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

Chapter 25. THE MYSTIC AND THE JESTER

From: juan.ramirez@free.ac.uk

To: sylvia.leclercq@FMP.fr

Subject: Miguel and Teresa

Monday, November 1

Dear Sylvia,

No news from you for ages, what’s up? Indian summer, lazing about on the warm sands of the Île de Ré? It’s All Saints, who’d have thought it, no computer and no Internet! Unless that “civil war” in your Parisian banlieues has pitched you back into politics! Are you giving up on the microcosm of dreamy introspection? I wouldn’t believe that even if I saw it; I expect you’re still galloping along with your flatmate, with no time to think about old Juan. So, to remind you who I am, I’m attaching a few articles by yours truly and other top folks as you asked for when you were pretending to consult me about your peregrinations in the land of my forefathers and through the Golden Age. You may not have time to read the whole of this lengthy epistle I’ve been pondering for a while now and which I’m just putting down as it comes, for your own good and mine — a kind of rough draft for a future article, if that’s okay.

Contradicting what I said under the ramparts of Avila, I don’t actually think Cervantes is as remote from the passions of your saint as I figured, as the unrepentant aesthete you take me for. You’ve sown a doubt — but I’m not convinced, so don’t crow too soon. Your Teresa may well pave the way for baroque art, but she’s very far from the comedy that lies at the heart of humanism as I imagine it, when I’m playing at thinking the future is before us, provided we look behind us properly. Fasten your seatbelt!

Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills — I’ll stick to the windmills for now, not to bore you with other images from that fabulous novel I’ve been living in for years as you know — that crazy battle waged by the old hidalgo is more, I think, than a satire on the literature of chivalry, whose obsolete rituals and pretensions to glory seemed comical to Renaissance types in 1605, the year Cervantes’s book was published. Teresa was about thirty years older than the great novelist (he was nearer the age of Jerome Gratian, alias Eliseus, alias Pablo, alias Paul, and so on — the darling father-cum-son your Madre was so madly in love with and you find so amusing!). Well, Cervantes was around for her beatification in 1614, two years before he died; one day I plan to comb through the work of this unbelieving writer for any traces of Teresa’s presence I might have missed. It’s a future piece of research, no hurry. For the moment, here goes with what I think brings your mystic weirdly into contact with my jester.

Knightly romances are not the only, or even the real, target here. The sailor-novelist was attacking delusion itself. I mean, look: he fights in Lepanto, Corfu, Naples, and Tunis; then, thrown into jail by Barbary corsairs, he makes four escape attempts before being ransomed from Hassan Pasha by the Trinitarians, and after that he goes as Philip II’s envoy to Oran. He’s even more of a vagabond than Teresa, isn’t he, but then he’s a man and he’s young, that counts for a lot, plus he’s closer to us in time. Between bouts of piracy and diplomacy he pens a kind of novella in the courtly tradition with a decently perverse twist, La Galatea. And a handful of comedies. He also commits a few minor swindles that get him excommunicated by the vicar-general of Seville; fathers a child out of wedlock, Isabel; and is claimed as a husband by Catalina de Salazar, in a transfer of assets she made out in favor of her brother. The author of Don Quijote ends up taking vows as a tertiary friar in the order of Saint Francis. You have to admit, my elusive Miguel led a rather more eventful life than your Teresa, for all that she made a picaresque foundress and a downright offbeat lover!

What compelled her was the Other. What intrigued him was delusion. In Spanish, maravilla means both marvel and miracle, the fantastic and the divine — putting us right into the postmedieval transition, when the Church set out to replace the obscurantism of pagan myths and fairy tales with the bright light of faith. Faith versus superstition. Teresa explores the love of the Other in a way that makes her immortal for every lover on earth, and especially for those who profess the Tridentine Catholic religion, as you point out. Miguel, on the other hand, puts delusion center stage and laughs at it, which doesn’t mean he abolishes delusion, just that he makes it endearing.

Delusion is the one thing that makes him act, write, and laugh throughout his life as a writer and adventurer. Inside and outside delusion, inside and outside the deluded, the one inseparable from the other, no fixed position, no “message,” always on the alert. See what I’m getting at? Next.

Over and above the values and positions of chivalry, and at the armored heart of the Man of the Mancha’s inflated nuttiness, which provokes sarcasm and pity, Cervantes the writer simultaneously, in a single movement, admires and pillories the ardor of human beings in search of an ideal. He’s tickled by believers: the earnest knight with his faith in Dulcinea and his own sacred destiny, sure, but also the whole of Christian, knightly Europe with its faith in the values of the Christ-centered Middle Ages, values that still persist today. Yes, I’m afraid that when you look for “values,” those are all you’ll find, which may be a shame, but there we are.

Query: Do the windmills only represent the summits of the courtly literature which, after Lancelot and Amadis of Gaul, fired the amorous imaginary of the Christian world in the days of Teresa of Avila and Miguel de Cervantes?

For starters, Don Quixote, what a name! Quijote — Quijada — Quesada.* [*Some of the names Cervantes advances for his hero at the opening of the book. — Trans.] You know that quijada means “jawbone”? Maybe the don is a derisory replica of the great Charles V, whose legendarily prognathous mandible prevented his upper and lower teeth from meeting, so that his speech was rather garbled. How do you like Don Quixote as a jawbone that pokes fun at royal greed, the devouring greed that’s as ludicrous as he is, in both appearance and essence?

Quesada, which sounds a bit like quijada, means cheese tart. Don’t tell me, you think I’ve gone too far this time with my culinary obsessions! Well you’re wrong. Contrary to what some of my colleagues think, Dulcinea’s suitor was not a “knight of the sad table.” Not a bit, and I can prove it! “Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lentejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos…”¹ In English it goes, “An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income.” You see? The King of France’s saupiquet was stuffed with gammon, truffles, and calves’ sweetbreads, indeed, but not everyone lived in Versailles. To return to my cheese tart. This quesada smells quaintly of the country. It sends my lovelorn knight, together with anyone else who claims parentage with the quijote (here a derivative of the French cuissot, meaning thigh-piece, part of the protective armor worn by God’s intrepid pilgrims) back to the more primary pleasures of the palate, to prosaic reality.

I recap by riffing on the name: What is Don Quixote, an emblem of holy war or a cheese tart — a custard pie, if you like? A hybrid, invented composite, does he exist to any greater degree than the windmills he tilts at? Or are those windmills imaginary enemies fueling the paranoia, sorry, the enthusiasm of the potential warrior who slumbers in all of us since time immemorial, the soldier of unavoidably holy wars during the sixteenth, seventeenth, or twenty-first centuries? — Not forgetting Toumaï!* [*Name given to specimen of a new possible human ancestor whose skull was found in Chad in 2002.—Trans.]

Beyond his satire on the madness surrounding rank and status, Cervantes has it in for the act of faith in itself, and that includes being madly in love. Don Quixote exposes the absurd underside of human passion, the jester side of the saints, if you will. Teresa isn’t unaware of this facet: it comes out now and then in her laughter and the farcical scrapes she gets into as a traveling founder. But she needed it to remain a secret, stowed away by His Majesty in the very cellars of the interior castle.

Less than half a century after the death of your Discalced Carmelite, along comes Don Quixote, who has mystical Spain splitting its sides over the pathetic amours of crazed knights-errant, the very love that fired the simple hearts and fathomless transports of John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila. Mystical Spain is tangled up body and soul in the sails of the windmills — or to take another great scene from the novel, it rolls on the ground with laughter, still flapping its powerful wings: wings of windmills, wings of angels and conquests, resilient, ridiculous engines.

On our last journey in the footsteps of the saint, we were both very struck by the wind turbines on the hills around Avila, their slow rotation churning the memory of Castile as much as anything. I agree with you about the paradoxical complicity between the mystic and the jester. As explorers of love, the one proceeding in deadly earnest, the other mockingly, they’re poles apart, for sure. But both of them construct and dismantle our machines for producing fantasies, passions, and beliefs. Adventures and high winds.

That laughable hidalgo, “of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman,” whose “brains got so dry that he lost his wits”—isn’t he unmistakably a man in search of absolute love? He is sold to us as a saint, but in pathetic mode, having turned up fifty years too late for waxing earnest about the Beyond and about oneself. He has a go, all the same. And we’re still having a go today, aren’t we?

When Teresa felt the need of someone or something, she would turn to the Master. Don Quixote, on the other hand, “came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with.” His lady would be a version of himself, the febrile male, for in resolving to christen this imaginary damsel “Dulcinea del Toboso,” our literary knight was selecting “a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him.” This game of mirrors isn’t completely alien to Teresa’s erotic logic, is it, when she’s communing with His Voice? With or without the capital letter, it’s the same. And the deconsecrated love affairs of the moderns, as you’re in a position to know, partake of the same beliefs and credences that magnetized Teresa toward her Father and those spiritual fathers…

By that point, who cares if the Quixotic visor is made of pasteboard! Our visionary was able to turn a swineherd driving his pigs through the stubble into a dwarf sounding a horn to herald his arrival at the next castle. And who cares if Jesus is not really walking by the Carmelite’s side? She enjoys him deep in her guts, skewered by the dart of the heavenly lad who appears in her dream. The force of desire is enough to transform an inn and its host into a great fortress commanded by a splendid lord, girls of easy virtue into noble maidens, and a laborer on an ass equipped with a saddlebag and a bota of wine (one can’t imagine Don Quixote without Sancho Panza!) into a faithful squire.

The novelist and the nun seem to be saying the same thing: that the love-fevered imagination must never, God forbid, be asked for evidence! You have to understand that in these misty regions of human truth, things are neither demonstrated nor disproved, they are imagined.

“If I were to show her to you,” says Don Quixote to those who doubt the beauty, not to say the existence, of his Dulcinea as others doubted the existence of His Majesty, “what merit would you have in confessing a truth so manifest? The essential point is that without seeing her you must believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend it; else ye have to do with me in battle, ill-conditioned, arrogant rabble that ye are.”

A few years ago, in a paper I e-mailed to you, I wrote that Cervantes the humanist was a committed debunker of religious faith, practically opening the door to unbelief. But now, after rereading him with Teresa in mind, I think it’s more complex. The normally sardonic Miguel smiles with compassion at the ineluctable, indefectible passion of faith. This passion makes him laugh, because he shares it. He manages to detach himself long enough to write, but he doesn’t rid himself of it. This way of being inside and outside at once makes him, and us, laugh louder. What else is one to do, when belief — like unbelief — is impossible, and sometimes deadly? Let’s write, let’s laugh.

Teresa, as you see it, had already taken that road. We’ll keep this from the worshippers who sanctify her and will go on doing so for ever and ever, why spoil their fun? But it’s good to know it between ourselves and to pass the word to a few other people who would never read her unless we pushed them. Conversely, they might see Cervantes in a new light if they read him along with Teresa’s works.

Decades before Cervantes and the don, Teresa knew that her visions were not perceived by the eyes but by the whole body before crystallizing them into “intellectual visions.” I took in what you told me in the hired car. Basically, while immersed in her carnal fantasies, she never stops wondering whether it’s a state of grace or a state of sin to believe that her body has merged with the Trinity, that our Lord has entered the garden of her soul, that the Other dwells within her, that she is penetrated by Him, and infinite, like Him. And the more she gives voice to these doubts that enrapture and terrify her and sometimes make her laugh, the more of a novelist she becomes. The more of a novelist she is, the better she founds. The better she founds, the more questions of this kind she asks herself.

What’s different with Cervantes? In his case, he exits the interior castle and observes it from outside, not abandoning the grounds altogether. “I chuckle at that poor believer of a Quixote, who is what I am when I’m not writing,” the diplomat-pirate seems to say. Standing at the intersection between the gullible hidalgo and the unbelieving boors who fancy themselves as modern, Cervantes mocks the whole lot of them: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and himself.

Teresa enjoys and suffers in the incarnation of her fantasies, in her raptus, whether illnesses or foundations, and pushes on in writing, further and further. If she’s readier to laugh than most other saints, with her it’s the laughter of a naughty girl, who giggles at La Madre swooning over her Husband like the little brat she remains to the end. Teresa is also a great writer, of course, and she senses it, but that matters less to her than her pleasure-pain in the Other and their common works on earth, pleasure-pain in the foundations of His Majesty, of the Third Person incorporated within her. La Madre likes to think that she’s a vehicle for the reason of the Other, and only wakes up intermittently to the fact that she is an unreasoning confabulator. And whenever she allows herself that grotesque insight, she turns into a precursor of — Cervantes! Do you follow me?

Descartes was born in 1596, when Teresa had been in the grave for fourteen years. It would be Cervantes’s irony that carried out, and with what elegance, the instruction the Carmelite liked to give her sisters, though she never included it in the authorized copy of The Way of Perfection, because its brutality probably made her laugh with fear, the instruction that’s one of your favorite quotes: “Play chess, Sisters, you could checkmate God!”

You see, I’m feeling provocative, I’m being blasphemous, just hope I’m not mutilating the complexity of your saint, as if she hadn’t been pruned enough already by a finger here, an arm there, courtesy of the relic hounds, the “faithful” who really take love to catastrophic extremes…I’ll stop, with apologies for such a long message. In London it’s freezing cold, these luminous chrysanthemums won’t warm me up, I do miss our Mexican Day of the Dead, a much more Cervantesque occasion.

I miss you. Hugs to Andrew.

Later,

Juan

From: sylvia.leclercq@FMP.fr

To: juan.ramirez@free.ac.uk

Subject: Re: Miguel and Teresa

Dear master-expert in the Golden Age,

I miss you too, and you were right. Neither the Indian summer nor the civil war are enough (so far) to unseat me from my gallop with Teresa. And what you wrote really hit home with me, as ever. After a quick jog through the Luxembourg Gardens, to wash my saint and the arsonist youngsters out of me for a moment, I wanted to pick up without breaking stride but can’t quite manage it, you see, so my reply will be leisurely and won’t resist the pleasure of contradicting you; you know how I am.

Cervantes describes delusionism, or the illusory part of faith, in other words, Love. I’m with you there, he is one of the greats who opened the shutters of the European and universal soul, letting fresh air into the dank cellars of their neuroses.

But — there’s always a but — do you really think idealism is the same thing as faith? I’m asking that question of myself, as well as you. A colleague of mine, Dr. Barbier, claims that there are three kinds of idealism: dynamic, delusionistic, and fundamentalist.

Teresa is undoubtedly a species of fundamentalist when she imposes her vicious mortifications on herself and the rest of the reformed Carmel. It’s too high-minded and hence cruel, a familiar pattern. It’s hard to figure out, but I’m going to try. She’s certainly a sadomasochist, although with a big dose of humor! She becomes a “fundamentalist” as a matter of “historical necessity,” as you put it with your knowledge of the Inquisition period, and with a view to bringing me down to earth! Let’s assume that’s the case. She is obliged to harden her stance against slackness (that of the ruling classes battening on the spoils of conquest, that of the decadent religious orders, that of the warmongers stirring up hostility to the Marranos, and more — thanks for the relevant attachments), but she also seeks to exalt the supernatural in opposition to the overexclusive asceticism of other groups (Lutheran rigor, for example). Basically, she wants to modernize the Church without severing it from its traditional sources and popular audiences.

La Madre is just as plainly a delusionist. She would be incapable of Cervantes’s sardonic distance when mocking Don Quixote’s fancies.² She dreams of becoming one with her fantasies, turning body and soul into the Other she lacks, incarnating their fusion — and standing back at times with the intromission of a little water here, a scrap of Dutch linen there. Now for the thousand-dollar question: Can this embodied fantasy really be termed a “delusion,” when it is experienced as a potentially lethal reality (as when Teresa imagines that God condemns her desires, or when she somatizes her guilt until falling into a coma)? And the term seems even more far-fetched when “delusion” is experienced as a life-giving reality (as when her nuptials with the Lord hoist her into physical and spiritual bliss). Here, words become things and ideas grow into genuine forces: we are closer to Judge Schreber than to Madame Bovary. And yet the pragmatic advantages of this real delusionism — note the paradox — could appear negligible or absent if they merely shut Teresa into a dungeon of narcissistic megalomania, or, worse, into masochistic mortification. Although, even then, the experience would be worthwhile for the sake of the summits Teresa reaches and reports on. Many others have sought such thrills to enliven the dull world, after all, in a different way but following a similar logic of extremes: from Sade to Mishima, with God or without Him, as a Christian, a Samurai, or an atheist.

It is the dynamism of Teresa the delusionist that astounds me as a modern, if that’s what I am. Not losing sight of Cervantes, let me play (just provisionally, stepping into the inviting dance of your message) the advocate of delusion, Teresa-style, against the jesting of the novelist. What’s more, I think the energy of her prayer actually challenges the novelist’s laughter, not to say refers him back to his own infantile facility.

It’s because I am a delusionist, in the sense of assuming my delusions, that I don’t tilt against windmills but instead make foundations: What do you say to that, Miguel? Don’t you think Teresa might have said that to Cervantes, had she lived until 1605? And if I’d been present at their encounter, I’d have asked another question: Is it possible to act without being a Quixote? Including one who is self-aware when combining windmills with the spirit of enterprise? It isn’t? Then what’s the difference between the sterile delusionism of a knight-errant lost in the Renaissance, and the genuine, dynamic delusionism of a founding Mother? Who draws the line between them, the Church? The commission that decides on the canonization of saints? The judgment of history? The Nobel Prize committee? The League of Human Rights? Or does the power of decision over where “madness” stops and “genius” begins come down to that elucidation of the longing to believe known as “writing,” “analysis,” or whatever you want to call it? It’s a process that leads to works, and sometimes to action.

My dear Juan, let me sum up my answer in brutally concise fashion, hoping that one day I’ll be able to develop it further, given the courage and the time. Teresa turned the embodied fantasy of the ideal Father, that brought her both joy and pain, into self-knowledge; into a journey, argued in writing, through her “interior dwelling places.” She managed to extract what is real about the fantasy that “the Ideal exists”—i.e., its foundational component, indispensable to the constitution of the human psyche. Yes, that’s it, I’m talking about the inner life of our contemporaries, about you and me, about humankind as it emerged from the last Ice Age and progressed through a civilizing process that climaxed with the cult of the dead, the dead Father, his authority and his love, in short, the fantasy of the Beyond. Now, this psyche and this humanity, ours, are in crisis, increasingly sapped and enervated, clones or no clones, take a look at American Idol if you don’t believe me; or else they are exploding in the night courtesy of the arsonists in our suburbs and elsewhere. As for so-called atheists like me, we are just as susceptible to other, mostly violent, delusions, if you care to examine our intellectual pretensions or the latest trendy cop series more closely…Before different psychical lives or different humans arrive to populate this globalized earth, let’s try, at least, to understand the metamorphoses undergone over the centuries by a believing humanity and the experience of faith.

Teresa in particular did not succeed in flipping the fantasy that “the Ideal exists” into a caustic guffaw at the very notion of idealization, as Cervantes did, and relatively few others, for instance Voltaire and Nietszche, in their way. But she did convert her belief into a relentless investigation of the recesses of the soul capable of idealizing, or of loving, if you prefer. That was (past tense) capable of idealizing and loving?

Cervantes blew faith and love to smithereens of derision, not abolishing them, you’re right, but regaling humans with the gift of disabused pleasure. Whereas Teresa uses faith and love in order to recondition the belief- and love-producing machine. She ventures as far as possible along the route that beckons the person who doesn’t give up on believing, the person who talks as a way of sharing, and who loves in order to act. With all the benefits and all the follies involved in this expectant belief, and while describing it with disturbing, seductive subtlety.

But Cervantes’s attitude won out in the end, didn’t it? Look around! What’s left of that universe of faith and love, what’s left of the windmills? Chimeras, TV soap operas for avid women and their partners. Or God’s madmen, the suicide bombers who pretend not to realize that He (the Almighty, the Master, the One and Only, the True, the Beyond) has mutated into pure spectacle, and twist their alleged faith into murderous nihilism. Dogmatic, moralistic, terrifying and terrified, or just as often insubstantial, drunk on images, there they are, with no knowledge of Teresa, Cervantes, or any of a few others, bent on deleting our memories, too.

Still, dare I suggest those dangerous maniacs of the virtual Absolute might not really be so scary? Cervantes’s laughter will get the better of them. Their fundamentalist rage would be defused if they just read him instead of burning flags, embassies, and Danish cartoons. And he could detoxify the rest. I know, there’s a long way to go — fanatics are no good at reading, or laughing, and the inner halls of my nuanced Teresa would be way above their heads. What would it take? Nobody knows, not even me. Missionaries? Believers? Educators? Committed people opening up spaces for reading and writing? People daring to analyze the “fundament,” to renew it? Maybe some of that will happen eventually.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for Teresa to be dusted off as a model for the third millennium. I’m only saying that she encourages us to think again about the place of ideal Love in the soul — or if you prefer the psyche — of the talking beasts we are. She invites us to open up the interior castle of our need to believe, death-dealing and lifesaving at once. Can we manage without such a place? And who’s “we”? Stammering humanoids with embryonic psyches, currently unable to be contained by any family, tribal, or ideological refuge whatsoever. We’re all suffering from a disease of the ideal, all nihilists. It’s because this species of humanoid surrounds us with waves of globalized fanaticism, or is lying in wait for us inside, that I’m so beguiled by Teresa’s story. And that’s why I persist in my efforts to decipher her embrace of the Other.

So there’s my profession of faith signed and sealed, you asked for it!

Otherwise, everything’s fine. The MPH keeps me busy, the sun is shining, and Andrew sends his love. He’s in Paris, sitting right here, listening to news bulletins about cars ablaze in the suburbs and bunches of men hollering about the cartoons of the Prophet. He says to tell you that Paris, far more than New York, is the place to write about whatever’s wrong. Will you come over and see us some weekend soon?

Looking forward to it, with lots of love,

Sylvia

Chapter 26. FATHER IS BEATEN TO DEATH

“I love because I am loved, therefore I am”: that seems to be your credo, Teresa, my love, but this solar face of your rapture is dependent on a bizarre figure: the man who loves you and whom you love is both suffering son and suffering father, scourged and put to death before resuscitating. As you will have guessed, my dialogue with you is also a dialogue with Freud: the founder of psychoanalysis believed that the “beaten child” we are in fantasy can (sometimes) resort to the paradoxical solution (as in your case) of another fantasy: a son-father is put to death.¹ Is this not the basis of Christianity? Or one of its bases, at the very least, in my atheistic eyes! I will here insert a parenthesis in the story of my cohabitation with Teresa, addressed to my psychology colleagues, as well as to believers who might be interested to see how their experience can be approached from the outside. I shall inquire into the fantasy of the “father beaten to death,” arguing that it is a cornerstone of Christian faith, and I shall do so via Freud’s text upon that other fantasy: “A Child Is Being Beaten.”

A Coptic manuscript, translated from the Greek in the third or fourth century and exhumed during the 1970s, appeared in National Geographic in April 2006. Its gist was that Judas did not “betray” Jesus so much as “fulfill” the latter’s design, which was to be put to death. Thus the image of the bad disciple, which had fueled Christian anti-Semitism for two thousand years, was shattered. The analyst, for her part, has no need of this kind of “evidence” to know that the execution of Christ was not an unfortunate accident (due to some betrayal or some internecine quarrel in Judaism, etc.), let alone a Gnostic revival of the Platonic soul (which must discard the body in order to ascend to the idea of Goodness and Beauty). At the intersection of “A Child Is Being Beaten” with Totem and Taboo, and in light of what Freud called “the desire of the father,” of sadomasochism and its sublimation, it seems to me that the scenario of the “father beaten to death” expresses a logical necessity in the Christian construction of the subject of desire.² Indeed, the Passion displaces upon the son-father the guilt and pain inflicted on us by the prohibition of incest and by abandonment (it is not me but him who is punished, who undergoes the passion of pain); it cannot be otherwise, if love of and for the father is finally to be authorized in a “reconciliation” wrought by “infinite intellectual love,” by sublimation.

Postulating the unconscious existence of primal fantasies (Urfantasien) derived either from the witnessing of certain events or from a “pre-historic truth” going back to the “earliest times of the human family,” Freud evokes the “primal scene,” “castration,” and “seduction.” Introduced in the same breath, the fantasy of the beaten child seems to occupy a specially privileged place among these primal fantasies, which are set to structure the psychoanalytic reading of desire and the range of sexual scenarios in which each person’s specific eroticism may be deployed. Halfway between the primal and the individual, between myth and poetry, “a child is beaten” constitutes the dawn of individuation — the decisive moment when the subject begins to sketch out his or her sexual choice and speaking identity in the ternary structure of kinship. Whether male or female, excluded from the primal scene, “I” seek my place between father and mother, both to mark my difference from them and to enter into bonds that are the inseparable ties of love and speech, erotic and signifying.³

It was Christianity’s genius to appropriate this fantasy (unwittingly, needless to say) in order to recast it and proclaim it urbi et orbi in the shocking, unbearable, and ultimately liberating — despite its ambiguities — form of Christ’s Passion. Only thus can the Man of Suffering, beaten to death, abandoned by his Father, reach the Father, and resurrect.

Jesus is human, like me, says the believer (and a fortiori Teresa). He is a brother beaten to death before coming back to life. But this human is also a god, the only God. After the Last Supper and before the Passion, the man who calls himself the Son of God tells Thomas: “If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also; and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.” He tells Philip: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father…Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?”⁴ Since Jesus is consubstantial with the Father in the knot of the Trinity — Teresa leans heavily on this point — Jesus is also a beaten father.

The outrageous idea of the violent killing of a Father, a martyred God, is repulsive to many rebels against Christianity, the most inspired being Friedrich Nietzsche. To abase God the Father to the level of a Man of Suffering could only, for him, produce a slave religion, fit for weaklings and infrahumans.⁵ How wrong he was! Teresa does not separate the Father from the Son; the praying woman likes to feel that she receives into her soul, by means of Communion, both Christ and his Father, thanks to Jesus’s sacrifice: “How pleasing to the Father this offering of his Son is, because He delights and rejoices with Him here — let us say — on earth.”⁶ “How did the Son take on human flesh and not the Father or the Holy Spirit?” she wonders, struggling with the idea that the three Persons are really “separate.” She goes on, archly: “This I haven’t understood. The theologians know.”⁷ I don’t mean to shock you, Teresa, my love, but Freud’s audacity is what encouraged me, Sylvia Leclercq, to detect in this divinized suffering a gigantic defensive scaffolding against the surfeit of desire and a hefty dose of sadism. It seems to me that the paschal scenario satiates desire and violence, but by turning these in every direction to play with them, defuse them,…and appease them.

The better to convince you, I must go back to childhood, it’s an occupational deformation of mine! The narrative of “A Child Is Being Beaten” opens with a scene in which I see someone being beaten. I don’t know who it is, but it’s not me, it’s him — someone else. The narrative progresses through three phases:

“Daddy loves only me,” says the little girl or little boy. “He cannot love anybody else, because whoever he is beating, it is somebody else.” I, the author of this fantasy, am not being beaten. I am only a budding sadistic voyeur. Why? Because my desire for Daddy is so great, I have to repress it into guilt. And so “this early blossoming is nipped by the frost,” as the Viennese doctor put it, in such a way that precocious genital arousal undergoes a regressive debasement to the lower level of orality, anality, or onanism, and becomes crystallized in the pleasure of whipping-punishment…displaced onto the anal zone of another. Thus the sadistic pleasure in the spanking meted out by Daddy to another in fact curbs my own genital excitement and guilt toward the all-powerful father I desire.

Note that at this stage of the script, the fantasizing child is not itself being abused, and the beaten “object” remains as yet indeterminate. The fantasizing subject is dominated by the excitement of its voyeurism alone, which arose as a bulwark against its genital organization. This voyeurism is “not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic,” Freud hazards cautiously, “but yet the stuff from which both will later come.” That is to say, voyeurism contains genital excitement and sadism in embryo. We will remember this when we encounter a believer prostrate in unnameable veneration of his ill-treated God, his speechless contemplation less a matter of decorous discretion than of shameful relish.

The scenario changes in the second phase of the fantasy. “Daddy does not love me: he is beating me,” says the little boy or little girl; but this masochistic inversion does not mean the same to both sexes.

To the boy, “Daddy is beating me” signifies that he is guarding against his passive desire to be loved by his father, as well as against latent homosexuality, before attempting to invert this passivity and feminization and turn them into weapons against the father, waging an oedipal war that launches him on the high road to male emancipation. Unless the boy enjoys masochism, in which case he changes the sex of the punisher: “Daddy loves me, and so the person beating me can only be a woman, it’s Mom! She’s the one I have to separate from, and yet it’s her place I want to take beside Daddy. Hateful Mom, that evil, desirable witch, she’ll never stop taking it out on me!” That’s how the script reads for a man who feels the thrill Sacher-Masoch described under the lash of a Venus in furs.⁸

But in girls like you, Teresa, matters are more warped still. The defensive inversion of potentially sadistic voyeurism (“A child is being beaten, I don’t know who, but it’s not me”) into masochism (“I am being beaten”) remains unconscious. Because you don’t experience this inversion as a punishment alone; it also implies the “secondary erotization” of the pregenital zones, as the same Viennese doctor explained; a regressive substitute for genital satisfaction. Sure enough, in the fantasy “A Child Is Being Beaten,” that satisfaction is discharged in masturbation. And since this intense, victimized, and self-focused eroticism is as much a source of guilt as a yearning to be loved, it too will be repressed into the unconscious. That’s how the permanence of unconscious female masochism becomes instilled, on top of the passivity expected of women and drummed into them by traditional cultures.

Finally the second phase of the fantasy is inverted in its turn, still as an effect of repression, and safeguarding the little girl’s masochism even more effectively, the better to impress it into the unconscious. “It’s not me who Father is beating, it’s a boy,” runs the formula for the third and last defensive step. It’s not me, and not a woman at all, it’s a man who undergoes the physical action of the Great Other! This has the effect of excluding the little girl from the erotic scene and, moreover, from any “scene” at all: social, political, cultural, and the rest.

Let us attempt to understand the stages of this progression. The little girl (and the woman) shields herself from her incestuous love for the father (phase 1: “He loves me”) and from her own masochism (phase 2: “He is beating me”) by projecting them in inverted form onto another, preferably of the same sex as the coveted paternal object (phase 3: “He is beating a boy”). How does this delegation of female desire onto another object of the same sex or the other sex take place, to safeguard her from being a subject of desire? How does this inverted delegation of desire come about, when it is not a repression properly speaking, but what I call an introjection of paternal attachment, of perversion (père-version)?

Unlike the boy, who concentrates the desires of the entire lineage and posits himself as a fairly happy Narcisssus from the moment of the primal scream (why has it been forgotten that Narcissus, in the eponymous myth, is a young man? Why is the “second sex” generally regarded as more narcissistic?), the girl, from earliest childhood, always compares herself to someone else. A woman exists only as a function of this other, who is, in the first instance, the mother. As I have noticed with my female analysands, little girls have their first “oedipal complex” toward their mother: they turn the mother into this premature otherness, this sensible, preverbal presence, this pole of simultaneous attraction and adversity they can never stop comparing themselves to, measuring up to, separating from.⁹ You or me? That’s the little girl’s initial question, for she is incapable of setting herself up as a self-complacent Narcissus, replete with his own image. She tries to put herself “out of bounds,” to safeguard herself from the unsettling excitement running through her. She defends herself from her passion — first incestuous, then masochistic — by focusing it on another: “He doesn’t love you,” she says, “because he is beating you.” Who is that “you,” that abused second person who shields my little-girl desire, guilty as I am of loving and being loved?

Every little girl, says Freud, has an irrevocable childhood memory of the way little boys are the ones who are given the rod. In his interpretation, the repression that succeeds desire inverts the father’s love into the punishment of another person who is the object of the girl’s jealous hatred. The prototype of this other beaten person can only be the mother, enabling a due humiliation of the little girl’s rival, even in the best patriarchal families. In Teresa’s family, the dignified, handsome Beatriz de Ahumada — prematurely ravaged by continual pregnancies and rapidly succumbing to sickness — could easily have been regarded as a “beaten woman.”

And yet the little girl’s ambivalent love for her mother persists in protecting the envied matron and seeks out other targets to deflect the beating from the loved/hated maternal object. In the girl’s fantasy, other children take the place of the abused rival, drawing on the parents’ libidinal transference to her siblings. Why this displacement, this masquerade?

Freud points to everyday scenes children witness at home or at school. When a child is punished, he is viewed by the others (inevitably in competition with him) as having forfeited the father’s love, leaving the father available for the not-beaten, unscathed onlookers or voyeurs; or more precisely, for the unscathed voyeuse!

But Freud goes further. He suggests that it is the guilt inherent in the repression of the voyeur’s desire that creates the necessity of punishment, irrespective of whether scenes of punishment have been observed. His inquiry now goes deeper, asking what is the source of that guilt-inducing repression of love felt for and returned by the father, which peaks in fantasies of punishment, of whippings?

There can only be one answer: this repression, whose violence depends partly on personal factors (such as the premature development of genitality in some children between the ages of two and six, or the excessive sensitivity and vigor of the sexual drive in others), partly on the nature of incestuous currents within the family, is simply the reiteration of the incest repression that underlies human history and is prescribed by it. As the founding element of the culture that distinguishes our species, the repression of incest necessarily and universally engenders guilt and its corollary, masochism. In specific circumstances, however — such as a highly strung family background and the exceptional sensibilities of someone out of the ordinary (like you, Teresa) — this prehistoric guilt entails a marked regression to earlier stages of psychical development, before the development of genitality: to the oral/anal level (spanking), to onanistic relief, or to the variations on punishment-whipping that treat the whole body as an erogenous zone.

All this resonates with us, doesn’t it? But I follow you, Teresa, my love, when I say there may be “something” wanting in Freud’s neat explanation; something that would account for your manner of jouissance, side by side with your “guilt” and your worship of the “Tortured Man.” We saw this in the course of your foundations/persecutions/jubilations: you are extraordinary. The physical suffering that inflames you carnally is gradually deployed just as much, and then more, in your mind. It invests language, writing, the multiplicity of attachments, and remains sublime. Better still, it becomes ever more sublime, ever more verbal and active. Bodily and spiritual, your suffering is always reversible, and that’s how it gives itself the chance to be distilled into an intense symbolization-elucidation-creation.

I suggest, then, that to the Freudian view of endogenous masochism ensuing from the repression of incest be added the fact that incest provokes a final displacement of arousal, not this time onto a different “object” (a boy), but onto the means of expression and communication itself. The repression of incest leads to an investment…in language and thought! Do you follow?

So, in parallel with the fantasy that “someone else is being beaten,” which protects me from forbidden genital pleasure and/or from the incestuous desire to love and be loved (by Daddy, but also by Mommy; Freud has less to say about her, since her love strikes him as more natural, less prohibited; I wonder!), in parallel with that fantasy, then, I the little girl will transfer the intensity of my desire onto words and thoughts, onto representation and psychic creativity.

This displacement is more than a barricade against culpable genital desires, creating a new object of desire that proves to be a new source of satisfaction, complementary to the pleasure of the erogenous zones; it consists of an infinite capacity for representing and naming, to the point of endowing genital arousal with words and meanings or nonmeanings, besides the exaltation of masochism itself. All this in hopes not only of finding partial substitutes for the forbidden love that is incest, in the shape of my own symbolic activities or works, but also of meriting that forbidden love, rendered guilty and reversed into masochism. Meriting it through the wild capacity for sublimation all humans possess, a skill that I, smart little girl that I am, noisier than the others and Daddy’s favorite to boot, employ to outdo everyone else.

