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

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-naissance 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.