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

Chapter 34. LETTER TO DENIS DIDEROT ON THE INFINITESIMAL SUBVERSION OF A NUN

Dear Mister Philosopher,

You began The Nun as a farce, because there was no question of publishing such a thing in 1760. (You’d have been off to the Bastille — worse than the jail at Vincennes where the Letter on the Blind put you!) And you ended it in tears, or rather not at all, because the text published in 1796, as it has come down to us, is unfinished.

Your Nun has been on my mind throughout my journey with Teresa. Please don’t take this admission for a piece of persiflage. I am incapable of that, and besides, I should never dare to be ironical with you!

Still, I must confess that I first approached Teresa somewhat lightly and unthinkingly. Not to raise a laugh, as you did with your story of the nun from Longchamp, but to challenge a kind of UFO, a baroque relic. I, too, was rapidly swept off my feet by a story that overturned my assumptions and sent me into analysis. “Whatever next?” drawls my friend and colleague Marianne Baruch, but she didn’t come out unscathed herself from this excursion into the heart of belief. Andrew teases me nonstop, rather sullenly, while my learned colleague Jérôme Tristan smirks discreetly: “You have to be ready for anything, with mysticism”—it’s his department, after all.

Impressed by the “old religious vice,” the sagacious Mallarmé felt that the tendency toward the secular (likened to atheistic “insignificance”) “doesn’t quite have a meaning.”¹ While I agree with the poet on this, it doesn’t prevent me from being an atheist, just as you are, my dear Philosopher. You start off as a theologian and a canon, but you won’t even be a deist by the end, unlike your friends-foes Voltaire and Rousseau. Irked by Jean-Jacques’ philosophical moralism, lacking the caustic temper of the Sage of Ferney, you are sensual, violent, something of a “comedian,” passionate about science, curious about women, and smitten by Sophie Volland. You flaunt a brutal, streetwise — cynical? — sort of carefreeness: your thoughts are strumpets, you say, you are regarded as a “materialist,” but I wonder about that. I think of you, and it’s a compliment, as the carnivalesque type.

Your partiality to the fair sex — which was surely one reason to defect from the career in the Church for which you were destined by your father, the worthy cutler Didier Diderot, and by the Jesuits whose brilliant pupil you were — does not stop you from feeling profoundly ambivalent toward women. The lyricism of the writer, the volatile delicacy of the man, these flatter me: “When we write of women, we must needs dip our pen in the rainbow and throw upon the paper the dust of butterflies’ wings.” But I also sympathize with the alarm aroused in you by the unknowable matrix: “The symbol of women in general is that of the Apocalypse, on whose forehead was written MYSTERY,” and with your perplexity in the face of female genius: “When women have genius, I think their brand is more original than our own.”²

Of all those in whose company, during that legendary era of Enlightenment, you wakened humanity from its dream of transcendence to lead it toward the best and the worst, it is you I feel closest to. I feel close to Jacques the Fatalist, The Indiscreet Jewels, Rameau’s Nephew, the Letter on the Blind. I feel close to your atheism, as redoubtable today as ever it was, which deeply and openly guides your liberty. From Paris to St. Petersburg, it was like a bracing wind that blew away the obscurantist miasmas battening like parasites on women’s bodies and the beliefs that exploited the quiverings of desire. It was your atheism that first rumbled the tortured sacristies and the torturing boudoirs, whose victims were unconscious of their sexual slavery. Because your atheism did not bow to any cult; it gaily honored the one sovereignty that means anything, the impudence of speaking out.

A DELUSION WITHOUT SOLUTION

In The Nun, you showed scant consideration for the feelings of the faithful.³ The story of young Marie-Suzanne Simonin, first confined in a convent and then debauched by a hysterical prioress who exploits her innocence, is more than a scathing satire on religious delirium; it also shows how ferocious repression and erotic passage à l’acte are the two inseparable faces of a culture that sets such excessive store by ideals because it is obsessed by the violence of the instincts.

Lambasting the unnatural life of Christian religion, you denounce the hypocrisy that goes on to infiltrate lay culture as well. Marie-Suzanne’s “inflexible” parents, for instance, invoke among others the “knowledge” of the Abbé Blin (a doctor at the Sorbonne) and the authority of the bishop of Aleppo, who receives the poor girl into the Church on a day that is “one of the saddest ever.” Family conformity and spiritual dogma are for you the twin aspects of a social code that forces the young girl to take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience in order to expiate her mother’s adultery, of which she is the product. To cap it all, her legal father is a lawyer! This “morality tale” would have made for hilarious vaudeville, had it not continued with the punitive enclosure of the girl and then, inside a supposedly liberating convent, with the lewd embraces forced on the novice by a mother superior with a contorted face and a warped, disjointed mind.

On the one hand, Longchamp:

A rope was placed around my neck, and with one hand I was made to hold a flaming torch, with the other a scourge. One of the nuns took hold of the other end of the rope and pulled me along between the two lines, and the procession made its way towards a little inner oratory dedicated to St. Mary. They had come singing softly; now they walked in silence. When I had reached the oratory, lit by two lamps, I was ordered to ask both God and the community to forgive me for the scandal I had caused. The nun who had led me there said the words I had to repeat, and I repeated them all. Then the rope was removed, I was stripped down to the waist, they took my hair, which was hanging down over my shoulders, and pulled it to one side of my neck, they placed in my right hand the scourge I had been carrying in my left, and they started reciting the Miserere.⁴

On the other, Arpajon:

At such times, if a nun does the slightest thing wrong, the Mother Superior summons her to her cell, deals with her harshly, and orders her to get undressed and to give herself twenty strokes with her scourge; the nun obeys, gets undressed, picks up her scourge, and mortifies her flesh, but no sooner has she given herself a few strokes than the Mother Superior, overwhelmed with pity, snatches the instrument of penitence from her and starts crying; how dreadful it is for her to have to punish people! She kisses her on the forehead, eyes, mouth, and shoulders, caresses her, and sings her praises…She kisses her again, lifts her up, puts her clothes back on for her, says the sweetest things to her, gives her permission not to attend the services, and sends her back to her cell. It is very difficult being with women like that, as you never know what they are going to like or dislike, what you need to avoid doing or what you need to do.…I went inside with her; she accompanied me with her arm round my waist.…“I utterly adore you, and once these bores have all left, I shall gather together the sisters and you’ll sing a little tune for us, won’t you?”⁵

Here are the two sides of a single madness, “the folly of the cross,” as you write, which “flies in the face of our natural inclinations” by inciting human beings to “hide away,” even though “God made man sociable”; locking them up into “madhouses” and giving free rein in fine to “animal functions” through the very savagery by which these are supposed to be curbed.