To perversion in its masochistic (“I enjoy the fantasy of being beaten”) or sadistic (“I enjoy seeing a boy being beaten”) forms is added the sublimatory jouissance of my own power to speak and think for and with the beloved/lover. You see, at the beginning, sublimation accompanies the perverse (père-vers) defense, and perversion (père-version) is the other face of sublimation. It is easy to imagine the possible variations of their joint destinies: sublimation and perversion can splice together, or part, or cross paths; they can be mutually oblivious, or reunite, or jointly stimulate each other…

To formulate it in terms akin to yours, in the dynamic of that third phase of the female fantasy resulting from the incest prohibition (“It’s not me, it’s him who’s being beaten”), guilt comes accompanied by a longing for redemption. There is no other way of meriting recognition and grace from the Other, that is, of rising above the unmistakably anal score-settling with those around me, than by overinvesting the psychic representations that are language and thought. My thought and my word are redemption; my writing and my creations likewise.

Unlike boys, who are bound to engage in interminable bouts of physical and erotic contests with the father and his doubles, merciless duels that will dominate and absorb all their most elaborate intellectual activities, girls exhibit (over and above their individual genetic dispositions and favorable or unfavorable developmental contexts), through their academic and intellectual prowess, commonly greater than boys’, a precocious overinvestment in the activity of thinking. Thinking may thus take on a “redemptive” value for little girls, in the sense of endowing them with a symbolic, phallic power that is the fantasy equivalent of the Other’s power. Some boys also take this more delicate, spiritual, intellectual road; they include artists and intellectuals, of course, and men of God, it goes without saying. This is how they sublimate their “psychic bisexuality” (according to Freud, again). In the end, at the top of this road to sublimation, to which sex do we belong? An inept question, since, properly speaking, once we reach the heights where Flesh and Word merge into one, each person belongs to the unique sex that she or he constitutes at her or his own peril. There’s a certain happiness in it.

Let us recapitulate. The terminal fantasy of “A child is being beaten” erases, from the girl’s conscious mind, the representation of the masochistic scene (“He is beating me”) and replaces it with a twofold movement: On the one hand, the sadistic version of the fantasy “He is beating him”; on the other, its accompaniment by a heightened level of imaginative and cognitive activity, alongside a critical moral conscience identified with the parental superego. The female superego roots itself in this movement, as does a critical vigilance liable to go to delirious extremes of self-scrutiny. It’s understandable, then, that the conflicts between this strongly invested symbolic construction and an equally consistent sensibility may cause the symptoms manifested by such conflictive, divided personalities labeled “hysterical.” They are particularly common among women, although they are also found among men who have followed a similar path. In the right family and historical circumstances, the same tensions may stimulate and develop women’s symbolic creativity. This occurs against the background of a domesticated masochism that can only in that way be tempered.

Let us pause for a moment on this strong identification, defensive and creative at once, that girls have with the paternal superego merged with the phallic function, at the expense of female identifications. It leads to a repression of the mother seen as castrated or infirm, prompts imitations of virile attributes, and propels the subject into a glorification of spirituality alone — so as to reunite the little girl, and the woman she will become, with the symbolic Father.

In line with this logic, masochism is preserved and cultivated while undergoing a final inversion, this time under the pressure of the superego, into hyperactive talking and thinking and other busy activities (in accordance with individual capability), an exhausting program that requires a…sadistic dominion over others. We are back with the sadistic voyeurism that characterized phase 1 of the little girl’s fantasy, and she makes the most of it: “I excel in my representational and symbolization activities, they also comfort me, and by thus drawing near to the agent of the Law, I seal a pact with the symbolic Father. I also take my revenge on the boy who has the penis, when he is beaten in place of me: I am the Phallus.”

However, as far as the girl’s unconscious is concerned, the beaten boy is just the mask of herself, which causes her sadistic jouissance, underpinned by a virile identification with the Father, the agent of the Law who dispenses punishment, to rely on a masochistic jouissance that is even more deeply buried in the unconscious (“I know it’s my own incestuous desires — for Daddy and Mommy both — that are being punished. But what advantages come with it!”). Ah, the impressive contortions and interminable polyphonies of the hysteric’s progress! Few can come up with an answer to the question, “What do women want?”

Boys for their part are not impervious to this sadomasochistic economy (John of the Cross and the monks at Pastrana attained heights of masochistic euphoria that made even Teresa feel queasy). Except that the boy’s whipping fantasy is always experienced as passive: “I am loved by the father” (subtext: like a passive woman). Thus male masochism, culminating in the scenario of his flagellation by a whip-wielding woman, in reality protects the subject from the father’s sadistic desire, something that must at all costs be kept at bay, for this paternal desire persists at once as unconscious homosexual attraction and as the ultimate danger. So, although the masochistic fantasy of being beaten by a woman by no means prevents a man from occupying a feminine position in the sense of a passive role, this fantasy nonetheless affords him a double boon. In the first place “it” isn’t happening between two men, for I’m getting pleasure from a woman; I might be playing a passive, female role, but my choice of object is heterosexual; furthermore, the child-beaten-by-his-mother who I have become is not even a passive female, since the man suffering from his mother, that is, I myself, mirrors the suffering I always divined in my own father — a humiliated man, always weighed down by the power of maternal hysteria. By being punished myself, I become one with my debased father: we are united at last in a kind of wedding beneath the whip. However you look at it, my masochism as a man beaten by a woman is the one thing that makes a man of me, an abused man, no doubt, but one who exists, by reason of his injury and his castration, just as I exist exclusively through my experience of pain. This man is my mother’s man, of course, the one I always desired with a cowed and fearful longing, but whose sadism I need no longer dread, since I have taken his place and erased him from the scene with Venus and her whip.

Such are, on the female side and on the male, the agonies and ecstasies of sexual identity. Does each sex suffer and die apart?

And what of the Passion, in this strange perspective? What if Jesus were not only a Son, but also a consubstantial representative of God the Father? A Father who is tortured to death?

We know that for the Freud of Totem and Taboo, the murder of the father was a foundational act, a historically real event in the course of human civilization. In the same way Jesus Christ is, for Christians, a historical character, and the faithful commemorate a murder that really happened. I’d rather keep a distance from these issues: leaving aside the question of whether the events actually took place, I shall confine myself to assessing the psychic reality they generate among subjects who literally believe in their fantasies and representations. In addition, while the Christ of the Gospels is a Son, I am interested in the logic that would have God the Father likewise put to death in the Passion (Saint Paul touched on this long before Hegel and Nietzsche). Given the inextricable knot of the Trinity, it would be hard to delink the suffering unto death of the Son from that of the Father, which is consubstantial with it.

To recap, what would happen if Jesus were not only a beaten child or brother, but a beaten father — beaten to death?

For the little girl, this situation implies that the one she loves — the object of her mother’s desire and the phallic function upholding her access to representation, language, and thought — is equally as victimized as the boy of her sadistic fantasy: “It’s not me being beaten, it’s a boy. Now here’s a father being beaten. This father must then be a sort of boy, or brother-figure.”

Mixing the son with the father, this scenario has the advantage of simultaneously alleviating the incestuous guilt that imbues the desire for the sovereign Father, the Other, and encouraging the girl’s virile identification with the abused man. A glorious and gratifying identification, to be sure, but under cover of the masochism this twofold movement promotes, not to say incites: “This beaten father and/or brother is my double, my likeness, my alter ego — me, equipped with a male organ.”

The way is thus cleared, in the unconscious, for the Father as agent of the Law and the Forbidden to merge with the subject of the guilty passion, that is, myself, the cherished daughter of that same father. The superman Father becomes humanized and, more importantly, feminized by the suffering he undergoes; as a result he is at once my ideal and my double. A cozy “us” is constituted by and in the passion of the Father, whose love, guilt, and punishment we both share. As far as my unconscious is concerned, not only is the Father the agent of prohibition and punishment, he is also, manifestly, the object of the interdiction itself and suffers from that prohibition and punishment just as…I do! Hence my idealization of him, in which the ideal of the ego and the superego are mingled, and which, by superseding my experience of myself as junior, ignored, and excluded from the primal scene, staunches that exclusion. This returns me to the first stage of my oedipal fantasy: “I love him and he loves me.” But in the light of our osmosis in the father’s passion, this love is formulated differently: “We are both of us in love and guilty; we deserve to be beaten to death together, to be reunited in death.”

For the unconscious, this father — daughter reunion suspends the incest prohibition in and through the suffering of the two protagonists, jointly in love and punished. Their pain will necessarily be felt as a wedding. A suffering sexualized under the “whip of faith,” in the ordeal of the father beaten to death, is seen and felt as a “merciless love” (to paraphrase Baudelaire).¹⁰ The only way out of this masochistic paradise lies in sublimation.

By placing the fantasy of the father beaten to death at the summit of the evangelical narrative, so that it calls out for our identification, Christianity does more than reinforce the interdictions: paradoxically, it displaces them and paves the way for them to be worked through or sublimated.

On the one hand, neurotics of either sex continue to be inhibited and/or stimulated by the threats of judgment, condemnation, and expiation that mutilate desire. Nevertheless, by being beaten, like the son-father, the subject can liberate his or her unconscious desires from culpable suffering, moving on to a suffering that could be qualified as sovereign or divine. Once past the guilt linked to transgression, the issue will be one of passion as the sole highway to union with the ideal Father. This new type of suffering, Christlike or Christian, is not the reverse of the Law so much as a suspension of Law and guilt in favor of the jouissance in a suffering that is idealized, precisely — the jouissance of calling, pining, crucially failing to satisfy the desire for the Son-Father; the pangs of pain-delight in the ambivalence of perversion, père-version. God’s Calvary unto death does not normalize suffering, nor does it authorize incest. However, by virtue of its glory and thanks to our desire for and with the father, this shared agony, this com-passion hover on the verge of admitting, and justifying, both the sin of incest and the pain that punishes it.

This goes beyond pleasure. We speak here of jouissance, in as much as pleasure taken with the Son-Father is a pleasure unto death. John of the Cross expressed this better than anyone: “Where have You hidden, / Beloved, and left me moaning? / You fled like the stag / And after wounding me; / I went out calling You, and You were gone” (“The Spiritual Canticle”). “And spread his shining arms,…/ And hung by them, and died, / His heart an open wound with love” (“Song of Christ and the Soul”).¹¹

The worship of the beaten Father entails a fundamental consequence: along with, and beyond, my surreptitiously avowed incestuous link with the Father, it is symbolic activity itself that the Father’s passion invites me to eroticize, to develop, to magnify, to love. How does this occur?

Reinforced by the incest taboo and the punishments the father metes out in order to maintain it, repression creates the neurotic and his or her representational capacity. We have just seen how the fantasy of the beaten Father establishes another structure inside me, the underside of the neurotic apparatus: his Passion, as physical suffering infused with value, incites me to resexualize and load with affectivity my own movement of idealization of the father. But this masochistic variant of père-version affords me little more than partial, largely unsatisfying pleasures, and the resulting frustration unleashes a cascade of somatic or functional disorders.

As it is by means of thought and language that I connect with the Other, the activity of representing my (however frustrated) desires is clearly favored by the Father-as-Passion, the figure poised to replace the Father-as-Law. The resexualization of the ideal Father into the man of the Passion fosters an unprecedented resexualization of representation itself — of all fantasy- and language-producing activity. First, in a way that induces compassion, the abused Father’s Passion invites me to realize my sadomasochistic drives in physical reality, by way of extravagant rituals; this is what is usually encouraged in self-mortification and atonement. In parallel, the religious and especially the mystical experience tend to deflect my sadomasochistic impulses, beyond the reality of pain unto death, into the realm of representation where language alone is fit to appropriate it. This is because it is through thought, imagination, and language — far more than through the fantasized communion — that I create around the subject of the “Father beaten to death” and become his chosen one, the Other’s elect.

Acts of representation-speech-thought, activities attributed to the father in patrilineal societies and that link me to him, become — in the Christic system — the foremost domain of a jouissance that embraces and transcends sadomasochism; this activity ultimately emerges as the “kingdom” where suffering, thus metabolized, can be expressed and appeased.

Following Freud, this displacement of pleasure from the body and sexual organs into representation has been termed sublimation. Perversion and sublimation impose themselves as the two faces, underside and upper side, of this relaxation or indeed fabulous suspension of the incest taboo, brought about by the Son-Father being beaten instead of me.

No other religion, including Greek polytheism, has proved as effectively auspicious for the experience of sublimation as the religion of the Son-Father beaten to death. By way of this fantasy, Christianity maintains, on the one hand, the inaccessible ideal (Jesus is a God, which makes Him a forbidden Father who forbids me to approach or to touch Him). On the other hand, and without avoiding the contradiction, Jesus is a son, a brother, a man who redeems our guilty desires by submitting to the lash as though he were a party to our transgressions and sins. On the one side, legalistic coldness and apathy; on the other, fervent jouissance filtered through the passion of pain. The alternation of the two can play out within an individual (feeding into autoerotic sadomasochism) or between a subject and his or her erotic object (boosting the sadist — masochist oscillation enjoyed by partners in perversion).

Not a father who begets, in the manner of the biblical patriarchs, Jesus as the Man of pain and the abused Son-and-Father sets in motion a spiraling cycle of repetitions that displace carnal passions into mental rewards. Coming after the figure of Baby Jesus and the sacralization of birth as an eternal starting over, the figure of Jesus as the beaten Father shows that the repetition of pain is the supreme act of atonement. By beaming back to me from the heights of his Fatherhood the mirror image of my own nonshareable pain, Jesus reinstates the symbolic or spiritual element of human suffering, and ennobles it by so doing. He reveals and reinforces the psychic participation that is intrinsic to the pain of beings with the power of speech. That is his lesson for those who would tend to overlook it, and that’s why Christianity acted for two thousand years as a laboratory for modern psychology and even psychoanalysis. But at the same time, as we know too well, it is susceptible to the idealism of indiscriminate pyschologization. Isn’t there an ersatz kind of Christianity lurking in the “heart of hearts” of globalized TV spectators, for whom nothing is “universal,” bar the universality of amorous or spiritual pain?

Whatever the truth of past excesses and their contemporary exemplars, my aim is to salvage the kernel of intrapsychic truth they contain, which with Teresa’s help can be summed up as follows: the myth of the murdered Son-Father tells us that the prohibition of incest is not simply about the deprivation of pleasure; it invites sexual excitement to perform a jump on the spot in order that, while remaining contained in me, it travels through my sensorial and genital apparatus to become fixed in psychic representations and acts — ideality, symbolism, thought.

Shockingly, but not without veracity or profit, Jesus as the beaten Father is the figure of language experienced as a representation that encompasses bodily pleasure and pain, travels through them, and wrenches itself away to reach the ideal. This language in its Christian version — though who has ever lived that version in all its transubstantial complexity, apart from Teresa and the great artists? — is not a pure abstraction, but rather an exaltation that heals suffering by means of a jouissance that is forever open and forever wanting. The speaking being’s life is a continual starting over, over and over again, in a series of communions with the Man put to death: “Sown in destructibility, indestructible we rise.”

Catholicism was more propitious than other religions in this respect, because it simultaneously maintained and transgressed sexual or carnal prohibitions and inscribed this happy culpability into signs. It ostentatiously highlighted that bis repetita, the desire of the speaking being, as a desire that infringes the Law insofar as the Law is prohibition (resulting in the feeling of suffering) and also as a desire to be recognized by the Law insofar as the latter is a symbolic code (resulting in the blooming of the self in jouissance outside the self). Pierre Klossowski invokes that very point when he writes that the reiteration of the carnal act in language not only provides an account of transgression, it is itself “a transgression of language by language.”¹²

I hear your question: In this theater of sadomasochism, does not Jesus as the beaten Father set free the death drive at the very moment he seems to “reconcile” it, to distill it into a Beyond? Absolutely, and we are all too familiar with the way Christianity has presented itself at certain points in its history as a justification of vengeance and a summons to the Crusades, to the Inquisition, or to sanguinary pogroms.

However, whereas some religions positively aggravate the same fundamentalist deviations, the Christic knot (particularly in Catholicism) of desire, suffering, and sublimation also gave rise to the perlaboration and analysis of these fatal excesses, thanks to the tremendous development of theology, writing, and art. Great artists like Mozart or Picasso responded to the intensities of this dialectic in a sustained fever of creation. Thus “set free,” the death drive was also set on a path toward its own deliverance, relieved of a certain…becalmedness.

Another crucial moment in the fantasy of “a father being beaten to death” does not stop at releasing the death drive as sadomasochistic aggression, properly speaking, but hoists it to a paroxysm of jouissance. The death drive in its radical, Freudian sense is pushed to the point of dissolution of bonds and uncoupling from the plane of the living. This is exactly what transpires in the story of the Passion.

For when Eros and Thanatos are released to “freewheel” down the Way of the Cross, the identity between body and soul comes apart in the transition from suffering to Nothingness. Here we confront the supreme difficulty always implicitly hanging over the figure of Christ, but coming tragically to the fore at Easter: Christ is not only a Son abandoned by his Father (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”)¹³ but also, yes, a Father (remember what he told Thomas and Philip) beaten to death (Saint Paul’s “Christ died”) before rising again.¹⁴

Let us pause over this death of the Father, a concept only very cautiously explored by Catholic scholars; it seems to appeal more to Protestant and Orthodox Christians.

