Thérèse mon amour: Julia Kristeva’s St. Teresa of Avila

Speaking Contagiously

Tales of Love, from which I take my epigraph, is Kristeva’s most acute theorization of love. In a chapter titled ‘Throes of Love: the Field of the Metaphor’, Kristeva turns to the thrills of writing love – the lover’s enthusiasm for penning his devotion, and its consequences for the love that is confessed:

Thus perceived, literature appears to me the privileged place where meaning is elaborated and destroyed, where it slips away when one might think that it is being renewed. Such is the metaphor’s effect. Likewise the literary experience stands revealed as an essentially amorous experience, unstabilizing the same through its identification with the other. In this it emulates theology, which, in the same field, has strengthened love into faith, thus subjugating by means of the absolute the critical moment that love comprises; today literature is both the source of “mystical” renewal (to the extent that it provides new amatory spaces) and intrinsic negation of theology to the extent that the only faith literature conveys is the assurance, painful just the same, of its own performance as supreme authority. In love with our own productions, under empty skies, we have not departed from esthetic religion. Religion of the imagination, the Ego, Narcissus, esthetic religion dies harder than Hegel thought. He had perhaps forgotten, while waiting to settle a score with theology, that in this respect one had to consider our loves – with which theology, for its part, had the cunning to concern itself. Since then, forsaken by faith but ever loving, hence imaginative, egoized, narcissistic, we are the faithful of the last religion, the esthetic one. We are all subjects of the metaphor (Kristeva, 1987: 279).

Metaphor, Kristeva suggests, will always confirm representation and not the object it is put to work to describe: the only faith literature inspires is faith in literature and the imagination, accounts of ‘our loves’. This displacement of faith, as Kristeva characterizes it, is neither the fault of metaphor nor of literature but an effect of both, made possible because writers and lovers are ‘in love with our own productions’. The lover-writer, enamoured of his declarations, is a subject of the metaphor because, like the rest of us but with a greater intensity, he places his faith in representation over and above his faith in the object: the metaphor feeds – and, the implication is, subjects him to – the narcissism of his own imagination. Something of this enamourment and its subjection lingers on in literature: ‘The literary experience stands revealed as an essentially amorous experience, unstabilizing the same through its identification with the other’. In literature as in love, Kristeva suggests, we lose a sense of whose metaphors and whose imagination we are reading, and the result is thrilling.

In Kristeva’s elegant analysis of the dangers of ‘esthetic religion’ is a fascinating and perhaps unexpected link between the loves we bear to the object, representation, and theology. Elsewhere, Kristeva has located the origin of what she calls the ‘need to believe’ in the act of speech, a leap of faith that takes the listening child into the realm of symbolic representation: ‘the speaking being is a believing being’ (Kristeva, 2009: 1). ⁶ Above, literature comes to expose some of the central difficulties of theology. Inspiring faith in its own operations, in the renewals and destructions of metaphor as they ‘unstabiliz[e] the same through [their] identification with the other’, the ‘amorous experience’ of literature mirrors theology’s concern with ‘our loves’ and their fate on being imagined and represented. In theology, Kristeva tells us, love has been strengthened into faith: love for a divine object is fortified by its elevation to the symbolic, but the ‘critical moment’ of love is subjugated by the same move. Both written-about love and faith are subjections to metaphor, displacements of love into abstract forms. Given this subjection to metaphor, sensation – the sensation of love (beyond its literature) and the sensation of the object of faith (beyond oneself) – becomes a critical question for Kristeva.

Yet what happens to this question in the case of a doubly literary romance such as that between Kristeva’s writing and the oeuvre of St. Teresa? Thérèse mon amour is the culmination of a long history of reference in Kristeva to the life and work of St. Teresa, and of a sensual identification of intellects: two of Kristeva’s primary critical concerns – the semiotic, paralinguistic elements of language, and the workings of faith and the sacred – are united in the figure of St. Teresa, with her unmistakably somatic love of God and its passionate displacement in the sensuous word of praise. Kristeva, however, does more than elaborate familiar critical themes through St. Teresa. Two years before the publication of Thérèse mon amour, Kristeva published an article on the saint that serves as a striking introduction to the concerns of the book, asking questions that point directly to the récit:

Comment Thérèse s’est-elle appropriée la langue castillane pour lui faire dire que le lien amoureux d’une cloîtrée à l’objet de désir, à l’être autre – en soi-même et/ou hors de soi – que le lien amoureux, donc, est un lien sensible? Comment dire de manière contagieuse cette altérité que lui fait éprouver la séparation dans l’amour, mais qui aussi peut la combler par l’amour? Et qui n’est ni une loi abstraite ni une vocation spirituelle, ni un souci métaphysique: mais inévitablement appel-et-réponse, réciproques et non-symétriques, entre deux corps vivants en contact désirant? Un lien entre deux désirs contagieux? (Kristeva, 2006: 46).

How did Teresa appropriate the Castilian language to make it say that the bond of love between a nun and her object of desire, the other being – in herself and/or outside herself – is a sensuous bond? How did she speak contagiously about the otherness that separation in love makes her feel, but which in love can also fulfil her? And this is neither an abstract law nor a spiritual vocation, nor is it a metaphysical worry: but inevitably a call-and-answer, reciprocal and asymmetrical, between two living bodies in desirous contact? A bond between two contagious desires?

The dilemma here concerns St. Teresa’s relationship with her object of desire, the kind of relationship it is and the way it is spoken or, properly speaking, written. Elsewhere Kristeva has described St. Teresa’s relationship to God as love transformed into ‘an unstoppable impulsive violence, into a passion for the Father which is in truth a sadomasochistic père-version’, a love that, in its rage at the object’s indifference, has absorbed the object into itself (Kristeva, 2009: 49). Yet the bond as it is described in the essay pulls a second relationship into its energies. What begins as commentary on a relationship to the divine and its intractable ‘otherness’, ends up invoking a distinctly terrestrial and sensible call-and-answer – ‘not a metaphysical worry’, ‘between two living bodies’ – and reflecting on precisely the sort of ‘desirous contact’ and ‘contagious desires’ that will occur in Kristeva’s response to St. Teresa. Kristeva’s address in the book to ‘Thérèse mon amour’, ‘ma fervente’ (‘my fervent one’), ‘ma déchausée’ (‘my barefooted one’) is a terrestrial, intimate register of affection that convinces us the relationship is real and immediate, something rather more tactile than literary (Kristeva, 2008b: 35, 506).

Desire, as it is represented and representable, flows only one way in each of these pairings – from St. Teresa to God and from Kristeva to St. Teresa – yet in both cases of desire, or rather, in the case of both desired objects, reciprocated desire is part of the fantasy permitted by the object’s otherness and intractability: I am in relation to God, in exchange with him, in part because there is nothing to prove otherwise; I am in ‘contact’ with an author because there is nothing in her language to put a stop to my fantasy: its indifference to my desires neither encourages nor denies my suit as a reader. Both channels of desire claim a desired object, yet both objects can be sensed and read as the reader desires; impersonal, objective and yet – the fantasy maintains – meant for me. Potentially all and none of these things, the object’s existence here seems to take second place to the desire for it.

What Kristeva does say of the relationship between texts beyond these projections of desire is that St. Teresa ‘speak(s) contagiously’: her desire – moreover, its particular textuality – is catching. Reading St. Teresa’s own writing gives us a sense of how her object of desire determines what writing can do with it. Teresa de Jesús or St. Teresa of Avila, Carmelite reformer and Roman Catholic saint, completed her own spiritual autobiography, Libro de la Vida, in the year 1567, and a guide to religious ecstasy, El Castillo Interior, in 1577. What strikes the reader of both volumes is just how interior Teresa’s castle – with the divine located at its centre – appears to be, how autobiographical her theology is and how fundamental that impression remains to understanding St. Teresa’s mysticism, and Kristeva’s response to it. The following lines from Libro de la Vida were the inspiration for Gianlorenzo Bernini’s iconic sculptural group The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (c.1652) in the Cornaro Chapel of the Basilica Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, in which St. Teresa appears in the throes of a recognizably sexual ecstasy. Describing her impalement by the angel’s spear, she writes:

[El dardo] me parecía meter por el corazón algunas veces y que me llegava a las entrañas. Al sacarle, me parecía las llevava consigo, y me dejava toda abrasada en amor grande de Dios. Era tan grande el dolor, que me hacía dar aquellos quejidos, y tan excesiva la suavidad que me pone este grandísimo dolor, que no hay desear que se quite, ni se contenta el alma con menos que Dios. No es dolor corporal sino espiritual, aunque no deja de participar el cuerpo algo, y aun harto. Es un requiebro tan suave que pasa entre el alma y Dios (Jesús, 2001: 384).