Your indictment, Mister Philosopher, is earnest, detailed, and uncompromising: you are up in arms, a militant.

Are convents so essential to the constitution of a state? Did Jesus Christ institute monks and nuns? Can the Church really not do without them?…Can these vows, which fly in the face of our natural inclinations, ever be properly observed by anyone other than a few abnormal creatures in whom the seeds of passion have withered and whom we should rightly consider as monsters, if the current state of our knowledge allowed us to understand the internal structure of man as easily and as well as we understand his external form?…Where does nature, revolted by a constraint for which it is not intended, smash the obstacles put in its way, become enraged, and throw the whole animal system into incurable disarray?…Where is the dwelling place of coercion, disgust, and hysteria? Where is the home of servitude and despotism? Where is undying hatred? Where are the passions nurtured in silence?…“To make a vow of poverty is to swear to be an idler and a thief. To make a vow of chastity is to swear to God constantly to break the wisest and most important of His laws. To make a vow of obedience is to renounce man’s inalienable prerogative: freedom. If you keep these vows, you are a criminal; if you do not keep them, you are guilty of perjury before God. To live the cloistered life, you have to be either a fanatic or a hypocrite.”⁶

As you write this — understandable — indictment, you are in tears. Diderot, in tears? It’s hardly posterity’s vision of him. We prefer to picture the philosopher patting Catherine the Great on the thigh, she who would later purchase his library…Are you weeping for your little sister, Marie-Angélique, who died a lunatic at the age of twenty-eight in an Ursuline convent, whom you haven’t forgotten, since you named your beloved daughter after her? Or are they tears of outrage, like the way I feel about fundamentalism, before the religious obscurantism that oppresses “our natural inclinations”? Or are your tears even more a surprise to you because you are so well aware that in the human animal, a speaking being, the capacity to make meaning has long ago “flown in the face” of any “natural inclination,” for there is a specific — hence natural — human capacity to clash with nature by dint of language, of thought?

You are discovering that this clash breeds delusions, in which wonders rub shoulders with follies; an inextricable jumble, a merry-go-round of bodies and souls whose perils and charms you brilliantly expose in the character of He, Rameau’s nephew, for example (to the delight of the gloomy Hegel), ten years after The Nun. Here follies cohabit with thought, sure enough; they make this noncharacter live, create, and decline, this literally polyphonous third person, He, the spasmodic artist, the Nephew. But they don’t spare his interlocutor either, I, which is to say you, the philosopher. The humans who lived before you or the Enlightenment ascribed such inconceivable oddities to either the devil or God: “God, through whom we discern that certain things we had deemed essential to ourselves are truly foreign to us, while those we had deemed foreign to us are essential,” wrote Saint Augustine.⁷ But what if the demonic and the divine were the same thing? What if your “tale” of The Nun led you to locate them, not in the Beyond but in “human nature” itself, which has become so dreadfully foreign? These possibilities are hinted at in your dialogue with that Nephew into whom you poured so much of yourself…

In the tragic story of Mademoiselle Simonin, the impulse that will lead you to the Nephew is still incipient; libertarian revolt prevails throughout. While following the martyrdom of your heroine the reader cannot help distinguishing the bright light of thought, championed by free spirits, from the cringing delirium propagated by fanatics, and the goodness of nature from the evil loosed against it — even though your artful love of masks can’t resist confusing the issue. Matters will be harder and often impossible to sort out when you venture into the subtler crannies of culture, where flesh overlaps with word, and vice versa, as they do in the character of Rameau’s nephew.

And yet, my dear Denis Diderot, I think you already came up against that overlapping at the time of The Nun, and that’s why your story made you cry. One of your cherished “strumpet thoughts” must have come over you: that the deadly excesses of religion, like its deliciously sensual enslavements, don’t come out of nowhere, and they don’t come from the people who use them to justify their liberticidal power. Their egregiousness amplifies and exploits the “clash” inherent in the “natural inclinations” of the human beast, in whom nature chafes with culture — because those two, nature and culture, are always yoked together, however awkwardly, in the speaking animal.

Such is my hypothesis, justified to my mind by the Nephew. Now, if you’ll permit me, I will carry it forward.

Was the end of your novel really lost, as some witnesses allege? Or did you condense the end of the story into a sketchy outline because, overcome by emotion on the heels of a mocking laugh, you found yourself simply unable to finish? “What ails you? What a state you are in!” exclaimed Monsieur d’Alainville, a friend of Grimm’s and yours, when he found you plunged in grief, your face wet with tears. “What ails me?” you replied. “I am undone by a tale I’m telling myself.”⁸ This “tale” you were “telling yourself” would have no conclusion. The end of the Enlightenment went awry with the Terror. Today’s ending seems interminable, and no less problematic.

PERSIFLAGE: FAITH OR WRITING?

And yet it all started off as a farce. That year, 1758, the charming marquis of Croismare was sorely missed by his friends. You had met the gentleman at the salon of Madame d’Épinay. He was a paragon of lively good humor, “devoted to numberless pleasures in succession,” as your friend Grimm described him. One day he decides to move for a time to his Normandy estate, where his affairs require attention. But he fails to return, having caught a serious case of religion! It was then that you, Denis Diderot, hatched the idea (with the help of some co-conspirators, including Grimm) of an amusing prank, otherwise known as a wicked, perfidious piece of jiggery-pokery: to write to the marquis of Croismare some letters purporting to be from a genuine nun of Longchamp, Marguerite Delamarre. This lady had gone to court to have her vows annulled, claiming she had been forced into the nunnery by her parents. The marquis, although he did not know the plaintiff personally, had tried in vain to intercede for her with the councillors of the great chamber of the Paris parlement.

