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

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: