Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

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.