According to the fake letters, the nun had now run away from the convent and was begging for help from the marquis, who fell straight into the trap. The hoaxers split their sides. Eager to succor a nun in distress, the newly reverent Croismare offered her a chambermaid post in his household. This forced you to contrive the death of the supposed heroine of the correspondence, so as to relieve your friend without letting the deception be known. Soon afterward you decided to assemble the letters into a narrative, revised in 1780, but still unpublished: private copies circulated from hand to hand. The joke came to light, and Monsieur de Croismare took it with great good humor. The text did not appear as a novel until 1796, twelve years after your death. There was a general consensus to forget about the persiflage of its origins, but this stratagem nonetheless forms the backdrop to the drama (“a tale I’m telling myself”) and confers an elusive dash of unreality and indeterminacy to the tragedy it recounts. A very French way, isn’t it, of tackling the secrets of religion, not to say the mystery of God, at the same time as attacking head-on the evils of superstition!

On rereading, I find myself thinking that you wept over the novel you were attempting to synthesize from your prank, not only out of compassion for the unhappy victims of the “folly of the cross,” as you call it in your role as encyclopedist and man of the Enlightenment, but also because the fine novelist you are was so stricken by the transference of your feelings upon those of your heroine Marie-Suzanne Simonin that, parallel to your indignation before her ordeals at the hands of religion, you succumbed to the blessings — sorry, the snares — of this magical thing, faith. Here are the words you put into her mouth:

It was then that I came to feel that Christianity was superior to all the other religions in the world. What profound wisdom there was in what benighted philosophy calls the folly of the cross! In the state I was in, how would the image of a happy and glorious lawgiver have helped me? I saw that innocent man, his side pierced, his head crowned with thorns, his hands and feet pierced with nails, and dying in agony, and I said to myself: “This is my God, and yet I dare to feel sorry for myself!”…I clung to this idea and felt a renewed sense of consolation in my heart.⁹

Such were, too, your own last words, according to posterity or wicked tongues. Distinctly over-the-top for an atheist!

Here’s the nub: you, who taught me that “the first step toward philosophy is incredulity,”¹⁰ didn’t hesitate to make a character sing the praises of the Christian faith, even though she had been ill-treated by it! Is this another ironical pirouette, should it be taken with a pinch of salt, are you teasing us? Or are you rehearsing, slyly, vicariously, what it would be like to feel enthralled by that “profound wisdom,” to submit to its attachments, to practice its dialectics? To comprehend its logic while condemning its abuses?

Maybe this was not more than a “strumpet thought” among others, one you discarded, before capsizing at the end. There was more urgent business to attend to in those effervescent days, after all. But I wonder: by limiting yourself to diagnosing how religion oppresses “good nature,” didn’t you deny yourself the chance to deploy the complexities of your discernment, to plumb the “mysteries” of that mystification after having denounced its aberrations?

You did, however, in your correspondence with Sophie Volland, undertake to plumb a different mystery — that of the Apocalypse whose name is “Woman.” And still another after that, the enigma of the asocial individual, the eccentric parasite, the nephew of the great Rameau. Religion, seduction, hysteria, art…As mystifications and delusions go, you are not exempt: by rewriting your mocking farce in the form of a narrative, you stepped right into that region of mystification that could not fail to “clash” with your personal continent, that further illusion of which you are the master: literature. The imaginary, the fantasized, the written. How does it connect with religion? What links are there between religion, literature, the female body, and the artistic body? Between desire, seduction, and manipulation? Between feminine and masculine? Between art and parasitism? Truth and falsehood? Such are the abysses of philosophy. And how about between dominion over others, elevation of others, abuse of others? Between the powers of language, rhetoric, faith, and the Word? Such are the abysses of culture, of freedom, of the Enlightenment.

In a bid to cast light on your tale, scholars have pored over the original “correspondence” with the pious, deceived Monsieur de Croismare; but there is another, missing correspondence that remains unwritten and whose absence drove you to tears: that of the canon you once were with the philosopher you became. Is it because the ill-being of others — or your own? — wounds you so much that you prefer to act rather than to delve into its labyrinth of impasses and delights? “I would rather dry the tears of those who are unhappy than share the joy of the rest,” you wrote to Sophie Volland. And to Madame d’Épinay: “I belong to the unhappy; it would seem fate sends them into my path; I cannot fail a single one of them, I haven’t the strength; they rob me of my time, my talent, my fortune, my very friends…”¹¹

How I understand! Barring the talent and the fortune, I could write the very same words — why else would I be so attached to the MPH? But I’m not with you all the way. The Diderot who bursts into tears, undone by his Nun, makes me doubt his luminous encyclopedist’s certainties elsewhere.

Did you really believe in that benign “nature without artifice” touted by the Enlightenment? At the time of writing those mischievous letters to Croismare, you were also beginning work on the Nephew. And in that book, over and above its notoriously baroque, corrosive, seething critique of buffoons and braggarts, musical feuds and anarchic enthusiasms, what is it but good old “human nature” that gets blown to smithereens in the convulsion of passions, mimeses, unbearable truths, impossible filiations, tempests of the senses and sensations, in short, in the absence of any point of reference amid the strange, the infinite comedy of language and languages? All of this — the crucible of persiflage, of the literary laboratory, of imaginative power, of the hatefatuation of the sexes — surrounds The Nun, shattering the hypocrisy of sanctimonious God-botherers, beyond the control of the very institution of faith. You make no effort to contain it. You simply make it exist, in laughter, in tears, in style.

Do not think I am turning my back on your Nun. Your writing, lightened or indeed denatured by the silliness of the prank that brought her into being (you revel in those sorts of ambiguities, you cultivate them in all of your works), gradually pulls free from that “self-delusion…ruled by…instincts” that Nietzsche thought was characteristic of Christianity and, I might add, of its repressed substitutes.¹² Epistolary satire (or persiflage) and the novel that attempts to reason through it (The Nun) seem to me to have been engendered by the selfsame “clash” between nature and meaning that you sought to demystify in faith itself, overshooting your immediate target, the abusive enclosure of young women. As though at the very moment your work was engaged in extirpating the religious, it became apparent to you that it was “inoperable” of that religion. Thus the esthete Swann, that inoperable “celibate of art,” as Proust wrote in the voice of the Christlike narrator of In Search of Lost Time;¹³ thus too the Sade— Pascal duo, encompassing a peculiarly French genius, according to Philippe Sollers.¹⁴ The need to believe is inoperable of desire, desire for meaning, whirlwind of the thinking flesh: that is what flew into your face, Mister Philosopher, and reduced you to tears, just when you were hoping to wind up The Nun in a hurry.