The Father’s “descent into the bowels of the earth” is denoted in Greek by the noun kenosis, meaning “nonbeing,” “nothingness,” “emptying,” “nullity,” but also “senseless,” “deceptive” (the adjective kenos can mean “void,” “of no account,” “futile,” and the verb kenoun “to purge,” “to sever,” “to obliterate”). Calvary confronts us with the complete suspension of the paternal function and the elimination of the representational and symbolization capacities that this function, in psychoanalytic theory, assures. In theological terms, it is purely and simply the death of God. In philosophical terms, with reference to the death drive as the “carrier wave” of all other drives, we can declare with Gilles Deleuze that only “Thanatos is,” in the sense that only Nothingness is.¹⁵

God himself is “pending” or en souffrance in Christ’s suffering, and this outrage, which theological scholarship has trouble facing up to, prefigures a later, modern time when the “death of God” seemed to be a fact. “God has died, God Himself is dead,” writes Hegel: a prodigious, “frightful” representation, confronting representation with the deepest of cleavages or ruptures.¹⁶

But no sooner mooted, the death of the Father and/or the symbolic realm is negated: Christ resurrects! What astonishing therapeutic power resides in this bracketing of recognized, longed-for death with the negation of death! What a prodigious restoration of the capacity for thinking and desiring is effected in this dread exploration of suffering to the point of loss of the mind, to the point of death! It is because the Father and the Holy Spirit are themselves mortal, abolished by the intervention of the Man of pain, whose thought endures all through his suffering unto death, that they can be reborn. Thought can begin again — a different thought! Thought as resurrection? Might that be the ultimate form of the freedom proclaimed by Christian suffering? Nietzsche was not blind to the fact that this letting go into kenosis lent to the human and divine death on the Cross “the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of resentment.”¹⁷

One can understand the potent effects of this fantasy on the unconscious. This breaking, even for an instant, of the link that couples Christ to his Father and to life, this caesura, this hiatus does not offer an image so much as a narrative to the psychic cataclysms that endanger the putative equilibrium of the individual, and in so doing it thinks and heals them.* [*The author makes a play on the homophony of penser, “to think,” and panser, “to bandage or heal”: “et, de ce fait, les panse.”—Trans.]

We are each the result of a prolonged “work of the negative”: birth, weaning, separations, frustrations, bereavements. By staging this rupture at the heart of the absolute subject that is Christ, by presenting it in the guise of a Passion, the inseparable reverse of the Resurrection, Christianity brings back into consciousness the dramas inherent in our becoming, thus endowing itself with an immense, unconscious cathartic power. Only the gradual progress of science, the human sciences in particular, plus the psychoanalytical leap, would help us move toward the psychosexual interpretation of these variants of suffering. At the time that concerns us, we had hardly embarked upon that long road.

What if it were only through kenosis that the divine was able to recuperate the most beautiful consciousness of its new beginning? I say “the most beautiful” because, next to the suffering of com-passion, the sovereign suffering of kenosis is paradoxically a process of “dis-passion”: I contend that it de-eroticizes the agony that voyeurs feel along with the God-man when they contemplate the Calvary. More than this, the absolute necessity hardwired into the human spirit to aspire to the Other, to desire the divine, to hunger for meaning, is abruptly revealed — in kenosis — to be empty, futile, of no account, and senseless.

Extreme passion, extremes of delinking. Due to the conjoined presence of the Absolute-and-Nothingness of desire, Christianity touches the limits of the religious. With kenosis we move from religion into the terrain of the sacred, understood as the trespass of thought into the unthinkable: the space of Nothingness, futility, vanity, and meaninglessness.¹⁸ Medieval mysticism ventured into that space with Meister Eckhart: “I pray God to make me free of God.”¹⁹ But it may be John of the Cross who best encapsulated that presence of the impossible in the tension of desire and thought — the Nothingness that gives voice to the hopeless chase (“I went out calling You, and You were gone”) characteristic of the need to believe.

Teresa, more attuned to resurrection, finds bliss in the reconciliation in which the Son-Father’s death is resolved. Spinoza’s formulation may help modern man to interpret this ultimate mystery: “God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love,” he writes in the Ethics, in terms that recast what is, for the believer, absorption of suffering into the “new body” of the risen Christ, seated at the right hand of the Father, and into the resurrection.²⁰ Because “infinite intellectual love” (God the Father) coexists with the existential pain (God the Son and the believer) which it elucidates, it is called God and is a joy.

Having emphasized, in a completely novel way, values of compassion and an implicit kenosis without ever divorcing them from “loving intelligence,” the genius of Christianity fashioned a formidable counterweight to pain, namely the sublimation or perlaboration of pain in mental and verbal activity. I, a being that suffers because I desire/think, because I am loving/loved, am capable of conceiving my passion as a representation that will be my resurrection. My spirit, in love with the Passion, recreates it in works of loving intelligence, such as thoughts and stories and pictures and music.

Christianity both admitted and denied the Father’s ritual killing. Such was the solution it managed to impose on the universal “murder of the Father” that is the bedrock of human civilization. From then on, Christianity — more especially Catholicism, after the revolution of the Counter-Reformation — appropriated the Greco-Roman body to itself. It took the body of antiquity rediscovered by the humanists and pushed it to the limit in the Passion of Man. Painting, music, and literature were to nurture the passions of men and women, announced by mysticism prior to baroque art, and to radically overturn the subject of monotheism.²¹

The tension between desire and meaning — the definitive trait of speaking beings and the motor of the sadomasochistic logic of human experience — is doubly resolved, then. I renounce incest in order to gain access to the desiring and desirable father as a symbolic father, and to be associated with him if, and only if, I succeed in appropriating his symbolic and imaginative powers. And yet this new beginning (“In the beginning was the Word”) is painful. The child who speaks must renounce its desires and repair its guilt; the verbal child is a beaten child. If it can conjure it up in thought, the way of perfection stretches ahead.

Soothing that infantile, incestuous, speaking humanity — for speaking humanity is suffering humanity — with his suffering as a Father who became incarnate in the Son in order to be beaten to death, Jesus does not merely act as therapist. He overturns capital components of the human condition.

The eroticization of his ordeal makes manifest the torments of the desiring body within the family triangle: incest with both parents, and more specifically with the Father, is not just an unconscious desire, for it turns into a preconscious one. With girls, the father — daughter encounter, unconsciously courted and sublimated in passionate nuptials with Christ’s “sacred humanity,” goes to stimulate the cultural and social energy of the Christian woman. With boys, the fantasy of a homosexual encounter with the father, equally unconsciously courted, ends up favoring social attachments based on warrior and political fraternities, with the risk of drifting into multiple forms of deviance and permissiveness.

In this situation the heroics of antiquity, and in another way the phallic omnipotence of monotheistic man, are clearly untenable. There are no supermen, proclaims the martyred Son-Father of Christianity. The only sovereignty is symbolic, propped up on the quasi-avowed sadomasochism of our desires and only thus qualifying for limitless transcendence. The libertines of the Enlightenment or the Sadean explosion went on expanding this unprecedented breakthrough, whose insights fostered a new European renaissance via the baroque. The repercussions continued with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose moral code based on the law and its transgressions continues to hold sway today.

Given the fact of repression, there is no solution to père-version other than to re-verse it through sublimation. Given that no subject is not perverted (père-vers, toward the father) the subject can become a “glorious body” if, and only if, it confines itself to the remit of the ideal — but a resexualized ideal. Art, whether thinking as art or art as thinking, in many modulations still to come, will demonstrate the truth of this. But I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity will end up as aesthetics, on the contrary. Over and above works of religious art, it is sublimation—at the core of the body-mind, murder-idealization transference — that reenacts the drama of the Father-Son, the metamorphosis of the Word into flesh, the transfiguration of thought-through passion. Sublimation ensures the planetary impact of all this, its human universality.

Was Teresa’s the first attempt to articulate the strange status of a thought that is neither abstract understanding nor unbridled fancy? An imaginary a-thinking? That way of being is barely comprehensible to us now, and for that reason seems more enviable, trapped as we are by technologies that have turned us into alienated, profiteering robots. Meanwhile the “hard-core” perversions are being decriminalized and normalized across the secular world.

As for the death of the Father (the kenosis) that interrupts the sadomasochistic flow with the promise of resurrection, it does more than to de-eroticize incestuous passion. It throws wide open the daunting possibility of another psychic upheaval: the abolition of symbolic or paternal power itself, with all the attendant risks of mental, social, not to say biological disorders, some of which are already to be glimpsed amid the globalized desolation of the world. And yet the death of the Father is also pregnant with the great libertarian potential that comes with the end of religious constraints, but will be delivered only if we can invent fresh versions of the “loving intelligence” that was once called God, that Teresa so faithfully depicted, and to which the love known as transference is presently making its own modest and markedly unsettling contribution — invented by the still youthful discipline of psychoanalysis.

Chapter 27. A RUNAWAY GIRL

“That saint of yours is going to kill you, give it a rest! When you’re not scouring her writings like a Benedictine, or a damn lunatic I should say, you’re on her trail! On foot, by plane, on wheels and online, from castle to castle, from convent to monastery…So where are you now? Salamanca? Toledo? Burgos? Pastrana? Slow down, for Pete’s sake, do you hear? Don’t patronize me, either. You’ve turned into a complete workaholic!*” [*“Workaholic,” like “runaway girl” in the title and passim, appear in English in the original. — Trans.] I’m not kidding. Just my luck, me the pleasure artist, laid-back Taoist sage, lover of eternal peace and quiet…”

Andrew is irate, under cover of chivalrous airs as though I were a real woman who needed protecting by a real man. Can he think for one moment that I’d fall for his promises to help me with anything and everything? Poor darling, flying to the rescue of his workaholic (well, at least not alcoholic) damsel. He couldn’t even make me a cup of tea! And who is he to talk, when he’s always rushing between New York, Paris, and London? He’s been acting extra virile of late, when not affecting a touch of the aristos — that’s a new one! Lord Andrew detests the plebs, and there’s nothing plebbier than working one’s socks off like poor, benighted Sylvia. The fact is, he’s jealous. All my attention is on Teresa, I don’t make enough time for my American writer; he can tell my mind’s elsewhere and I’m not really listening. I haven’t got time to go to art shows with him, or to the opera to see the latest gimmicky production of Don Giovanni, no thanks, not even to see the first night of Halévy’s La Juive (now there’s an author awaiting his Proust).

“Are you crazy, it’s four hours long!”

“It never bothered you before,” Andrew says grumpily.

Before Teresa, he means. All we share now is the bed, that’s something, the most essential, surely. Or is it? I think he may be wondering about that, even though he’s an American writer. Oh well.

“‘Workaholic’ suits me,” I say, pretending to take his dig as a compliment.

“It’s what Louise Bourgeois used to call herself, like that, in English. She was a hard worker, addicted to it, you know.” I know: the more he contrasts me with other women, the more he loves me.

My New World aesthete has been in London, making a DVD on Louise Bourgeois, who is showing at Tate Modern.¹ His admiration for this sculptor is recent; when first we met he couldn’t stand the Spiders, and the Teats didn’t turn him on at all. Now he’s putty in her hands! It seems incongruous to find Andrew Garnett, the brooding novelist who rocks like Philip Roth (minus the wealth and the glory, but what can you do?), producing a hi-tech survey of Bourgeois’ works in the Turbine Hall, but there’s no mistake. Having always claimed to despise gadgetry, he’s become an electronics wiz and knows all there is to know about Bourgeois.

“Getting on a bit, isn’t she?” An experimental sword thrust from me.

“But still just a runaway girl,” parries Andrew, with heated self-assurance.

He’s right. The young Louise dropped everything: the family workshop steeped in the odor of wool dyes, the Aubusson tapestries they repaired, the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi; the libertarian mother, a reader of Zola, Louise Michel, and Rosa Luxemburg. But most crucially she dropped the libertine father, living under the family roof with his mistress Sadie, who was supposed to be the children’s English governess. Adieu sweet France, gray skies, banks of the Seine: Louise ran away to marry an American history of art teacher — an Anglophone, obviously, like Sadie. She settled in New York under what she called its cutting, humorless sky (ciel coupant qui ne plaisante pas), and began frequenting artists with a knack for creating outlandish spaces. “Settled” is not the word, though, since the emigrant was constantly switching her aesthetic, borrowing and appropriating different styles right and left. So mutable was she that the clerics of modern art often wondered, and still do, whether this Frenchwoman possessed a style at all, whether she was “anybody” in her own right.

“Ah, they don’t understand a thing, they seldom do,” says Andrew, making a face. “Her style, it’s…well, it’s a runaway style, do you see? It’s not about breaking up space, but accumulating spaces.”

He’s repeating himself, but it’s interesting. After all, this approach to adventure is not altogether foreign to me.

“So leave Teresa alone, and come see Louise.”

Andrew slots the DVD into my computer without asking. He clicks away enthusiastically. I watch the film, but I’m thinking about Teresa. Not that I say so, why bother. He’s on a roll.

“Space doesn’t exist, you see!” My writer’s eyes are full of what he saw in London.

That austere and lively city intoxicates me, projects me inside of myself, erases me, all the opposite of New York’s crystal clearness, which gets me going. In London I feel available, like an empty page, I visit, listen, read; I am receptive. My friend Juan, the Golden Age man, introduces me to his youthful fans, who learn about the new maladies of the soul with expressions of mild disgust. I let them talk, I daydream, I can’t help it, it’s out of my control; Christopher Marlowe put it nicely, echoing Shakespeare, or was it the other way around? “It lies not in our power to love or hate, / For will in us is overruled by fate.”² In New York I’m like myself, I get excited, fired up, purposeful; I make efforts. I should have gone to London with Andrew and saturated myself with the Egyptians at the British Museum and Louise B at the Tate, why didn’t I…Andrew’s voice breaks in:

“Space is just a metaphor for the structure of our existence, she says.” Andrew speaks solemnly, and I repress a giggle to respond in the same tone:

“So perhaps our castles, interior or exterior, are projections of our psychic lives?”

Am I here with him and Louise B, or am I still, as ever, with my Teresa?

Andrew zooms in on details, lingers on them, talks me through them, draws me into Louise’s motionless travels. Like everyone in her milieu, Louise rejected religion as such, considering that 140 religions on this earth are way too many. But since she believed herself to have a religious temperament, she signed up for the 141st, which is art.

In the beginning was fear. “Fear makes the world go round.” “It’s the story of someone so frightened by his love that he withdraws.” Fear turns into depression, together with an inexorable lowering of self-esteem. “A man and a woman lived together. On one evening he did not come back from work and she waited. She kept on waiting and she grew littler and littler. Later a neighbor stopped by out of friendship, and there he found her in the armchair the size of a pea.” But it’s a fortunate pea. It, or she, realizes “that you can stand anything if you write it down.” She starts snatching at all the ideas buzzing around her head, buzzing through the air like flies, and converts them into pen-thoughts, pink or blue, like butterflies. Once written down, these thoughts will become drawings, then paintings, then sculptures. For the little pea discovers that sculpture alone is liberating: it’s a tangible reality that encases emptiness, desertion, separation. Death. You must never think that the pea is interested in anxiety. Like her mother, it — meaning she, this woman — is conceptual, and assesses the situation objectively, scientifically, and not emotionally. “I was interested not in anxiety but in perspective, in seeing things from different points of view.” And: “I am not interested in the appearance of the body; I’m interested in how things work.” Obviously, since the body is a mechanism, and mechanisms are stronger than women and men and fear and death.

In the beginning was loss of innocence. “You cannot understand erotic forms if you are completely innocent, and a symbol is a symbol only if what it stands for is known.” Do sexual forms provide a way out of depression or emptiness, then? She clarifies by saying that to sculpt is “to record confidence or pleasure,” which take the place of depression and emptiness and modify them. Then it can be called “a formal problem,” that of reorganizing the world.

And that’s how the little pea became the architect of the world. The Aubusson tapestries played their part in this loss of innocence; French tradition is totally to be run away from — provided one revisits it often, it’s so terribly chic! The “tapestry” is henceforth named Restif de la Bretonne, Colette and Willy, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Céline, Antonin Artaud…all of them French. But, for the pea/woman who “travels herself,” it is also named Norman Mailer and the constellation of Americans whose courses she attends and whose shows she sees. They initiate her into the brazenness that culminates in this tribute to Francis Bacon: his inebriation doesn’t depict “things” but an “indisputably violent desire” of “terrific brutality”; “his suffering communicates.” “I want to share it.” “To look at his pictures makes me alive.”

From one beginning to the next, Louise Bourgeois confirms the vagabond destiny of creators from time immemorial, but especially during the twentieth century. Among the frontiers to be crossed were those of language, political regime, the family, the father. An absolute necessity for girls in particular, especially those who were born, like Athena, from the head of Zeus after he had swallowed their mother Metis, goddess of crafty thought. Equally important, never omit to jump every fence: Athena was the first, and already an accomplice of Ulysses the traveler, of course. It’s essential “to free oneself” from self and from home, and more so as a woman. “I married an American. I left France because I freed myself, or escaped from home.…I was a runaway girl. I was running away from a family situation that was very disturbing.”

Hannah Arendt felt great affinity with this line from Schiller: “Eine Mädchen aus der Fremde,” “A maiden from afar”—seeking the father, fleeing the father. Or rather, taking the place of the progenitor and faithful-unfaithful to the intellectual mentor; situating herself in the indefinite, cut loose from foundation. In perpetual re-foundation, perhaps, budding forth moment by moment? “Une éclosion de tous les instants”: that’s how Colette phrases her floral adventure in the company of her mother, the sublime Sido, recreated by the writing of a daughter endlessly nourished by the maternal tongue; cleaving to her rooted matrix. But cleaving away from the father, the captain with a wooden leg, the impotent writer with a “membered” need to write, and equally rejecting the trio of husbands — Willy, Jouvenel, Goudeket. Melanie Klein did something similar by reinventing psychoanalysis in order to understand mutism in children and making the cure for desire a thought cure. Klein had to leave, first her mother, and then Mr. Klein, who had given her three children; she had to tear herself away from German and struggle for English; finally she had to get away from Freud himself in order to found her own school — from depression, via matricide, to sublimation.³

Louise Bourgeois didn’t have to resort to such brain-clutching upheavals. More recent, more modern, and a lot luckier, an American in the cosmopolitan sense, she “only” had to reinvent the terrain of her “structures of existence,” and make far-fetched spaces in three dimensions. She “travels herself” (elle se voyage), to borrow the neologism of the journalist Stéphanie Delacour in Julia Kristeva’s metaphysical detective novel, Murder in Byzantium.⁴ Kristeva is Bulgarian by birth, French by nationality, a European citizen — and an adoptive American? She’s a journalist, a psychoanalyst, a semiotician, a novelist, and how many other things? She too is made up of mobiles and kaleidoscopes…

The father’s daughters rediscover the mother’s depths when they appropriate the father’s ambition, while taking tactful care of the male urge to power: “The phallus is a subject of my tenderness.…I lived with four men, I was the protector,” explains Louise B. Had she lived today my Teresa might have endorsed that sentiment, thinking of her own family, of father-uncle-brothers, and then confessors…These “runaway daughters of the father” thus manage to transmute their fear, and maybe they end up not being afraid, whether of the phallus, or of betrayal, or of fear itself, the fear that petrifies most “liberated” women into hardened militants.

