloe setting down their soul distress on paper and “elucidating it through narrative,” as my learned colleagues would say? Our patients, Marianne’s and mine, are probably too image-soaked to indulge in that kind of old-fangled pursuit. As for those who surrender to the sexual night of hackneyed autofiction, that’s part of the program: no comparison with my exigent Carmelite.

  Fortunately, Paul, who really does love me, arrives to rescue us from certainties and hypotheses that lead nowhere, as I’m prepared to admit. He’s holding an open book, it’s my copy of Diderot, he’s reading as he walks in and doesn’t stop. He’s letting me know he wants to share in what I’m reading. He must have picked it up off my desk, my door is always open; he often borrows books of mine and as often returns them, with the utmost tact. After a sidelong, hostile glance at the departing Dr. Marianne Baruch, who was surely “bothering Sylvia,” as he unceremoniously calls me, he starts reading out loud from The Nun.