THE MISSING LINK OF EUROPEAN CULTURE

Your libertarian verve, the incisive violence of the French body and sense of humor, the upheavals of a history that was preparing to guillotine the king and overthrow the Church, all these impelled you to strike a ringing, well-aimed blow against obscurantism. After you, and largely thanks to you, religion (especially Catholicism) lost much of its aura of absolute revelation and institutional impregnability. This happened first in France — often accompanied by “revolutionary” atrocities whose tragic balance sheet not been fully reckoned yet — and little by little spread elsewhere in the world by means of the awesome, unstoppable march of secularization. Here I include religious pluralisms of every stripe, spiritualist mystifications, sectarian outpourings, and the “black tide of occultism” that so revolted Freud.

Is Christianity irrevocably discredited?

Many people are worried about this. Some question secularism, others dread the comeback of clericalism and its twin, anticlericalism. I know of some who try to deal with the problem by going back to the source, such as biblical inspiration, obviously: these read the alliance of the crucified Jesus with His Father as the accomplishment of the Jewish Akedah, not so much an “imperfect” to be “voided” as a truth forever present in the evangelical pronouncement, in the truth and presence of its accomplishment. As an epochal gesture this re-sourcing claimed to settle the old intra-Hebraic quarrel between Old and New Testaments, by re-founding the Pauline separation into a fresh unity of Jews and Christians. Is it a response to the tragedy of the Shoah and to the current threats posed by the “clash of religions”? Some people content themselves with a return to Latin. Others begin to listen to their contemporaries…And so on.

The atheist that I am holds her breath while asking herself these questions. And I dream that Teresa’s experience could add to the movement for a salutary re-foundation a new reading of this revitalization of European culture that was ushered in by the much-maligned Counter-Reformation, of which Teresa was the more or less clandestine inspiration — alongside Ignatius Loyola and John of the Cross, but very differently from them.

This renovation, launched in part by La Madre’s exemplary experience, makes me see that Christianity did not come to a halt in the Middle Ages; it was not killed off by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and humanism, contrary to what is often said. Mingling the message of the Song of Songs with the Passion on the Cross and infusing them through the bodies of the Renaissance and right into the entrepreneurial pragmatism of modern times, strongly marking the artistic sensibilities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but stuck in the tribunal of moral values, Christianity let itself be cowed by the libertarian energies of the Enlightenment and sidelined by the technical and multicultural acceleration of history. It flourished, however, under unexpected forms that might not always welcome the association: in your novels, Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau’s Nephew; in Mozart’s Magic Flute, for instance; even in the care for human uniqueness professed by the European Union today. Does that surprise you? Good, I’m flattered! To issues of love, the Bible, and the Gospels I would attach everything that, without sinking into modern nihilism, patiently breaks down and recomposes the desire to believe with all one’s body and soul. Everything that stays close to myths and rituals, monotheistic or otherwise, and revisits those bold condensations that restore humanity — disoriented by the threat of global disaster — to its own “monumental” history: a history made of the self-transcendence speaking beings have labeled the “divine,” the “unconscious,” “being,” and “time,” not to say “lost time.”

Less than two centuries after Teresa’s death you could not have perceived, dear Denis Diderot, this renovation within continuity achieved by a strange nun living at the very heart of the ontotheological continent you were determined to blow up, with swimming eyes. As an impatient, libertarian protester, committed to the efficiency that would benefit the humble and the wronged, you proceeded in plebeian fashion by dint of “epistemological breaks.” Was that how it had to be in order for me, Sylvia Leclercq, beyond any real, imaginary, or symbolic guillotine, to find my way back to Teresa? After you, yet upstream from you? I don’t know, but that’s how it is.

Others, in ever greater numbers, would align themselves with what they took to be your fight against obscurantism, and continued the desecration with the help of a cudgel: this, those poor unprotected believers believed, was indispensable for lancing the boil of superstition and subjection. But they had overlooked the fertile twists, the vicious benefits, the ineffable traps of the desire for meaning: morbid fancies, instinctual eruptions, hopes and despairs, physical and psychic manipulations.

You’ve got it, Mister Philosopher: being the person I am, my cohabitation with that roommate is the paradoxical, but inevitable, result of your Nun. I began by rebelling, in step with you, against the physical and psychic oppressions effected by religions and ideologies, the latter being more or less secretly modeled on the former; I shared your revulsion at monastic claustration; I felt the empathy that made you weep over the fate of the victims of so many enforced, but often voluntary, delusions.

Over time, however, I found myself parting ways with you. Or rather I attempted to shine your light, in my own way, into the murky chambers of the female soul that intrigued you so much in Marie-Suzanne Simonin. Into what Freud called the “psychic apparatus,” of both sexes: the recondite places where torture is distilled into secondary benefits, into a “surplus” of jouissance, and where the need to believe constitutes the foundations of a culture, with or without apparent malaise.

I wonder if you’d ever accept — as Freudians do, like me, who cannot share your enlightened optimism on this point — that delusion, with all its dangers, is a constitutive part or the now immersed face of a civilization seemingly melting away under the overheated blast of technology.

I have tried to channel your imagination, passion, and empathetic compassion for your nun in another direction in my own exploration of the interior dwelling places of Teresa of Avila. My heroine was not spared the woes of the good sister of Longchamp and Arpajon, but she forged ahead right through them, first toward ecstasy, then into writing and action, and finally into sainthood. I spoke of the “interior dwelling places of Teresa of Avila,” but they are not only hers. They do not harbor only the pioneering audacity of an elite soul of the sixteenth century, or the ravings of certain Catholic women in any century; perhaps (following Leibniz, with deficient humility once more) Teresa’s inner mansions could be relevant to all kinds of passionate souls? Not because they share the same faith, but because such souls speak and think and are in time in a particular way. “There is a great difference in the ways one may be,” the Carmelite wrote.