“A bit psycho-babbly, don’t you think? These days, even in New York…it comes over as rather intellectual, for an artist. Not sure I’ll keep that bit.” Andrew moves the DVD on, unhappy with his art-star’s line on phalluses. I don’t blame him. I hide a smile. Men, really, ever since they turned into the second sex…On with our viewing!

It’s surely a prime achievement for a sculptor to rid himself or herself of rigidity. “I dream of being a reasonable woman,” is how Louise describes her latest metamorphosis. Out with stiffness and brittleness — and yet: “I was supposed to apologize for being only a girl. My brother was born later, of course.” “Ever since I was born, I was pushed into constant rivalry with other people.” Is that any reason to bend? To throw in the towel? Of course not! Though it’s never definitive, let’s try to attain serenity without dependency. “I feel good. I feel independent.”

Teresa “feels” as well, there’s no doubt about that, she burns with longing to feel herself being this or that. They were all at it, during the late sixteenth century: “little Seneca,” the towering John of the Cross, “Doctor in Nada,” cares only for “substantial words,” the kind that resonate viscerally, in the flesh, that are one with substance. If the soul were to be told, “‘Be thou good,’ it would then substantially be good.”⁵ Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises had the Jesuits wrap up their meditations with the “application of the five senses”: after cogitating they were to find repose in looking, listening, tasting, touching, smelling. Teresa, however, has no need to “apply” herself, for simplemindedness or bobería comes naturally to her, she boasts of it, it’s a state that does not cancel the intellect but subordinates it to simplicity: “Here there is no demand for reasoning, but for knowing what as a matter of fact [con llaneza] we are and for placing ourselves with simplicity [con simpleza] in God’s presence, for He desires the soul to become ignorant [boba] in His presence, as indeed it is.”⁶ And the more this ignoramus feels, the more she feels herself, and the more she senses her friends and enemies, until she feels, and becomes, independent. Independent with His Majesty or of His Majesty? It makes no difference, since He was inside her by the time she began to write and to make foundations. She feels both things at once. The writing, fighting Madre is also a “runaway girl,” indeed the epitome of one — she who is always escaping from what precedes her toward what exceeds her and always re-founding herself by founding institutions. Tutti a cavallo…“Everything depends on your ability to sublimate,” says Louise’s voice on the DVD.

Is there a deconstruction of the father going on? Some of Bourgeois’ works, like The Destruction of the Father, would make us think so. Andrew’s film has wicked fun with this one, shadowing the artist through her labyrinth of paternal forms with an unabashed pleasure in their vacillations between tumescence and detumescence, deformation and formation. Suddenly my favorite filmmaker starts horsing around, I like him best like this, playing the fool without his deep-and-serious-writer mask on. He whirls away from the computer and bounces around me like a chimpanzee, shrieking at the top of his voice:

“Hey, Nobodaddy, Nobodaddy, Nobodaddy! Why art thou silent and invisible, father of jealousy? Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds from every searching eye?”⁷

Has La Bourgeois bewitched him? Jigging and giggling, oblivious of the deconstructive Seventies, Andrew is a carnival king. With a few lines of rhyming verse, he flies off into unbearable father love, it’s hysterically funny; is libertarian Christianity alone in legitimating and cultivating such a thing? Jesus the imagination is a silky tiger made of wrath and pity, and the revolution will be libidinal or it will not be. I dare you, go cross swords with the Commander, go taunt Daddy, see how you make out at squishing him into Nobodaddy! A burlesque dig here, an obscene jibe there, poor old fellow left to rot, coughing and cowering, who “jumps up off his seat and turns thrice three times around,” some passion! Nowhere else has Daddy love, confessed to death, pushed artists and others not belonging to that weird species into such a rebellious, savage tenderness, the banality of evil revised and corrected, male anality rehashed to the nth degree. They call it freedom and Andrew is acting it out to me this minute, jabbing a faux-sardonic finger at the ceiling.

“‘That ole Nobodaddy got stuck up there, burping and farting without a care! He read out a big sermon that made heaven shake, and then got to yelling for William Blake!’ That’s pretty good, getting Blake in there. In subtitles, or as voice-over? ‘Why darkness and obscurity in all thy words and laws, that none dare eat the fruit but from the wily serpent’s jaws? Or is it because secrecy gains females’ wild applause?’” My friend is getting quite carried away, capering and cackling; then he stops dead, and strikes a Gallic pose. “‘Upon seeing this, the moon blushed scarlet.’ Curtain.”

He stares at me with dark, crazed eyes. He’s not laughing now.

Silence.

If he only knew how his clowning vindicated my own very personal theology…But let’s not go there.

“Shall I paste that into Bourgie’s film? What d’you reckon? Too strong for her, maybe? Oh, she blasphemes with her dad’s organ all right, bingo! But it’s like she envies him…or like she’s holding back even so, do you feel that or not? Couldn’t be further from my poet-engraver, anyway. Uncommercial maniac.”

I think of Teresa, it’s far from her too: she’s into chess, not chisels.

“Mind you, Louise ain’t so bad for a woman. We’ll see at the editing stage. Ready for the rest?”

He presses Play, more calmly.

I understand his disquiet. Louise’s hand-to-hand combat with her father is also an indefatigable reweaving of the maternal web: it’s the restoration of Joséphine, the mother who was her companion in depression as much as in good sense. Before the artist found out how “ridiculous” life is. Becoming a mother herself — an experience Louise B accompanies and reflects, like a refracting mirror — led her inevitably to this detachment; but most mothers don’t know it. Andrew’s heroine, who is not an ordinary mother (But what woman is? Certainly not Madre Teresa!) turns space into a kind of fecund receptacle, a topography of udders and breasts. Cows, sows, women, all are “interesting, moving, live and flexible landscapes.” We’re a long way from your subtle dwelling places, Teresa, my love! Apart from the flexibility, the liveliness, the mobility, a certain simplemindedness, alma boba…

Warlike violence nonetheless persists beneath the decorous indecency that is always being petted and cajoled. It simmers like the tantrum of a child who is loved and yet quick to flare up, flounce off, blow her top. Who can stand anything if she writes it down and then makes of it a sculpture, which is her preferred script.

But then is this nomad nothing but an eternal adolescent, a phallus worshipper cloaking the dreamer of breasts? What is a woman, in the end? A woman must dare to be “arrogant and ambitious,” declares my writer’s latest muse. Great! Anything else? I won’t tell Andrew that Louise sounds like a feminist from Milwaukee, because I do know by now that if a woman isn’t minimally arrogant or ambitious she simply is not, period. But then…Oh, it would take too long, you’d have to write a novel!

Every beginning is a new life “organized around hollowness.” That’s quite a discovery. Does it apply to the female body? Maybe, or it’s an overstatement, we’ll see. For the time being the pea-woman is a “house-woman,” necessarily an empty one like the empty homes it/she left behind, clearly “a metaphor for existence,” for abandoned, abandoning, abandonistic space. Excellent start if you want to become a sculptor, or sculptress. Nice and particular, without precluding an element of the general. And so it was, claims Andrew’s film, that the arrogant and ambitious little pea took on the great Bernini himself, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, seventeenth-century virtuoso, Italian sculptor, architect, decorator, painter, playwright, and poet. Good gracious, that’s someone I didn’t expect to meet at Tate Modern! He adored La Madre and was the first, in my humble opinion the only, artist to see her with the eyes of a marveling connoisseur, in a way that still shocks the faithful. I have knelt before his sculpture in Santa Maria della Vittoria (not before Teresa, who only exists in her writings). Andrew doesn’t need to know this; it’s my secret garden. I’ve said too much already and can’t take any more of his sarcasm; today we are at the altar of the contemporary.

In the video still unfolding on my plasma screen, Louise pays due homage to the master of the baroque. But she objects to his love of drapery: “There was no emptiness [in this work], not an inch that was not filled with folds, as if emptiness was Bernini’s enemy.”⁸ It takes guts to stand before the Praxiteles of modern times and dedicate to him a great galumphing ball with a hole inside! Come off it, Louise!

I stop myself there.

“Hang on, hang on…from one beginning to the next…” Andrew’s squeezing it for all it’s worth. We are treated to Eye to Eye, Blind Mind’s Bluff, Harmless Woman, In and Out, and Passage dangereux, in sequence.

“Hey, did Louise ever go into analysis?” I’m reading a statement that’s splashed on the screen in an achingly avant-garde font: “Unconscious is something which is volcanic in tone, and yet you cannot do anything about it, you better be its friend, you better accept it and even love it if you can, because it might get the better of you, you never know.”

No answer. Andrew looks smug to have caught me out on my home ground. I continue, in a careless voice:

“Well, she’s read her stuff, as artists go! She talks the talk…”

“Yes,” murmurs Andrew, “but it’s embodied in the space of the works. That’s where words get canceled out, you see, in bronze, iron, glass, wood…”

He sounds husky and thoughtful, he really admires her.

B kept a diary, noting down the fleeting ideas or “butterfly-thoughts” that helped her to keep depression at bay. Those thoughts fed and illuminated the gestures of making. Finally the made objects in turn evolved into a mishmash of borrowings from here and there, a multifarious bric-a-brac compacted into private, provisional spaces, the thresholds of new departures. Plural landscapes of rebirth, labyrinthine buddings with multiple facets, kaleidoscopes of absent identities, polymorphous ambiguities, polytopical vitality.

“It’s a female thing, isn’t it, this perpetual starting over, you’d think it was a whole different person,” muses Andrew. Is he wondering aloud, or stating a fact? “Nietzsche was the great pioneer…but he went mad.”

“Syphilis, I believe.”

After all, I don’t really know. I think of Teresa’s re-foundings, her perpetual variations upon those same but always different states of prayer, loss, exile, loss of self, selflessness in Majesty, elucidation…

The repeated new starts that characterize the trajectory of Louise B are not just psychological stages in a therapy of survival. In her borrowings from analysis, self-analysis, and, inevitably, the “intertextuality” of contemporary art, most art critics have merely seen the “subjective cures” of an idiosyncratic artist rather too involved with her own moods. But observed close up in Andrew’s video, these artistic departures don’t strike me as illustrative. Instead they seem to be generated by their own products, in an oeuvre of sudden leaps and eternal returns. In the later, more mature achievements, they manage to condense the ruptures and reprises into polymorphous geometries. Neither a cubist nor a surrealist, although bearing the marks of both “schools,” Louise B juxtaposes without breaking and links without isolating.

“I like Cells the best.” I’m only saying that because it’s a good idea to have a favorite work when approaching an artist. I’ve picked one: Cells.

These cells — whether the units that comprise a sculpture or an installation, or the actual series entitled Cells—are not impenetrable castles. They are merely embryos or shards of life, calling out to one another. Sometimes the link between them is conducted via mirrors, which like the membrane partitions that demarcate the rooms inside Teresa’s interior castle, protect the impregnable singularity of the alveoli. But there are paradoxical gangways between the enclosures: oneiric narrative threads, unthinkable and yet now peaceful anecdotes, open to the gaze.

Take Cell (You Better Grow Up), from 1993. Andrew’s lens slides as lovingly as his prose over the materials, hugs the surfaces, brushes the contours. Steel, glass, marble, ceramic, wood. Here the polyphony of textures materializes in the diversity of forms and voids. A ring of phallic cylinders, old favorites with Louise, variously erect or flabby, twist in this particular Cell like granulated substances heaped into towers, liable to blow away or to collapse. The erectile, sperm-fat Babels of earlier periods are starker here, in these twists of broken glass. Crystals pile up, spinning skyward — threatening at every moment to dwindle, thin, deflate, lured earthward, tempted to come crashing down. On another plane in the same cohabited space, three hands poke up, straight out of another era, Greek, Renaissance, or baroque. It might be a child’s two hands in an adult one, or else a man’s two hands folded in prayer, clasped by a woman’s hand, or vice versa. A glass-paned pagoda stands like a transparent hourglass counting the seconds, which this sculpture will not allow to become petrified; our participative contemplation flows through it. Light spirals over the curves of the building. Three circular, pivoting mirrors encompass these objects, mingle and dissolve them, fracture and recompose them. Not forgetting the spectators and visitors roped into the pirouette of art by these membrane-mirrors, their inner children rediscovering long-lost fantasy caves: the title reminds them that they’d better grow up. Maybe moving into one of these cells is a fine way to do it…

Andrew pours himself a drink. I remain before the screen, watching the documentary.

“Or maybe I’ll go for Topiary IV, takes up less room than the so-called Cells. Just right for my apartment on place d’Italie?” I can’t stop teasing him.

After birds, my favorite beings on earth are trees and shrubs. Like outsize flowers, not content to defy beauty but challenging the tempests of time, they seem to embody the best of human yearning. Topiary IV, from 1999, is a kind of tree-woman, the anti-mermaid par excellence. Instead of swapping her lower body for a fishtail that dreams of water, the tree-woman knows that one day her legs will give way and she’ll be on crutches before she dies. But she keeps her lower woman’s body, sporting a flimsy adolescent frock below the profusely ramifying crown. Her sap has risen, and despite her scanty foliage the tree-woman continues to beguile us with jeweled clusters along her branches. A hybrid made of steel, fabric, beads, and wood, for me this shrub is the heavenly resurrection of Beckett’s Not I. Sometimes a male or female artist, female in the present case, manages to attain the psychic plasticity that transforms a failing body into a blossoming tree.

But Teresa does that too, Andrew, wait! I haven’t got there yet! Let’s see more of your Louise meanwhile.

Oh, this sculpted shrub is nothing like the flowering cherry of the teenager’s body, and yet its bunches of emerald, raspberry, or purple beads caught in the looking glass of time have a vitality that reminds me irresistibly of the freshness of the cherry trees under the Great Wall of China, where I stood in admiration, dreaming I was pregnant. As Andrew and I gaze at it now, the Topiary body seems to be clad in an elegant white satin shift or a teenager’s nightgown, but the body’s missing a leg, she can’t stand up, she needs a crutch, the artist makes no bones about it. And yet for all its dry branches and trunk, the organism grows tall, sprouting and budding — if not into juicy flavors, then into emerald gems. The seduction of crystallization. And what wonderful details: the arms of the artist-arbor, snaking out like the limbs of a Hindu divinity, are full of surprises! Two garnet-colored raspberries, when we expected pink! Plus, I ask you, what’s that sort of orange wineskin doing in a female head that’s a leafless tree tipped with blossoms? Is it a nest for butterflies or caterpillars? Or, given that black hole it’s got, is it a watchful eye, mocking so much assurance on the part of a woman artist, even a runaway one?

At the end of In Search of Lost Time, Proust saw his characters mounted on stilts. They had grown because their bodies incorporated the time of years and turned it into space. Only one of them didn’t age, Odette, the cocotte, associated in the writer’s mordant imagination with his own mother, how blasphemous is that! Odette (and/or the mother) stops time inside her: men can age or grow, she’ll remain in bloom until the end, in spite of everything.⁹ The femininity of Louise B, outside time in its own way, is not afraid to stand tall like a tree of life in defiance of death, laughing at death. Teresa’s the same, which is odd for a Carmelite, isn’t it? You’ll see…

Andrew has finished his whiskey and gets back into gear, clicking on this and that, coming up with more surprises.

“Look at that! I’ll take Seven in Bed, how’s that for a Tantric dream?”

What does he see in these lewdly entwined rag dolls? A three-way orgy mixed with a four-way swinger’s party, at least three of the figures have two heads…Bisexuality, incest, and betrayal. The hurts inflicted on Louise B, in childhood or early youth, are apparent here in rose-tinted version. Are the nestling bodies deceased, aligned in a sarcophagus and already petrified by the lava of memory, that bestows innocence but does not purify? Or are they floating in a state of weightlessness, in some ultra-ecstasy beyond sexual pleasure, in postwrestling reconciliation? Human puppets either way, makeshift stuffed bolsters, tacky and ugly, touching and touched. Evil has not disappeared into some banality or other, but suffering has been staunched by the urge to hug; touch, that most essential of the senses, can be seen and felt in this “sculpture.” Does it posit the victory of the breast over every other kind of eroticism, exhibited, assumed, and dealt with at last? Not really. It represents the same search for the origins of space (the metaphor of our desires, according to Louise B) that her work tirelessly inquires into — in ricochets, with no end in sight.

Teresa veiled her body, she had no choice, modesty and faith required it. But the fiction enacted in her foundations stripped her bare, embraced the Spouse, and diffused their caresses as felt by her — a majestic solitary orgy, a polytopical, kaleidoscopic vitality — through centuries to come. And in all innocence. If Andrew doesn’t want to know, that’s his problem. From the heights of the Tate Modern he looks pityingly down on me, stuck God knows where with my saint. He only has eyes for Louise B, who’s old enough to be his mother or grandmother, as if I cared. We all have our fictions.

It is fate. “It lies not in our power to love or hate…” He hands me a glass of claret, closes the computer, kisses my cleavage, and pulls me toward the bed.