To get to the bottom of religious experience a slow, interminable effort remained and remains to be made, and it always will. Your Nun initiated the process with an almighty thwack at pious hypocrisy, but it was received with bland applause, reducing your text to an institutional operation: you were not seen to be interested in religion itself, let alone in God, you were merely attacking religious “power” in relation to personal and private life. There was a reaction of denial, a refusal to dig further! And yet your polyphonous adventure, your polymorphous oeuvre meant so much more. Is it by chance that you are the only Enlightenment philosopher cited by Freud? Your Nun pulled open the secret drawers of faith. Pieces like “First Satire,” Rameau’s Nephew (my own favorite), “Conversation of a Father with His Children,” and “Conversation of a Philosopher with the Maréchale of—,” attempted to explore religion’s links with the law, filiation, and parenthood. Delving into the exquisite refinements and treasures of perversity lodged within bodies and souls with, around, and despite the realities of servitude and despotism, you continued to construct the bridge that leaps from Teresa’s ecstasies (via Bernini, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo) to the passions of those modern monsters, the men and women of today, balanced aloft on the stilts of incorporated time, à la Proust, or dispersed into kaleidoscopic shards à la Picasso.

Teresa leads me through that labyrinth where the present has no meaning unless it recollects the inaugural moment and re-engenders it; where the now is only of interest insofar as it continually re-founds what came before, like Teresa does when she places Solomon’s Bride inside the body of a woman praying to Jesus. This woman passes the baton to Bernini, who passes it on to Molly Bloom. Let us walk a little further in La Madre’s company. I am trying to work through the tangled mazes you abhorred with a patience I hope to make as incisive as your own sardonic passion. Wounding or tiresome I may be, and yet somewhat appeased, I hope. And if so, it will be thanks to your preparatory spadework.

NEITHER RHENO-FLEMISH, NOR A QUIETIST

Did I say patience? Am I not rather caught, with this great Teresa, in the turmoil of a transference—that again, always that! — which I am trying to assume with whatever vigilance I still have? Behind my curiosity about this saint, what really fascinates me is the dynamic of the loving bond itself. It preexists this or that individual along with whatever objects of transference may present themselves in the course of the person’s lifetime, for it is by the grace of the transference upon my parents, which founded my psychic life, that I think and therefore I am. “I have found out that you were less dear to me than my passion,” wrote the Portuguese nun to the French officer who had forsaken her.¹⁵ You will understand, Mister Philosopher, that if I am not content with thinking up equations but ask myself: “What causes me to think?” then I am still preoccupied by that foundational passion. So I am not about to close down my dialogue with my roommate, Maître, and now you know why you are its last witness here. How could I interrogate the original transference without moving backward through the battles you fought on behalf of the freedom of bodies and souls, the struggles you bequeathed to us, which are now mine? Who am I? Who is she? What is she looking for?

Who are you, Teresa? A garden irrigated by four waters, a fluid castle open to infinity with seven permeable “dwelling places,” an inexhaustible writer, a dauntless warrior, a languid lover sighing for “more!” under Bernini’s caress? A pitiful epileptic or a woman of power? A Carmelite cloistered in hopeless delusion or a modern, more than modern, subject? Do I really have an answer, at the end of this long sojourn side by side?

After following you as best I could through your life and death, through the firmament of ideas where you hover with the opus that is your jewel, that last question remains open.

Is it because you were a woman, or because you were Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, then Teresa of Jesus, then Saint Teresa of Avila — who I watched being born, vibrating, and passing away, with your epoch and against it — that you built yourself a soul, as it used to be called, that matched your body but did not fit the Aristotelo-Thomist model of the interior man and the exterior man? That equally contradicted the rationalist, sensualist model mounted by Fénelon and Madame Guyon?

The history of Christianity is actually littered with sophisticated anatomies of the soul, vertiginous palaces of the inner life. Might I run through some of them with you, Mister Philosopher, as a way of clarifying my disagreement? I’ll use the bits and pieces to enhance my Teresian “installation,” like the Beguines decorating their offerings to the Sacred Heart with shreds of grass and scraps of floral fabric. Or like contemporary female artists who eschew synthesis and prefer to pile up the fragments of their untenable identities. A nod at the scholastics, a glance at the Rhenish philosophers, an allusion to quietism, all to be submitted for your inspection. It’s my patchwork sampler, my polychrome canvas, my MoMA-worthy “mobile.” So that the dwelling places of my saint are sure to stand out while remaining connected, I tighten my gestures, quicken my paint drippings, gather time into the space of a condensation. Teresa of Avila’s revolution can only be assessed in relation to that mutation of mystical subjectivity, those variations on the “kingdom” of which modernity knows nothing, but in which I tried to steep myself while traveling through the works of the woman from Castile.

As you know, my dear Philosopher, after Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, scholasticism came up with a topology of inner space in which the higher part comprised man’s rational faculties, and the lower part the sensitive faculties.

The Rheno-Flemish mystics modified the structure established by Aristotle and Aquinas by adding to this bilevel schema a new “higher part”: the locus of mysticism itself, the site of the “essence” of the soul, above the median level of rationality and the base level of the sensitive. Transcending the operative powers (intellect, will, imagination), irreducible to the actual capabilities of any given subject, the indivisible essence of the soul is deployed in a rigorously ontological context. This summit of man’s interiority is described by Meister Eckhart as the “innermost source” in which “I spring out in the Holy Spirit, where there is one life and one being and one work.”¹⁶

The soul sits at rest on this crowning point to “merit” an “interior nativity,” in other words an overcoming of the “self” by means of the rebirth of the “subject” as Other, in the modern interpretation. “Be quiet, let God speak and work within”: this is the method advocated by Johannes Tauler, Eckhart’s disciple, to enable the soul within which the (re)birth occurs to become “a child of God.”¹⁷ An essential, noetic, abstract, imperceptible union, “without images or instruments,” “a learned ignorance,” ignota cognitio, this “depth”—or rather pinnacle — of the soul in Rheno-Flemish mysticism is thus an ontological reality, the transcendence of being over doing.

And yet the consciousness of the feeling and thinking subject is by no means abolished here. Meister Eckhart’s experience is more like a “flickering” between the three hierarchically separated levels of essence, reason, and sense.¹⁸ Mysticism only sacralizes the noblest part of the soul, the essence, and this can only be attained in the seclusion of silence, causing the rebirth of subjectivity through its immersion in Being; its power is none other than the pure silence of noetic alteration. The “vain pursuit” of faith in Saint John of the Cross has affinities with this noetic alteration described by Tauler: “There is no doubt that Almighty God has appointed a special place for Himself in the soul which is the very essence itself, or Mens, whence the higher powers emerge. This spirit or Mens is of such great dignity that no creature has or ever could rise to the height necessary to understand it.”

Teresa was not unaware of this noetic ambition, for her whole reformation of the Carmel, with its stress on austere enclosure, silence, and purity, alluded and adhered to it. But my roommate went further: her life, her writings, and her deeds embody and testify to a different mystical model.

If more evidence is needed of the impossibility of reducing Teresa’s procedure to the Rheno-Flemish model, suffice it to say that the sensualist-rationalist tendency, opposed to the mystics of the North, acknowledged a debt to the saint’s experience. This current, launched by Francis de Sales in his Treatise on the Love of God,¹⁹ hit the zenith with Fénelon²⁰ and Madame Guyon.²¹

In one of your marvelously intransigent fugues, my dear Philosopher, you yourself conflated “la Guyon,” her verbose Spiritual Torrents, and Fénelon, with…Teresa! You begin by expounding rapturously on the fickle female of the species. Then, having immortalized Jeanne Guyon, you automatically associate her with my saint. So La Guyon writes with unrivaled eloquence in her book Torrents? You go on to declare: “Saint Theresa has said of devils, ‘How luckless they are: they do not love!’ Quietism is the hypocrisy of the perverse man, the true religion of the tender woman.”²² Indeed. But Teresa a “tender woman”? Never! Next, carried away by enthusiasm, unless it’s persiflage again, you commend Fénelon as a “safe” man: “There was, however, a man of such honesty of character and such rare simplicity of morals that a gentlewoman could safely forget herself beside him and melt into God. But this man was unique and called Fénelon.” Right! Enough of that, let’s get back to the female genius. “Women are subject to epidemic attacks of ferocity.” Although: “Oh, women, what extraordinary children you are!”

With that, were you edging nearer to Teresa? Not in my opinion. Dare I say that the philosopher lacks something indispensable for following the Carmelite in her cruelty, her infantilism, her raptures, her foundations? You don’t know what to do with those exaltations in which the soul becomes one with the Other, because the atheist in you is condemned to diminish the singularity of innerness and to lock himself out from the mansions of the soul by his refusal to countenance the Other’s very existence. I’m not asking you to believe in it, to subscribe to it, or even to make use of it. I’m asking you to make your object of incredulity — God — into an object of interpretation.

It was impossible: you were blocked by the same rationalistic sensualism that had already produced a new mystical model, itself sense-based and psychologistic, with which you rather sympathized. It made you “shiver” in the company of Guyon-Fénelon, and you redressed it on the reason side or tilted it toward the side of emancipation to castigate the iniquities of an oppressive obscurantism. But it debarred you from the subtle paths of perceptible — and imperceptible — perfection that are opened up by the experience of faith.

What if your Nun were not only the fruit of a revolt against the abuses of religious institutions but also and equally an ultimate consequence of the rationalistic sensualism that abrogates, along with the “God question,” the true complexity of the “castle of the soul”? First by belittling it, then by ignoring its intrinsic logic, and finally by annulling it? You perceive the threat, Mister Philosopher, and fight it by creating the polyphonic and carnivalesque characters of your novels, you entrust the imagination with the job of musiquer (setting to music, the term used by He in the Nephew) the psychic life.²³ But you’re not sure that all this is enough, and you have no desire to finish the novel of The Nun now that you’ve released her from religion. The “benighted philosophy” of the “folly of the cross,” as Suzanne puts it in her letters to the marquis, is, I suspect, somewhat yours as well — for haven’t you elected to remain blind to the voyage of souls toward the God question?

I am not suggesting that you personally, Maître, closed the God question in favor of another question, not entirely divorced from it but not to be reduced to it either: the question of subjection and how to get rid of it. I am only saying that this closure has a history, which involves you, and that the history of mysticism itself participates in it. But since my wager is to reopen the God question in the thinking that crystallized in the enlightened Encyclopedia and culminated, as I see it, with Freud, I can only do this by way of your good self, replaying your revolts and querying your silences.

It’s well known that you found Christianity a doleful affair, compared with the zest for life, sensual gaiety, and civic pugnacity you valued so highly in pagan antiquity and transposed to the dimension of mankind. And yet I hear you tell your Maréchale that all deities, including pagan ones, belong in the madhouse: grist to my psychologist’s mill, as you can imagine.

“In no century and with no nation have religious opinions been the basis of national morals. The gods adored by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the most virtuous of people, were the merest scum: a Jupiter who should have been burnt alive: a Venus fit for a reformatory: a Mercury who ought to be in a jail.”

But while you shared Freud’s abrasive unbelief, you feared that delusion could not be so easily eradicated. “Do you think man can get along without superstition?” asks the Maréchale de—. “I do not entertain this hope, because desire for it has not blinded me to its hollowness: but I take it away from no one else.” At the same time you doubted that the Christian message had been heard: “But are there any Christians? I have never seen one.”²⁴ Echoing Hobbes, you rightly contended that religion is a superstition that is allowed, and superstition a religion that is not allowed.²⁵ Being a reasonable fellow, more influenced by your English contemporaries than by the Hebrews of yore, you felt that religious abuses are best remedied by sound legislation, devised in the public interest. It is impossible, you tell the Maréchale, to subject

a nation to a rule which suits only a few melancholiacs, who have imposed it on their characters. It is with religious as with monastic institutions; they relax with time. They are lunacies which cannot hold out against the constant impulse of nature, which brings us back under her law. See to it that private good be so closely united to public good that a citizen can hardly harm society without harming himself. Promise virtue its reward, as you have promised wickedness its punishment. Let virtue lead to high offices of state, without distinction of faith, wherever virtue is to be found. Then you need only count on a small number of wicked men, who are involved in vice by a perversity of nature which nothing can correct. No. Temptation is too near: hell too far off. Look for nothing worth the attention of a wise law-giver.²⁶

But your affinity with religious — and with Freud’s — experience is never more glaring than when you equate the Creator and His Laws with the good father and his selective authority. With feigned ingenuousness you remind the Maréchale of the story of the young Mexican and the old man. The Mexican (yourself, perhaps?) doesn’t believe that anybody lives across the sea, until one day, blown by a storm, he lands there and finds to his relief a venerable old man on the beach. He falls to his knees. “‘Get up,’ said the old man; ‘you have denied my existence?’” Of course, he pardons the Mexican for his ignorance. This allows you to make a point to the Maréchale to the effect that fatherly forgiveness trumps the punishment that “real” religion metes out — according to her (surely un-Christian) preconceptions.