Chapter 28. “GIVE ME TRIALS, LORD; GIVE ME PERSECUTIONS”

A total transformation into God, as what Teresa went through — albeit momentary and climaxing with a translucent castle — is still a living sculpture carved out with blows of programmed death. Andrew admires the edifice and the haste; my pleasure lies in detecting the survival that germinates in the work of death. Ah, the space-time of women! As a child I never cared for snowmen, I used to dig with frozen fingers into the thick, crisp crust in order to free the snowdrops. There had to be some.

To merge with the murdered Lord until the husband-Father becomes a brother-husband, a double, an alter ego, is more than a passion for Teresa, it’s her way to be. To suffer through and for Jesus is hard, but given her complete confidence in His existence, His approval, and her future recompense in the form of His eternal grace, this hardship is clearly preferable to unsatisfied desire and the want of love that damages health as a symptom of hysteria. Teresa knows it and spells it out: “I am my usual self, for trials are health and medicine for me.”¹ The tribulations prompted by the fantasy of reciprocal love relieve her somatic conversions, migraines, and convulsions; the heartaches of love are always “trials,” but far from being experienced as maladies, they are like vehicles of healing to her. In the spiritual life, “everything seems to be a heavy burden, and rightly so, because it involves a war against ourselves.”²

All trials and all persecutions remind her of those Jesus endured, so they can only be glorious. This narcissistic reward, as well as a phallic assumption into identification with the Lord in His troubles, is felt in the short and long term as intense pleasure: “Give me trials, Lord; give me persecutions.”³ Teresa longs for these with complete sincerity, before she gets to reap the still more gratifying rewards of the art of victory. But since the duty of humility most often forbids her to articulate her satisfaction, not to say her personal glorification, all her pleasure will be in “somehow imitating the laborious life that Christ lived.”⁴ Being without self, her jouissance derives from the Other: entirely projected into the Other, she is the Other’s protecting, saving, nonperson.

At that point a further step is possible: the praying woman gives herself leave to consider the pact with the ideal Father as a matrimonial contract, or rather a patrimonial and indeed notarial one, under the rules of a kind of universal community of assets (“what is Yours is mine”). This alliance between proprietors confers on Teresa a far higher dignity than the unlikely “honor” she had struggled for hitherto. La honra is only vanquished by virtue of this most seigneurial (con señorío) marital agreement, and the “friendship” of the divine Father, by whose side she walks for the duration of the Passion, can be received as comfort and more, as a rightful property:

And the Lord said: “You already know of the espousal between you and Me [ya sabes el desposorio que hay entre ti y Mí]. Because of this espousal, whatever I have is yours. So I give you all the trials and sufferings I underwent, and by these means, as with something belonging to you, you can make requests of My Father [con esto puedes pedir a mi Padre como cosa propia]. Although I had heard we share these [somos participantes de esto], now I had heard it in such a different way that it seemed I felt great dominion [pareció había quedado con gran señorío]. The friendship in which this favor was granted me cannot be described here.…since then I look very differently upon what the Lord suffered, as something belonging to me — and it gives me great comfort [como cosa propia, y dame gran alivio].”⁵

Extolling the rights, duties, and benefits of suffering, your most radical passages employ the pronoun “she,” my exiled Teresa. Who is this she? The human soul? The female soul? The Bride in the Song of Songs? It’s your own soul you observe, Teresa, but from so close that its/your contours are blurred, there is no more I, I is overlaid by her, absorbed in her. But you are not erased by this osmosis into the nonperson, you grow bigger by it, and create another, impersonal I; “I” becomes a nonperson in the Christian faith you hoist to its zenith by ceaselessly transcending yourself in your ideal Him, until you become Him. Although you call her “she,” it’s a selfless, sexless “I” that rejoices in being the Other in you, in all senses and meanings, burned away in a wholesale cleansing that is itself re-sexualized. By “putting a cross” over your person, you are not interring yourself, as the ingenuous might think; you are exiling yourself “in majesty.” Among apples, as in the Song of Solomon: “Comfort me with apples.” “Asking to be sustained doesn’t seem to me to involve a request for death but for life and the desire to serve in some way the One to whom she owes so much.”⁶

The transference that transmutes suffering into fruitful jubilation comes at a cost: carnal fulfillment must be renounced, and persecution endured, although you exaggerate the latter at times, as though every moment of your life were a battle. Exhausting, no doubt — but a great deal more bracing than the repose of ennui between bouts of somatization. The benefits of outwitting your harassers far outweigh the drawbacks of being harassed: you obtain the reunion with the Great Other, which not only satisfies an incestuous desire to possess the Father, but also promises the grace of your metamorphosis through the Word that He is, into Eternity. By your work as a founder and re-founder, you taunt the passage of time with spaces of rebirth that are secluded and yet noticeable, incisive. You broaden the course of the world; your way of being, your deeds and your writing drive it outside of itself; with the Other and like the Other, you are outside time.

This surplus jouissance (plus de jouir) in your total transference, which nonbelievers regard as fanciful and affords scant consolation even to regular believers, becomes a physical reality for you, Teresa: the joy of the union with the Beloved is so powerful that it obliterates the perception of ill-being and transforms it into continual jubilation, perpetual acquiescence.

Having reached this fork in the road of psychic experience, you choose neither of the two paths available; but you definitely tilt toward the second.

The first is mortification. Your guilt at transgressing the prohibition (of incest, of carnality), magnified by and through your identification with the sacrificed Father-Son, turns you into a dab hand with scourges and hair shirts. You flagellate yourself diligently, nothing special, until you add an extra twist: your niece Teresita swears she’s seen you rubbing nettles on the welts. There, how’s that for pain! Malicious tongues, out of envy or cynicism, wax ironic on the disinfectant properties of nettles. Even if you knew of this, I doubt there have been many volunteers for such a biting balm. Fasting days are prescribed by the liturgical calendar, but one is welcome to fast more, and you often do. In addition, as an intermittent but proud anorexic, you make yourself throw up by tickling the back of your throat with a goose feather — a quill too far! But that’s the kind of refinement a nun thinks up when competing with the sisters. You want to be the first, the best, the only one to merit the Other’s grace.

For twenty years, and more intensely from 1591 to 1597, more than 1,500 people testified before the Sacred Congregation of Rites for the Counter- Reformation Church to beatify, and then canonize, Teresa of Avila. After death her sanctity rested upon the basis of this collective memory, detailed in the numerous depositions whose accuracy was no doubt tinged with subjectivity. But the reports concurred on one point: Teresa inflicted appalling injuries on herself. “There was nothing she liked more than to martyr her body for the sake of our Lord” (Ana de la Trinidad); “Her haircloth is made of sharp-edged patches to cut the flesh into bleeding wounds” (María de San Ángel); “Her body is covered in sores caused by the scourge and the hair shirt” (Ana de San Bartolomé, her nurse, who testified that even when she was old and sick, Teresa went in for savage penances); “This was a woman who disciplined herself so often that her confessors grew concerned; owing to her constant use of the cilice, her skin was permanently raw, despite her frequent illnesses and convulsive fits” (Beatriz de Jesús); “This torture was so excessive that the confessors often had to intervene” (Alonso de los Ángeles). But Teresa persisted, even when her sores became infected: “The wounds on her body grew empoisoned and turned into pus-filled sacs” (Ana de la Madre de Dios). The precision of these accounts suggests they were genuine observations, not the histrionic hyperbole of zealous companions trying to boost her chances.⁷

Nevertheless, you frowned on the reckless mortifications of friends such as Mariano de San Benito, and even on John of the Cross’s elaborate taste for pain. Nor had you any sympathy for women who are always miserable, plaintive, and ailing; you hated any such weakness in yourself. It’s one thing to take care of nuns who are poorly: the Constitutions prescribe it; but too much melancholy is unacceptable. Sisters, beware! Even love, supposed to be the universal remedy, often induces a lamentable mushiness.

“But I thought Love was our God, Madre?” simpers María Bautista. She is a crooked soul who cannot help being disingenuous and will ultimately prove treacherous.

“Certainly it is, but mind: it must be virile love.” Teresa stares at her with eagle eye. “I would not want you, my daughters, to be womanish in anything, nor would I want you to be like women but like strong men.”⁸

“Like men?!” Cheeky scrap, either pretending to be dim or else asking to be punished.

“The soul understands that so as to reign more sublimely, the only true way is that of suffering. You know that much, María Bautista, don’t you?”⁹

The unfortunate girl didn’t expect such a put-down. Had she forgotten that the truly virile way was to be put to death? That the worst humiliations, when endured in place of the Man, are glorious? Her initiation has only just begun.

Teresa doesn’t let go yet. With regal poise she seizes a rotten cucumber from the table and proffers it to her insolent cousin, transfixing her with the same predatory stare.

“I order you to go plant this in the ground.”

The sarky girl musters up a last show of sham obsequiousness, which does her case no good at all:

“Shall it go upright, or sideways?”

“Sideways!” And with that the superior turns on her heel in disgust. Teresa de Jesús has better things to do than to linger where it stinks of women.¹⁰

You are implacable, Madre, when it comes to the frailties of young nuns. Such as those who seek permission to leave one Carmel for another, right after taking their vows of enclosure: the very idea! General Juan Bautista Rubeo himself authorized one sister to move to a different convent, because she didn’t like the climate! Whatever next? “The devil doesn’t want anything else except to foster the opinion that something like a transfer is possible.”¹¹ You warn Fr. Gratian against such lax indulgence, for you understand “women’s nature” better than he. Is it that self-knowledge you have, of yourself as a woman, that drives you to be so callous? You add, “It is better that some die than that all be harmed.”¹²

You surprise yourself by thinking such thoughts aloud, but the sisters don’t appear alarmed. You’ve drummed it into them, after all, that there’s no better life than to die for the sake of the Lord.

Sadism? Masochism? An urge to raise yourself to the level of the humiliated Phallus, suffering/rejoicing in that humiliation? Words are inadequate to describe the ever-praised sacrifice that enables you to dream of being at one with the Other’s Passion, and yet to find yourself forever wanting, forever falling short of Him.

You have a horror of the weak, the crippled, and the mad (“melancholics,” manic-depressives). You don’t let them in, there’s no place in your convents for them. But what if a woman succumbs to ill-being when she’s already inside? What would happen if an elite nun, the kind you welcome, lost her reason? There’s a grievous trial for you! Why? You’re not upset for that person’s sake, my prideful Teresa. That sort of modern, humanistic, bourgeois notion is still a long way off, even if your blissful osmosis with the Other is preparing the ground, along tortuous and unsuspected paths, for its emergence. No, you are sorry because mental illness in a nun is liable to unsettle all the others, as you write to Mother María de San José in Seville. The order takes precedence over all else: your compassion is simply a form of perfectionism. For that matter, compassion is not the right word: “Perhaps a thrashing will get her to stop screaming. This wouldn’t do her any harm.”¹³ You’ve said it. With melancholics, “use punishment; if light punishment is not enough, try heavy; if one month in the prison cell is not enough, try four months.”¹⁴

Your severity becomes legendary, and while your followers are all for it, your enemies brand you a criminal. Rumor has it you’re an ogre, a bully who enjoys abusing her flock, more a witch than a mother! Well, people are notoriously quick to speak ill of nuns, but watch out, the Inquisition pricks up its ears at this sort of talk.

“The reformed Carmelites tie each other up by the wrists and ankles and flog each other! That’s what people are saying, Mother. The woman who left the Seville convent, María del Corro, is accusing Isabel de San Jerónimo and you, too, Mother, of such practices.” Your daughters wonder, whispering, whether the gossip could be true. Little Teresita is dismayed: What if it were? Tell us it’s not so, Auntie, unless…

“Please God they’re saying nothing worse!” You kick it into the long grass, rather than deny it outright. The compulsion to domination over yourself (“lord of all the elements and of the world”)¹⁵ and others must inevitably lead to some gratuitous nastiness toward your “daughters,” and they don’t spare you either, as we’ve seen. The cruelty of female passion!

In fact, your line on religious suffering is not fixed. In this as in other dwelling places, you are never buoyed by certainty, you waver, groping toward the right path, slipping between the walls of the translucent diamond of your soul. Suffering is the way, agreed. But not absolutely, not always, not to the end. The Constitutions enshrine certain rules, of course, while allowing some leeway for initiative and indulgence:

Work with a time limit should never be given to the Sisters. Each one should strive to work so that the others might have food to eat. They should take into careful account what the rule ordains (that whoever wants to eat must work) and what St. Paul did. If someone should volunteer to take on a fixed daily amount of work, she may do so but ought not to be given a penance if she fails to finish it.¹⁶

The rules limit some penances:

“Should the Lord give a Sister the desire to perform mortification, she should ask permission. This good, devotional practice should not be lost, for some benefits are drawn from it. Let it be done quickly so as not to interfere with the reading.”¹⁷

If punishments are designed to conduct the body toward the Christly ideal, reading could perform the same job, if wisely directed. Would you instate reading in place of penitence?

In response to other infringements, however, you gave yourself free rein — with considerable and undisguised glee:

She should likewise be punished who says something falsely about another. And she should also be obliged to restore, in so far as possible, the good name of the one whose reputation was harmed. And the one who is accused should not respond unless ordered to do so, and then should do so humbly, saying “Benedicite.” And if she answers impatiently, she should receive a heavier penalty, according to the discretion of the presider.¹⁸

You are even wise enough to acknowledge the existence of desires that “offer something good,” as distinct from the egregiousness of “violent thirst.” What’s the difference? Unacceptable desires are those whose pain is so “sweet and delightful” that we, being “indiscreet,” “never think we can have enough of this pain.”¹⁹ You suspect this melancholy masochism of being fomented by the devil, who “tempts one to perform indiscreet penances” purely to wreck one’s health, “take away one’s reason,” and render one finally “deranged.”²⁰ You are certainly the last person who would ever encourage such deviations! We are guilty enough at birth, aren’t we? No need for the devil’s “stratagems”! Your successors, when they completed the regulations, classified potential “faults” in five chapters appended to your section entitled “On the Chapter of Grave Faults.” They were numbered in ascending order, from light faults (49), medium faults (50), and grave faults (51), to “graver faults” (52), culminating in the “gravest faults” (53). You personally counsel prudence in the management of passions, showing your consummate proficiency at settling human scores: “the punishment should be given after the anger has subsided.”²¹ It’s always sensible to postpone the reckoning, my subtle Teresa; what is to be done with passionate love and hate, joy and suffering, except give them time to percolate into the senses, to attach to words, and with any luck, to be illuminated in thoughts? Always postpone: Sea el castigo después de la pasión aplacada. No vindictiveness, no sanctions in the heat of the moment.

All in all, you are for punishment with a cool head, never in anger. Because raw emotion, whether painful or pleasurable, is a jouissance that summons another; it leaves little room for judicious decisions. You, on the contrary, are lucid in passion, my moderate Teresa. You don’t trust your moments of incontinence, your penchant for punishing yourself and others is quite objective. Is this to appease the expert torture-mistress in you, Teresa? Good luck with that!

You go as far as calling yourself “not very penitential,” and I guess you’re right in comparison to other paragons, like Antonio de Jesús or Catalina de Cardona, to name a couple. In 1576, the more moderate flagellant you had lately become wrote to Fr. Mariano:

I have to laugh that Fray Padre Juan de Jesús [Roca] says I want you all to go barefoot, for I am the one who always opposed this to Padre Fray Antonio. He would have found out that he was mistaken had he asked me. My intention was to attract people of talent, for they would be frightened away by a lot of austerity. What was set down was only so as to distinguish ourselves from the other Carmelites.…What I have insisted on with him is that the friars be given good meals.…The other thing I urged that he impose is manual work…Understand, padre, that I am fond of strictness in the practice of virtue but not of austerity, as you see in our houses of nuns. This is perhaps so because I am not very penitential.²²

In your view, then, suffering is not the one and only “true way,” but a means among others — a secondary means? — for attaining the spiritual ideal. In any case it is subordinate to joy, which takes precedence in your experience of faith understood as a wholly fulfilled love. But pain is not entirely discarded, either; how could it be, when your ideal Father is a “beaten Father,” like Jesus, or like don Alonso Sánchez? But you still prefer its sublimation in reading, and even more in writing, which became your “true way” after 1560.

Language is not the only ruse you deploy against rampant masochism. I like to imagine, Teresa, my love, that your dolorism lessened in the same proportion as you became more aware of the eroticized (and preconscious? — no, highly conscious) link with your confessors.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since your very first visions and trances, since the sighting of Jesus’s severe countenance or of that horrid swollen toad. You don’t suppress your desire for the Other or for others any more than anyone else, indeed rather less, as we have seen over and over. Aged sixty-one, on June 15, 1576, you embark on a perilous idyll with your confessor Jerome Gratian; it must surely have an erotic side, no matter how platonic in practice. It’s you I choose to believe on this point, rather than the slanders passed on to the Inquisition. Cloistered, clad in shapeless rough wool, full of repentance as you are, this romantic friendship authorized and reciprocated by Gratian himself channels desire and redirects its turbulence away from the ever-lurking temptations of self-harm. How restful!

“Although…I reflected that this suffering would be very beneficial to my soul, all these actions helped me little. For the fear didn’t go away, and what I felt was a vexing war. I chanced upon a letter in which my good Father [Gratian] refers to what St. Paul says, that God does not permit us to be tempted beyond what we can suffer.”²³

After meeting Gratian, the flesh would no longer be an obstacle. Present or absent, the close friend’s body was more than a dream: it became another incarnate, guilt-free fantasy.

“One night I was very distressed because it had been a long time since I had heard from my Father [Gratian].…He suddenly appeared to me…coming along the road, happy and with a white countenance.…And I wondered if all the light and brilliance that comes from our Lord makes [people in Heaven] white. I heard: ‘Tell him to begin at once, without fear…’ It couldn’t have been my imagination.”²⁴

This was reassurance. If Gratian shared in the “holy humanity” of Jesus — and your love was so strong that you amalgamated the priestly father with the ideal Father — then there was no reason to feel guilty or to literally beat yourself up!

And you went further, Teresa. You invited the gaze of your correspondent Jerome Gratian to creep under your habit, to crawl over your bare skin, and not by itself: a toad — no, a lizard this time, anyway a critter, was there too:

Oh, mi padre, what a terrible thing happened to me! While we were sitting on a haystack considering ourselves lucky to have found it, next to an inn that we were unable to enter, a large salamander or lizard got in between my tunic and my bare arm, and it was the mercy of God that it didn’t get in somewhere else, for I think I would have died, judging from what I felt.²⁵

You are a wicked flirt, Teresa, a perverse little girl, an irresistible seductress armed with a diamantine pen. You submerge the sorrow of lovelessness into the four waters of prayer, you wash it clean and dissolve it in the trust you have in the infinite sublimation within you, that jewel of your carnal being. In short, you drown “all things” and their “nothingness” in that magical charm of yours, which priests and nuns alike have fallen for, hooked by your compelling, seductive motherliness.

By allowing yourself these “friendships”—though you’re not deceived about them, thank God — suffering and passivity in the mind are experienced better than ever with detachment, dejamiento. You are “altered” in the Other (as I call your “exile” toward the Beloved), but since this “alteration” slips between your tunic and your bare skin, but gets no farther, you turn into placidity what some would have felt as alienation. You are altered, not alienated. The symptoms and other penances are converted into a kind of effortless cooperation with His Majesty’s Voice, and this sustains you through the other cooperations you might be involved in, including with “distracted” or “corrupt” people:

“I understood well that these effects didn’t come from me, nor did I gain them through my diligence, for there wasn’t even time for that.…I do hardly anything on my part…it is the Lord who does everything.…souls upon whom the Lord bestows these favors…could be placed in the company of any kind of people. Even if these people are distracted and corrupt.”²⁶

This kind of detachment, without efforts or judgments, does not require any physical punishment. Preached by Osuna, explored from the very beginning of your monastic life, dejamiento becomes — together with writing, and the bonds formed by dint of making foundations — a cheerful serenity tinged with moral masochism, accepted as a chastening deserved, and meekly consented to: “It calls for great humility to be silent at seeing oneself condemned without fault.”²⁷

In the ardor of her ascesis, Teresa exhibits an ambiguity that gives rise to the second path her dolorism would follow before being quieted at last. She often writes to criticize too much intemperance in pain, warning her brother Lorenzo, for instance: “Don’t take the discipline any more than is mentioned [in my letter], in no way should it be taken more than twice a week.”²⁸ Already in the Life, Teresa had argued that to “long to be martyrs”²⁹ often indicates a demonically inspired failure of humility. With insistent ambiguity, though, she delivers her body to the very martyrdom she has just advised against:

Since I am so sickly, I was always tied down without being worth anything until I determined to pay no attention to the body or to my health. Now what I do doesn’t amount to much; but since God desired that I understand this trick of the devil, who put the thought in my head that I would lose my health, I said: What difference does it make if I die; or at the thought of rest, I answered: I no longer need rest but the cross.³⁰

But she is still seeking some precious balance. “It seems to me now that this kind of procedure is a desire to reconcile body and soul so as to preserve one’s rest here below and enjoy God up above. And if we walk in justice and cling to virtue, this will come about.”³¹ Extreme austerity being the devil’s gain, the temptation to look “more penitential than anyone” must be resisted and the supreme challenge faced: to obey her confessors or the mother superior, “since the greatest perfection lies in obedience.”³²

Teresa couldn’t fail to be impressed by the spectacular mortifications performed by Catalina de Cardona at Pastrana. This highborn lady had left the court to spend eight years living in a cave, with only beasts for company, eating roots, and inflicting ghastly tortures on herself.³³ Then she came to the reformed Carmel, in somewhat mannish garb, and continued with her extreme program of penitence. Half wanting to outdo the amazing Catalina, Teresa was goaded to rivalry until the day His Voice — His Majesty’s — rescued her from the command of the Père sévère to harm herself without restraint. It was a good Voice: it saved La Madre from her deadly père-version and reconciled her with an ideal Father who is content with mere filial docility.

“The Lord told me: ‘You are walking on a good and safe path. Do you see all the penance [Catalina de Cardona] does? I value your obedience more.’”³⁴

Whence came this bifurcation, this appeasement? How could you, my fervent Teresa, renounce pain unto death in exchange for “obedience,” choosing that active passivity you constructed in view of the recommencement of time? How were you able to replace “jouissance unto death” with that hyperactive passivity, your symbolic maternity? In opposition to Catalina de Cardona and her vehement masochism, you chose life.

“The desires and impulses for death, which were so strong, have left me, especially since the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene; for I resolved to live very willingly in order to render much service to God. There is the exception sometimes when no matter how much I try to reject the desire to see Him, I cannot.”³⁵

Instead of being penetrated to death by the Other, you make yourself receptive. You replace oral-anal-muscular violence, the kind that swallows-excretes, bites-vomits, that is spasmodic and paralyzing, with an overflowing pragmatism backed up by a real or feigned detachment—“obedience” treated as a mental genitality under the sign of acquiescence and receptiveness, interleaved at times (rarely, but still) with lucid interrogation. “Humility?” you say; your infectious complicity with the Beloved, your tender reliance on Him, emboldens you. In the final analysis, obedience is inflected into a continual mutual nesting of the transcended into the transcendent, the nun into His Voice, the feminine into the masculine…I challenge anybody to separate container from contents!

In the meanders of this movement, with regard to the senses the raptus itself, the forcible usurpation, the abduction of your own body by the Other, who debars you from any other creaturely love object, become transformed into replete orality. You feed on the Voice and Word of the Other that satiates you to the extent of imparting “manly strength” (fuerza de varón). No more anorexia, no more vomiting as you greedily ingest the God who, you do not doubt it, “even in this life…gives the hundredfold.”³⁶

I was also thinking about this comparison. Since what is given to those who are further advanced is totally the same as that given to them in the beginning, we can compare it to a food that many persons eat. Those who eat just a little are left only with a good taste in their mouth for a short while; those who eat more, receive nourishment; those who eat a great deal receive life and strength. So frequently can these latter eat and so filled are they from this food of life that they no longer eat anything that satisfies them other than this food. They see how beneficial it is to them, and their taste has so adapted to this sweetness that it would prefer not living to having to eat other things that serve for no more than to take away the pleasing taste the good food leaves behind.³⁷

Now that the guilt of incest has been lifted, now that He has convinced you, you have the right to love Him and be loved in return. His Voice neither forbids nor judges: it is simply a lovely taste that penetrates with the Voice into all the body’s cavities. Deeper down than the mouth, the guts themselves are touched by it. And this feeling spirals up toward the Other who authorizes the pleasure and gives it a meaning, the meaning of reciprocal love. Orality and genitality, mingled and disinhibited, are no longer felt as “rape” or abduction (in French: un rapt; in Spanish: arrobar, “to tear,” “to mutilate,” “to damage”) but as rapture (French: ravissement). To “ravish” in the sense of entrancement is another cognate; “one” is torn out of oneself, but in a situation of trust. You entrust your bewilderment (desconcierto) and your folly (desatino) to Him so that He might contain them and contain you, as one cradles a baby, and so that you might contain Him as the perforated female body contains a lover. “We are not angels but we have a body.”³⁸

Catalina, who wanted to be a man, couldn’t unite with Him except by sadistically hurting-killing herself. You, just as much of a tomboy and more virile than many of the monks around you, accede by means of fantasy (and who knows, in reality too, perhaps? — the texts are discreet, but undoubtedly suggestive) to female genitality as well as to symbolic motherhood. How was this possible?

Let me hazard an enormity that psychologists and writers might understand. Your appropriation of language by writing revealed another Teresa to you — a new Teresa who transformed the fear of divine judgment into attentiveness to the Other’s Voice. By speaking and writing about your culpable (hence frustrated and painful) desires, you take onto yourself both divine judgment and its redemption. Because you are in the place of the Other, the Other takes Its place in you. Fear is compounded, or rather superseded, by receptiveness: openness, welcome, abandonment to the gift.

This is how from being feared, then heard, the Other rewritten becomes an Other touched, felt via all the senses. Writing does not enact the respect for otherness (for evil, for impossibility, for crime, for “characters”…) as morality would wish, although this can happen too. Through writing, the Other and all forms of alterity cease to be forbidden, cease even to be separate from me. By writing I think them, perceive and possess them, touch and am touched by them. Writing is the supreme, innocent move from word to deed, the consummation-assumption of all prohibitions, including the primal one of incest. Henceforth, by authorizing herself to write, Teresa is “another,” capable of feeling in the fundamental sense of touching. All those “others” who frightened or at least impressed her are inside her, and she is inside them — a reciprocal interpenetration. The Scriptures and Gospels, the family superego, the demands of honra, or the aspiration to the Ideal and to eternity no longer assail you as external imperatives, Teresa, my love, since you have the audacity to assimilate them into your own sensory experience and to impregnate your style, your fiction with them. Others, the Other, are your fiction, which is not even “yours,” since you exist outside yourself, in the third person.

Your writing was born, as we have seen, in the wake of amorous transferences with your confessors (akin to psychoanalytical transference) and with variably loyal fellow nuns and female friends (akin to every heightened attachment between women), all of which unlocked your desires. A sensual body, alive to the passions of men and women, was thus made available to your pen. Through guilt and repression, and despite renunciation and punishment, you built yourself a new corporeal and psychic space; sensual, ravished, in a continual state of elucidation, and, by all these tokens — I say this confidently — a glorious body.

If masochism and its twin, sadism, are not entirely avoided here, they are nonetheless crowned by ravishment, or rapture, and surpassed in “marriage.” Meekness vanishes in a surge of loving elation, and the imaginary flows back into the body and its erogenous zones to relieve them of the tensions that so harrowed the young novice. La Madre’s potency and impotencies together diminish, her dominion and humiliation of self and others abates, her comitial or flagellant mortifications become few and far between. Relieved of desire itself, body and soul find peace in the fusion of everything with nothing, of nothing with everything, of self with Other, of flesh with Word, and vice versa.

You achieved this entrance into the writing of fiction around the age of fifty, with the book of your Life, and you consolidated it through the trials of founding houses, themselves objects of love and writing. I interpret this, also and simultaneously, as a reiteration of the immemorial founding metamorphosis of the speaking being: when the infans, touching and feeling, undergoing and rejecting, begins to move through the language of its home environment and to appropriate it, at which point its sensations become refined into meanings. How many years did it take Toumaï, our prehistoric ancestor, to learn to speak? Did language come about at a stroke or after some protracted evolution? The children who come to my consulting room, my patients’ and my own dives into the forgotten, teach me that I accede to language when the words of other people do not seem a menace or a violation; when other people do not inflict on me either their incomprehensible opacity or their judgments, let alone their blows, frustrations, or neglects. I welcome their voices as they welcome me, I co-take or com-prehend a voice, it does the same to me, in a flowering of sensible intelligence and intelligent sensibility. This leaning on the other voice and its leaning on me place me in a different connection to others: the persecutory other invaginates into the receiving-received other. I cease to be an infans and become a speaking-desiring subject, a thinking child; I build sexual theories; I am a potential seeker.

As its final surprise and greatest benefit, this reciprocal receptiveness is not, or not feared as, a victimized passivity, aggravated throughout one’s life until it is time to merit — maybe — a posthumous reward in heaven. If at the start of my graduation to speaking subject I acquired the use of language through jouissance, then language will never be just a utilitarian communication code for me. I will understand and practice it as a co-penetration: not rape but rapture. Is this a delusion? No, it’s a constant therapy, which takes over from original fear and unpicks the cascading chains of infantile hatefatuations and primal abjections into the trials and pleasures of speaking.

Chapter 29. “WITH THE EARS OF THE SOUL”

Your visions, Teresa, are not perceived with the eyes of the body, you often insist on this point; rather they are built by a listening that avails itself of touch. Does this relate to the infrastructure of language, the gradual intelligibility of sensation, the primary molding of meaning which Julia Kristeva calls “the semiotic”?¹

She never saw anything with her bodily eyes, as has been said. But what she saw was so delicate and intellectual that sometimes at the beginning she thought she had imagined it; at other times she couldn’t think such a thing. Nor did she ever hear with her bodily ears — except twice; and these times she didn’t hear what was being said, nor did she know who was speaking.²

I read and reread your words; might not that “intellectual delicacy” that pertains to your visions be the very element of your interior castle, body and soul included? With the scalpel of your self-analysis, you probe into the deepest, most intimate region, where metaphysical categories overlap and combine — body and/or soul, matter and/or spirit, space and/or time, subject and/or object…From another perspective, an evolutionary one, you might be auscultating the emergence of thought: as a writer, you stand at the borderline where thought is not yet a thought. It is no more than the delicacy of a wholly intelligent flesh, whose understanding is a function of its smelling-listening-seeing-tasting: each sense a threshold you approach and step across in order to come into contact with the Other, and with others, without being raped, frightened, or hurt. Ravished, yes. “In spite of the halo of light surrounding his form, the youthful Persian god remains obscure to us,” writes Freud, dumbfounded by the incestuous bliss of Mithras-Zarathustra.³

During your ecstatic visions that is the face you wear, Teresa, over the body of an infant prior to its separation from the mother, prior to the prohibition of incest.

Here the psychologist in me discerns the glee of the fabulous infantile satisfaction you preserve intact beneath and throughout the separation that prompts humans to speak and which you acquired, like all law-governed humans, by force of grief and melancholy — only to conquer the independence of existing. You are always reconquering that realm, that paradise, while facing up to the ache of prohibition and abandonment.

And yet your sensual reconquest is not confined to a regression, far from it. It is not before, but after separation and prohibitions that you give yourself leave, accompanied by the Voice, to reconquer those delectable depths (the “interior of the soul,” as opposed to “whimsical imagination”), and it is this belated reconquest, on the other side of frustrations and sufferings, that you so scrupulously observe and name. Reconciled with your tempests and attendant comas, you distinguish these from the “external part of our being” that, being prone to sorrows, agitations and disturbances, remains the domain of the devil. Thus you’re able to separate suffering, the kind we call masochistic and which seems connected to an unacceptable “melancholia,” from that “delightful tempest [that] comes from a region other than those regions of which [the devil of disturbing, contentious desires] is lord.”⁴

The Voice of His Majesty, issuing from a different region, is no longer received as an imaginary favor, a “fancy [caprice: antojo],” a flattering, trying, or agonizing injunction from the superego. Instead you hear it as unmistakably as a “loud voice is heard” by the ears of the body. No doubt about it: “There’s no basis for thinking it is caused by melancholy, because melancholy does not produce or fabricate its fancies save in the imagination. This favor proceeds from the interior part of the soul.”⁵

Your enamored state, identified with incest with an Other endowed with the attributes of both parents, profoundly alters your relationship with meaning. Meaning becomes sensible for you, which helps attenuate the cruelty of the prohibitions and the judgment inherent in them. Your relationship to the body is also changed; you take possession of a new body that flourishes in the delicacy of that sensual intelligence made possible, no matter how intermittently, by its incorporation of thought. “A person with the ears of the soul seems to hear those words…so clearly and so in secret.”⁶ The intelligence of your interpenetration with the Other alleviates the spasms, labors, and agitations of ill-being, and allows you to “enter” into the “tempest” of contacts with the Other, a turbulence that carries you away without obliterating you in psychosis. Your union with the Other does not destroy you; there’s no threat of identity catastrophe. On the contrary, you succeed in meticulously depicting the yearning for nonseparation.

“Sometimes my pulse almost stops.…All my longing then is to die…if anything could give the soul consolation, it would be to speak to someone who had suffered this torment.…So it seems to me that this desire for companionship comes from our own weakness…the desire the body and soul have of not being separated is what makes one beg for help.”⁷

True enough, that separation can only be consummated in the eye of the storm; I am reminded of the “depressive position” Melanie Klein considered a psychic precondition for the acquisition of language.⁸ But in your case, Teresa, after that long meditation upon your states of prayer, with which I’m familiar thanks to your accounts, the unbearable separation is redressed by reunion. Confident in the knowledge — or is it faith? — that reconciliation makes up for suffering, the soul feels neither abandoned nor guilty, neither helplessly depressed nor inexorably excited, neither melancholic nor hysterical, even though it has known all of those states. “The soul is purified,” you say, “purged like gold in the crucible.” You’re an alchemist, Teresa, since you can’t be a psychologist. You borrow from the masters of the occult to explicate how, by going through depressiveness with its ascetic temptations, you became worthy of “the enameled gifts” from the Lord. A new “purification” occurs, fulfilled and gratified, a “golden” purgation that preempts the one awaiting sinners in purgatory, with its expected mortifications: “Que en esta pena se purificaba el alma, y se labra o purifica como el oro en el crisol, para poder mejor poner los esmaltes de sus dones, y que se purgaba allí lo que había de estar en purgatorio.”⁹

The prayer of union finally leads your soul to a “complete transformation…in God,”¹⁰ which although it “lasts only a short time” makes you feel “healed.” A therapeutic prayer, then (unlike the one that used to send you into a coma as a novice!) replaces the judgmental, fearsome Voice with a new Voice that offers itself, touching and penetrating while letting the other senses penetrate it.

This new topology of intimacy imbuing your lover’s rapport with the Beloved completely changes the experience of suffering: were you to feel pain, you couldn’t assign to it the negative value of ill-being. This rather undermines the sadomasochistic nosography that I’m pinning on you from the outside! Here, “separation” and “the incest prohibition” are not scotomized; you don’t pitch into psychosis or even perversion, Teresa, my love — I’ll sign you a doctor’s note on that — you only teeter on the edge. Instead, like all the suffering in your realm, separation and prohibition allow themselves to be veiled by a “transparent covering,”¹¹ as you describe in your Dwelling Places — in other words, by your fantasy incarnate, carnal and permissive, as though by a caressing, flimsy veil. As you write it, the pleasure of love in the form of incest with the Son-Father turned Spouse is wiped of guilt by the fable of a “union” you desire so much that you experience it as a physiological reality. Is it a veil, or a penetrable hymen? Nothing licenses me to jump to the conclusion that one or another of your confessors, some intrepid explorer of female desire like your adored Eliseus-Gratian, might have given you the opportunity for congress itself. But we know for a fact that spiteful contemporaries, and you had your share of enemies, did not refrain from hints to that effect.