Law or mercy? To this intra-Hebraic crossroads where the God question leads, you will return very analytically, dear Denis Diderot, with regard to yourself and your father. We know that as an impudent thirty-something you went to your father’s house to ask for his permission to marry Anne-Toinette Champion, a modest lace vendor. He refused and had you locked up in a monastery, you escaped, laid low in Paris and married your sweetheart — only to find her a bore. Well, it was in that same family home at Place Chambeau, in Langres, that the prodigal son, having disobeyed the paternal injunction to become a churchman, mused with his father over the need for a Law and how to become free of it. You attributed to this father, the underwriter of the Law, not so much the authorization to defy it as the shrewdness to be wisely unconventional. I am thinking of your “Conversation of a Father with His Children”: “When it was my turn to bid him goodnight, I embraced him and said into his ear: ‘Strictly speaking, Father, there is no law for the wise.’ ‘Pray keep your voice down.’ ‘All laws being subject to exceptions, it is for the sage to judge in which cases to bow to them and in which to ignore them.’ ‘I should not mind,’ said he, ‘if there were one or two citizens like yourself in the town; but I should not live there were they all to think likewise.’”²⁷

I rather fear, Sage of the ideal polis whose citizens do not all think likewise, that your philosophy has not been followed to the letter. I’m afraid your unconditional fans tend not to know or to forget about your writings and your tears, this time at the death of the cutler, a paragon of piety and justice: “I feel an infinite sadness,” wrote the inconsolable son who was not by his father’s side when the time came.

All in all you are a tolerant atheist, Mister Philosopher, and it doesn’t come amiss to repeat it, even if your oh-so-reasonable sensibility makes Teresian interiority a closed book to you. I like to think that if I met you today, more than two hundred years after your demise, you would have persevered with your nun’s story, and our paths might have crossed. Personally, I’m sure of it.

Let us return then to that other mystical model, distinct from the Rheno-Flemish school. This developed through the rationalist-sensualists, aiming to integrate the Cartesian subject while adapting it to lived experience, and bewitching the French — or rather, French women. To my mind, this model was not in keeping with Teresa’s project either. Descartes’ ego cogito gradually infiltrated Christian mysticism to eclipse the ego amo and ego affectus est of the Christian subject; it was Julia Kristeva and her Tales of Love that made me understand this long ago, when, disappointed in my unfinished thesis on Duras, I attended her classes at Jussieu. Briefly, faith ordered by reason is accompanied in Francis de Sales by a mutation of love that finds peace in knowledge. Pascal himself insists, in his Discourse on the Passion of Love, on the role of reason in love, and presents the latter as a clear-sighted vision of truth rather than a form of blindness.

Paradoxically, the desacralization of mystical experience begins with this second would-be mystical current or “model,” with its inflexion of being toward doing. The desacralization is lasting, even or especially when the praying person resists doing with all his or her might in order to find refuge in non-action. How can this be? The faculties (intellect, will, imagination) are henceforth located on the higher planes of both the Rheno-Flemish trichotomy and the Aristotelo-Thomist dichotomy; as a result, the mind is split from the senses, that is from feeling or sentiment, relegated to the lower plane of human reason. The two activities nonetheless overlap and encroach to produce an amazingly complicated map of the soul, a jumble of components, degrees, and postures, but this “vertiginous carousel with its proliferating subdivisions” has nothing in common with Teresa’s dwelling places, as we will see.²⁸

Among the rational sensualists, my dear Denis Diderot, the essential soul of Rheno-Flemish thought is invoked only to be redistributed through a rational and sensitive topography. This entails a psychologization of experience that in turn leads Fénelon, the Swan of Cambrai, in his Explication of the Maxims of the Saints, to define the “supreme peak” of the loving union of the soul with God in negative, sentimental fashion as the absence of any intellectual discourse or inclinations of the will based on the exercise of reason.²⁹ The concept of Being remains, of course, but only as a posited reference (henceforth separate from the “subject,” or more exactly of the psychological “self,” which becomes merely the sign of it) in a supradiscursive regime of rational faculties. In fact, this attempt to make mystical doctrines compatible with scholastic theology signals the impossibility of preserving any mysticism of the essence within rational and sensualist parameters.

For the subject of the Cartesian cogito wrecked the ontological ambition of the Rheno-Flemish mystics,³⁰ which now became inaccessible to such anti-mystics as Bossuet, who devoted himself to “tempering by means of holy interpretations” the notions of the “great exaggerators,” mystics who have no idea of what they’re talking about.³¹ This did not prevent the Eagle of Meaux from standing up for Teresa in his own terms, as we’ve seen, and he also had kind words for Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Catherine, and a few others. Nothing is simple in this area, Maître: I can’t keep up myself, which is saying something. Let’s press on. The ontological ambition would also be inaccessible, in a different way, to Pierre Poitiers and to Fénelon, even though these claimed to be the greatest defenders of mysticism in all the seventeenth century. The first declared that the union of the human soul with the divine essence should be understood as merely a “metaphor,” while the second depicted the essential mystical union in terms of a simple affective bond whereby the soul unites with God in pure, disinterested love. Thus the way was paved for sensualist materialism to sound the knell of the mysticism of Being in favor of the mystique of the psychological ego.