Given and received, the Voice uttering the words of the Beloved — and therefore also the words of the Bride “transformed” into the Beloved — are freighted with a “supreme authority,” far more powerful than any abstract verbal message. In the new economy of amorous writing, of Teresa’s new body that is constituted by the acts of writing and foundation, there cannot possibly be a barrier between words and things, writing and making, reading and doing work in the world. There are only transitions to and fro through the “veil” (in place of the repression that governs consciousness): “locutions from God effect what they say [speaking and acting: hablando y obrando].”¹² It is not surprising that if He speaks-and-acts, as one would expect from a Creator, Teresa “transformed into Him” also writes and acts (i.e., makes foundations), both things together.

Make no mistake, Teresa is not calling upon human beings to do as they say and say as they do. Her experience is not a morality. Indwelt by a speech reconciled with her desires, she pushes incarnation as far as erasing the last borders between speaking and being, meaning that she only speaks by being and only is by speaking; there is no barrier, just a “veil.” Manic agitation and its symmetrical other face, the melancholic-masochistic guilt generated by forbidden desire, which racked her before, are no longer a threat. Voices and words alongside acts of foundation become, in this great alchemical flask, of “great repose” and “engraved on our memory.”¹³

A great repose engraved in memory?

This experience of incorporation, authorizing the embodied fantasy of incest over and above the incest taboo, will require a new “imaginary vision” if you are to convey it to your sisters and confessors — and to us, your readers in the third millennium. It will be the story of a hidden treasure, the casket enclosing a secret jewel.

The alchemical metaphors and the metamorphoses of this radical experience travel from invisibility to light, from imprint to brilliance, from the casket of empty space to the density of the diamond, from blinding sunlight to the veil of fine linen or the transparency of the gem, from impenetrable stone to infused light. None of these extremes immobilize or alarm her, for they have eased into thresholds, landings, membranes, in the journey of the I toward the Other, of the body toward the soul, in an indefatigable to-and-fro.

The recasting of identities and the suspension of categories was already intrinsic to the Christian dogma of the Incarnation, in which God became a man. But you pushed this logic further, Teresa, to extremes that must have shocked many a theologian. What a heretical notion, this access to an inaccessible “jewel” in a “reliquary” whose keys are in the Beloved’s keeping, but which you, a simple nun, are capable of appropriating! As if you could house the very sun inside yourself, making your conjoined body and soul into a “case” so thoroughly penetrated by the scorching star that nothing separates them any more from Him, beyond a transparent veil. And this diamond, the Other within, is the most precious thing you have — or better said, the most precious thing you are. To have or to be: to have is not enough for you, you must be the gem. Therein resides the effrontery, the heresy, the paranoia (as Jérôme Tristan insists, and I let him, I share, I murmur: To each his alchemy).

So I think you write a madness you have faced up to and yet worked through, in the jouissance of devotion, in a masochism precisely sublimated by writing, and in the realities of foundation, the cherry on the cake.

And since for you the jewel is the “sacred humanity of Christ,” His desiring and desirable body, tortured and glorified, it’s understandable that the contact with Him in visions — as you journey through the permeable dwelling places of your interior castle — no longer kindles fear in you, but only an unbridled ecstasy.

When the Other forbids you from acceding to Him, He is telling you: “Suffer!” and you instantly become melancholic and driven to penitence. When you permit yourself to love Him as a Bride loves her Spouse, you are threatened by delirium: “I am the Other” is an exalting temptation…sent by the devil, perhaps? You step back from the manic extremes of both anguish and excitement, Teresa, shielded from them by that refraction of hallucination — the a-thought of writing — that operates as a self-analysis. Bedazzlement curves back into inscription, ecstasy meets reflection, and the exile outside oneself returns to the reasonable self so that the latter may chart its path.

Only thus can the sublimation of the Passion for the Beloved into sensible, appeased intelligence take over from sex and fear. The quailing of the child before the father’s seductive authority and its terror before the idealized Father, the indomitable proprietor of the enviable, painful maternal destiny, arouse fear and trembling in the eternal infants we are — that Christian believers acknowledge themselves to be. And yet all it takes is to stop living as a beaten child, or even as a beaten father, and recast one’s familial role into that of the receptive wife — so receptive, indeed, that she manages to “transform herself” into Him through their “union.” All it takes is for a delicate intelligence to accompany the desire thus authorized, so that in place of wrath there descends the peace of the elect, the sovereignty of the kingdom. All this occurs within and beyond the strictness of the Primitive Rule that you have no intention of relaxing; in fact you would like to reform it into something stricter still, wouldn’t you, Teresa? And you don’t forget that one must still fear the Father, in view of the Last Judgment; for when He comes “with so much friendliness” to speak with His Bride, it fills her with “such fear”: a fear tamed by writing it.

I say “frightening” because although the Lord’s presence is the most beautiful and delightful a person could imagine even were he to live and labor a thousand years thinking about it (for it far surpasses the limitations of our imagination or intellect), this presence bears such extraordinary majesty that it causes the soul extreme fright.…

O Lord, how we Christians fail to know you! What will that day be when You come to judge, for even when You come here with so much friendliness to speak with your bride, she experiences such fear when she looks at You? Oh daughters, what will it be like when He says in so severe a voice, depart ye who are cursed by My Father? (Matt. 25:41: “Depart from me, ye cursed.”)¹⁴

Fear is not relinquished altogether, but increasingly overlaid with the self-assurance brought by contact with the Other to the point of dissolving into Him, becoming impregnated by Him; and thus you have become, Teresa, someone else. I is another. A Mother.

Is Teresa, body and soul, like a small jewelry box in which the humanity of the Spouse, that desired and desiring body, is secretly lodged? Does she emit sunbeams, the visceral heat of His Majesty within, only separated from her by a scrap of gauze? Or is she perhaps the texture itself, a homemade hymen softly linked to Him? And finally, the diamond: Is it the Other’s precious humanity? Or the indestructible glint of that ecstatic and most intimate inner core, as Teresa is transformed by Communion into Him?

“Once after receiving Communion I was given understanding of how the Father receives within our soul the most holy Body of Christ…There are deep inner secrets revealed when one takes communion. It is a pity that these bodies of ours do not let us enjoy them.”¹⁵

You are evading the issue, Teresa. Allow me to remind you that, contrary to what you claim above, “this body of yours” was right there with you when you communed so blissfully with the Other. Everybody knows that now, thanks to Bernini. I’m willing to admit that “deep inside your soul,” which precedes and entails the metamorphosis of your body — or possibly the other way around — you equated yourself with the nuptials joining Father to Son (since you had “transformed” into Him!). Might you be the Father who contains within Him the Child Jesus, His Majesty pregnant with the God-man, or are you only (if that’s the word) the receptacle of their reconciliation? Here is a curious but ravishing fitting together of forms, a nesting that leaves many of us pensive. Might you embody all by yourself the mystery of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose ins and outs you once discussed in such rarefied fashion with John of the Cross that the pair of you were seen to levitate in your seats, according to the nuns of the Incarnation, all agog at this communion between future saints! And, more miraculously still, the mystery that lifts you above the ground is played out in your woman’s soul-body, no more, no less! The way “that body of yours” never kept you from jouissance is proof enough; your prayerful revelry in Him simply endowed you with a new body, capable of incorporating fantasy and molding itself as it pleased.

The old body has not disappeared, though. All your life you’d have done anything to get rid of it, enduring everything from the slightest mortification to the agony of abrasive hair shirts. The inventive range of punishments you relentlessly inflicted on yourself would be the dark underside of rapture: “A fault this body has is that the more comfort we try to give it the more needs it discovers.…The poor soul is deceived [by these demands] and doesn’t grow.”¹⁶ You are reminded of “many women who are married,” and imagine one who — like your own mother? — “suffers much adversity without being able to receive comfort from anyone lest her husband know that she speaks and complains about it.” “Indeed, we have not come here to receive more comfort than they!”¹⁷ Being married to Jesus, do you atone for the sins of all married women?

To suffer is a woman’s fate, that’s well known, and to die is human, naturally. You seem to bow to this, Teresa, but you don’t really: for you, subjecting the body to “heavy trials” can only serve to prevail over it when the goal is to purify suffering and even to abolish it in order to “enjoy repose.” Repose after Calvary, masochistic joy, is that it?

Or is it rather a question of reaching that “other region” of jubilation disconnected from suffering, pure père-version, exquisite mère-version? You reach it, it seems. Because you write it. I am prepared to believe you. Well, almost. We obviously won’t breathe a word of this to Andrew or Jérôme or Marianne, will we?

You are torn with indecision again, Teresa; sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other, or presumably both at once. Indecision? Or should I say sinuousness, playfulness? Because the ambiguity that plagued you all your life between suffering and sublimation finds an exact designation, an uncanny synthesis, in the verb “to mock.” This word falls abruptly from your nib, to suggest not so much a cruel denial of ill-being as a kind of jaded detachment or mild irony: “So what if we die? If our body has mocked us so often, shouldn’t we mock it at least once?” (“De cuantas veces nos ha burlado el cuerpo, ¿no burlaríamos alguna de él?”).¹⁸

Your body, that cumbersome object, was a burden; now it is a toy. Instead of putting it to death, you dedicate it to the saints, to Jesus, to God — to “our God the Logos,” as old Freud used to say. And here you are, not only rid of your fleshly envelope but delighted to play tricks on it the more it taunts you, what am I saying, the more it tries to knock you out for the count! For example, you think you’ve earned the Other’s love and your sisters’ admiration by performing so many penances. You make yourself vomit in order to have something to offer God (“the Lord is served by something”),¹⁹ for you reckon that He expects treasures from you: “In this life there could be no greater good than the practice of prayer.” Prayer will constitute the exercise that helps you skirt anorexia, and with it the body, but by raising frustration to the rank of a pleasure shared…with the Father-Son. And with your own father, don Alonso Sánchez himself, as we have seen.²⁰

My reading is as follows: so as to resist the impulse to offer your life (your body) to your father, you begin by offering your death (your vomiting body) to the Lord, but you marry your father indirectly, coming together in the Lord: a pretty tortuous defense, admit it! You keep fanning the faith of your father Alonso, so as to lead him to the supreme Good, of course, and to have done with la honra…

After all, none other than Jesus is showing you the way in this. Since he is a man, the Son of Mary gives you “understanding through experience,”²¹ in other words the union with the Beloved is corporeal: Is this your way of disavowing the “spiritual books” your father valued, he who placed God’s immaterial divinity far above the bodily presence that doña Beatriz, like most women, hankered for in novels of courtly love? But you, praying over the Passion and the Resurrection, don’t dissociate God from the flesh. It is clear that the “most sacred humanity of Christ” does not count among the “corporeal things” from which we must “turn aside.” “It is clear that the Creator must be sought through his creatures.” (“Está claro, se ha de buscar al Criador por las criaturas.”)²² How could you possibly dispense with your body, since His is always present for you — contacted, contagious, penetrating, or enveloping?

A daughter of the Renaissance, a woman of zestful vitality, you never forget for a moment that your Lover is “human.” And it is that understanding through experience (por experiencia me lo daba a entender) of the mystery of the Incarnation you are so sure of sharing with Jesus—“incarnate fantasies,” in psychoanalytical terms — that led you to revolutionize the Catholic faith at the end of the sixteenth century.

You interpret Christ’s Passion, with its descent into Hell and ascension into Heaven, as an invitation to acknowledge the violence of human desire, with the ultimate goal of tempering it so as to have a firmer dominion over the world. If the majority of human beings are “scattered” souls, skittish as “wild horses no one can stop,” you consider that the saints, by contrast, could do “whatever they wanted” with God’s help, merely to gain “dominion over all worldly things.”²³ This course is surely the way of perfection you aim to follow.

By uniting with the Other until it becomes Him, the soul goes beyond humility; in its very abandonment, it transcends suffering and acquires “power and authority” (“poderío y señorío”)²⁴ as well as a “great quiet,” a “devout and peaceful recollection.”²⁵ We gather that ideal Fatherhood is no longer punitive for you, but instantly pleasurable and nourishing; it satisfies the person, affirms the advantages of being alive, brings joy. In consequence the task now is to make your word live up to that, to become agreeable so as to be like Him — to be Him? “Think, daughter, of how after it is finished you will not be able to serve Me in ways you can now. Eat for Me and sleep for Me, and let everything you do be for Me, as though you no longer lived but I.”²⁶

To be agreeable to the Third Person, to the nonperson in you; maybe that’s the definition of happiness.

You prefigure the seventeenth-century moralists, Teresa, my love, with that obligation of happiness that you think comes from the Other. “There is…only one duty, to be happy,” Diderot wrote. I wonder whether the inspired encyclopedist ever suspected that one of those nuns whose fanaticism so infuriated him had preceded him along that path?²⁷

With no strain, the soul becomes a babe in arms that “nurses” and comprehends “without effort of the intellect.”²⁸ No more “frenzy”;²⁹ Teresa is through with suffering and punishing, she is all consent and contentment, she says yes. “During the time of this prayer, everything is ‘yes.’ The ‘no’ comes afterward upon seeing that the delight is ended and that one cannot recover it.”³⁰

Negativity, ill-being, angst, discontentment, and criticism only arise “afterward,” as a temporary eclipse of the yes. More than a subjective choice, Teresa’s yes, emanating from the Other, presents itself as an ontological yes she appropriates by appropriating “the sacred humanity of Christ”; perhaps, too, as an unconscious spur to gratitude? The no, on the other hand, along with every species of negativity, mortification, penance, or active realization of sadomasochistic impulses, is only apprehended as a cessation of the essential yes.

Jérôme Tristan keeps looking over my shoulder; I can feel him breathing down my neck as I write. Certainly, my friend, one can interpret this masterly reversal of depression and sophrology into manic exaltation as the paranoid temptation to ensure absolute dominion and control. But you can’t overlook the fact that while this temptation exists, it is both checked by the framework of the Catholic institution with its many rituals and hierarchies and continually deconstructed by the self-analytical discipline of a writing undertaken for the long haul.

I spend my sleepless nights dissecting, with the aid of the magnifying glass and scalpel of my daytime clinical duties, the psychic metamorphoses that make the Teresian castle into a work of art that’s more unusual and differently admirable than the great cathedrals of the Christian West. Has time wiped out these pneumatic dwelling places? Or do they survive beneath various disguises and renovations, like the walls of Avila loom before the handful of tourists who still appreciate their splendor — or rather, their pasteboard-scenery quality?

Teresa the writer who turns to making foundations is no longer the punished child or the beaten Father-Son. The thought-sensation of her tremendous introjection of the loving-loved Other is turned into action, into works. Although the “faculties” (understanding, will, and imagination) may persist in fretful agitation, and there may be no end to struggles, trials, and sufferings, nothing will prevent the soul from joining, not the “sound of the Voice,” but the “work” of the Spirit — the soul’s spirit, or mind:

“This greeting of the Lord must have amounted to much more than is apparent from its sound.…His words are effected in us as deeds.…For it is very certain that in emptying ourselves of all that is creature and detaching ourselves from it for the love of God, the same Lord will fill us with Himself.”³¹ For “the Lord puts the soul in this dwelling of His, which is the center of the soul itself”:

This center of our soul, or this spirit, is something so difficult to explain, and even believe in, that I think, Sisters, I’ll not give you the temptation to disbelieve what I say.…To speak of pain and suffering and say at the same time that the soul is at peace is a difficult thing to explain. I want to make one or more comparisons for you. Please God, I may be saying something through them; but if not, I know that I’m speaking the truth.³²

Does this mean He is the soul? The soul is Him? Pain is peace? Peace is pain?

What is the meaning of the verb to be, here?

“Mas habéis de entender que va mucho de estar a estar”: there is a great difference in the ways one may be.³³ Teresian “ontology,” succeeding to her raptus sublimated into gratitude, does not, however, fall back on quietism. The movement that appropriates be-ing conjugates the verb in the plural: I is an amassment of others. Identity must be porous, presence must be penetrated, and the feeling-thinking subject engaged in a cascading chain of reciprocities with other feeling-thinking subjects. The consent to incest with the ideal Father-Son restores the world as a place of grace and joy: Yes to requited desires and reconciled alterities. Yes to the affirmation of co-presence, to the acceptance of otherness that founds the subject of desire, yes to the infinity of being.

Could this message I have gleaned from Teresa’s words be a universal truth? It is certainly not a call to solidarity with the host of wronged humanity, “the humiliated and insulted,” even if this humanist commitment is embedded in many modern branches of Christianity. Via Teresa’s experiences, a prodigious subjective space is being built before our eyes, one that makes an impression upon the European mentality, even where it does not impose upon it. Unless it be just a grandiose illusion, the crowning glory of the aesthetic religion now fading into globalized virtuality?

The existential joy of Teresa of Avila was (ontologically, unconsciously) founded on the delegation of the Self into the Other — a delegation that had to negotiate any amount of frustrations, separations, travails, punishments, and penances before adhering to the alterities in the self that are manifest in the insatiable activity of representation, that is, the narrative I am capable of producing for, and with, another. This entails a constant translation of the estranged inside oneself, the assumption, body and soul, of I into Him; and this elation reshapes depressive angst into energetic pragmatism. Words thus become not things, but affirmative deeds: yeses, works. The Creator is succeeded, not perhaps by a Creatress, but certainly by a re-foundress.

“Yes,” says Teresa, while writing and founding. And even while dying — especially then. Her “amen” to the Other-Being defies time: that yes falls outside time.

Today, in Alba de Tormes, she is leaving this world to meet her Beloved face to face.