May I put more clearly, in light of this, the objection I raised before with regard to Jeanne and Teresa? When, with touching quietist “abandonment” and in the dignified perfection of “pure love,” Jeanne Guyon seeks to identify with Teresa of Avila, a serious misunderstanding has occurred. “Not being able to find in [myself] anything that can be named.…”³² You well know, Maître, as a declared admirer of Spiritual Torrents, that Jeanne’s encounter with nothing failed to stem her outpourings on the vicissitudes of her sensory ego. The saint of the Counter-Reformation, for her part, was equally conversant with the psychological maze of earthly affections, their frustrations and glories, somatic consequences, narcissistic or depressive recesses, and manic excitements — all taking turns to cram or vacate the psyche of Madame Guyon, according to her torrential text. The main difference between the two women was that Teresa’s “abandonment” of herself to the infantile was merely a transition, to be elucidated and then situated in the co-presence of emptiness and infinity.

With La Madre we find none of the apotheosis of “Nothingness” so central to Guyon’s approach, which betrays an obvious narcissistic regression to the infant’s impotence / omnipotence binomial. Teresa would never say, “I suffer as gaily as a child.” She would never offer an apology of the “abjection” that advocates “pollution” and presupposes the abolition of sin by the quietists. Where Jeanne Guyon annihilates herself in an Other reduced to an unnameable Nothing — symmetrical counterpart of the mercilessly judgmental paternal divinity — Teresa exults at being the infinitesimal presence of the Other, an atom forming part of infinite Love itself: the infinitely present, rewarding Love that embraces her viscerally (entrañarse)³³ and allows itself to be checkmated, no less, in a game she plays to infinity and with energy to match.

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-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.

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 insists 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.

I am overwhelmed by tiredness, I am surrounded by terror, and rest escapes me. I have just reread at leisure these memoires that I wrote in haste, and I have realized that, though it was utterly unintentional, I had in each line shown myself to be as unhappy as I really was, but also much nicer than I really am. Could it be that we believe men to be less sensitive to the depiction of our suffering than to the image of our charms, and do we hope that it is much easier to seduce them than it is to touch their hearts? I do not know them well enough and I have not studied myself enough to know the answer. But if the Marquis, who is credited with being a man of exquisite taste, were to persuade himself that I am appealing not to his charity but to his lust, what would he think of me? This thought worries me. In fact he would be quite wrong to attribute to me personally an impulse that is characteristic of all women. I am a woman, perhaps a little flirtatious for all I know. But it is natural and unaffected.³⁶

Paul lifts his head and looks at me.

“Have you any idea what she means?”

I don’t respond, that’s my role.

“A natural, unaffected woman? What’s that?”

Silence from me again.

“‘A woman dominated by hysteria experiences something infernal or divine.’ What do you make of that, Sylvia? Shall I go on? ‘Saint Teresa has said of devils, How luckless they are! They do not love.’”³⁷ Paul carries on reading out his latest discoveries in the Pléiade edition of Diderot.

Now I’m in a fix. I can’t tell him about the conviction I have lately reached, which is that devils are inseparable from love, and that love, that is, God, goes hand in hand with its best enemy, the demonic, and that it’s impossible to free oneself from demons without freeing oneself from God, and hence from love. This doesn’t mean we must, or even can, eradicate love, whether diabolical or divine; that would be to castrate ourselves of our inner being and turn us away from the exterior world; it would deprive us of discovering, acting, wandering, journeying through the self. No, it means that it is possible to move through love indefinitely, infinitely, to make of love one’s infinity-point. An eclipse, a bedazzlement. Teresa, again. A serenity. Very hard to put into words. I try saying something:

“There’s no better Catholic than the devil.”

My allusion to Baudelaire falls flat, as expected.³⁸ But that’s also a part of my role: to plant a seed for later, or never.

Paul’s not up to it yet. All of a sudden he’s not interested in me anymore. He carefully places the book on my desk and saunters off with an air of insouciance, crooning: “Depoooosuit…” He’s got perfect pitch, that boy! Suffering from psychomotor disharmony (another definition from his compensated autistic file), he needs love to screen his anxieties. He’s got to think of himself as a lady-killer, he has to charm the girls, as many girls as possible, in hopes of finding the very best, though even if he found her he’d keep on looking. He dreams about the idea, he plays on it, a lot; he very seldom tries it out. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day he took off from the MPH in pursuit of love and Love in an Indian ashram, a Jerusalem synagogue, a Roman church, a Venetian back street, a Chinese pagoda, why not? I wouldn’t be the one to stop him.

I wouldn’t stop anybody who felt that kind of need. Which includes each and every one of us when we feel excluded, forsaken, penniless, disabled, forgotten, erased, when we send the past to hell, or make a clean sweep of it, when we are sick of the nothingness of Nothingness…

Even me, I still dream of love, at my age! Not very often, of course, and only for a laugh.

And not today.

Today, writing to you, Mister Philosopher, after saying goodbye to Teresa, my love, I am faithless and lawless. Utterly available. Ready to listen to Paul with his perfect pitch, to Élise with her lavender flowers, and to all the rest. Ready to disappear into their sorrows and joys. A therapy, that’s what love is. Freud stretched it out on the couch, not without reading you first, and I’m continuing the experiment. God is Love, and we listen to Him. A different kind of humanity began to take shape with and after you, Mister Philosopher, as it did with and after my Teresa. Checkmate to God, to Love? For sure, but not right now. Otherwise, hello Apocalypse, Ground Zero, reproductive cloning, synthetic wombs, the works! Please, not that. I too stretch Love out and operate on it, and I do so inside myself as well, of course. Delicately, laughingly, yes, and starting over, playing it out in that eternal and infinite recurrence. I try. “And will we checkmate this divine King?” “¿Daremos mate a ese rey divino?” We’d be wrong to think “it was enough to know the pieces.” But this King (Love, in other words) “doesn’t give Himself but to those who give themselves entirely to Him.” “Pensó bastaba conocer las piezas para dar mate, y es imposible, que no se da este Rey sino a quien se le da del todo.”³⁹

We are not done rereading Teresa, are we, Mister Philosopher? If I have moved you to meditate afresh upon those dwelling places I recently revisited, I will have accomplished what I set out to do.

Yours in respectful complicity,

Sylvia Leclercq