[The spear] seemed at times to be thrust into my heart, and to reach even my entrails. On withdrawing it, [the angel] seemed to draw them out with it, leaving me burning in the love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan, and so excessive was the sweetness of this great pain that I had no desire for relief, nor could my soul content itself with anything less than God. This is not bodily but spiritual pain, although the body takes its share in it, sometimes a little, other times to excess. It is so sweet a suit that takes place between the soul and God.

This divine suit is pure exchange: the spear that seems to ‘draw’ her body ‘out with it’, the libidinal swapping of pain for love, the soul discontented with anything less than God after ‘having’ him. Kristeva has described this exchange as a ‘union avec l’impossible, avec l’indispensable Amour’ (‘union with the impossible, with indispensable Love’), reflecting precisely the paradox at work here: that although God is impossible for St. Teresa, his love is indispensable (Kristeva, 2008b: 59). The question arising repeatedly from Teresa’s meditations – and seconded by Kristeva in her theorizations, we will see – is how to separate this object from its point of sensation in the body; the love and desire that binds Teresa to God is also what makes him impossible for her, intractable insofar as desire and love are tractable – and above all, writable – sensations. ⁷

St. Teresa’s God is symptomatic, a jouissance sensed once in the body and again in its description. What is clear in St. Teresa’s account is that her ecstasy resides between the sensation she calls God and the act of confession, another ‘sweet suit’, this time from St. Teresa’s hand to her beloved object. Her confession elsewhere in the book that ‘no sé qué me digo’ (‘I don’t know what I’m saying’) is hugely suggestive regarding St. Teresa’s relationship with writing: it subordinates what is being said to the impulse to speak; the gesture of enunciation is one thing, but the objects invoked by it are quite another, and enunciation – speech, metaphor, literature – is all Teresa can finally be sure of (Jesús, 2001: 520, 235). Kristeva asks the burning, unanswerable question in This Incredible Need to Believe: ‘do the ravishments exist outside her tales?’ (Kristeva, 2009: 53). Yet the ravishment of her account is finally inseparable from the event. St. Teresa senses her object in moments when her knowledge of him falters, when her belief in perception and her command of description are at their most strained, and when the object most resists her desire.

St. Teresa’s desire for this impossible yet indispensable object is replicated by Kristeva in her own readings, both as a problem and a form of speech. Looking at Thérèse mon amour, we see St. Teresa’s speech and its dilemmas at perhaps their most contagious. The following, part of a breathless, page-long stream of consciousness, describes the ecstasy of St. Teresa as Kristeva reads it:

le petit papillon expire avec une indélébile joie car Jésus est devenu lui c’est-à-dire elle, Jésus papillon, Jésus femme, je connais une personne qui sans être poète compose aussitôt des poèmes, des romans qui sont des poèmes avec quelque chose de plus, des mouvements en plus, vraiment je me demande si c’est moi, Thérèse, qui parle […] les philosophes ne s’en doutent pas, ils deviennent lettrés, ils redoutent vos sensations, les meilleurs se font mathématiciens, ils apprivoisent l’infini, et pourtant c’est aussi simple que ça, mais oui, métaphores transmuées en métamorphoses, à moins que ce ne soit le contraire, mais oui, Thérèse, oui, ma sœur, invisible, extatique, excentrique, hors de vous en vous, hors de moi en moi, oui, Thérèse mon amour, oui (Kristeva, 2008b: 41).

the little butterfly expires with an indelible joy because Jesus has become it, that is to say, her, Jesus butterfly, Jesus woman, I know a person who without being a poet composes poems like that, novels that are poems with an extra something, extra movements, I really wonder whether it is me, Teresa, who speaks […] the philosophers don’t suspect a thing, they become scholars, they dread sensations, the best of them are mathematicians, they tame infinity, and yet it is also that simple, yes, metaphors transmuted into metamorphoses, or perhaps the other way round, but yes, Teresa, yes, my sister, invisible, ecstatic, eccentric, outside yourself in you, outside myself in me, yes, Teresa my love, yes.

Kristeva’s confessions are risky because, like St. Teresa’s, they confess the ‘I’ of desire in the midst of desiring, with all the thrills, urgencies and paradoxes it implies. First, the thrill of collapsed identities: St. Teresa finds that Jesus has become her, the ‘little butterfly’, the composite ‘Jesus woman’, followed by the elliptical non-sequitur about a non-poet writing poems, which tells us we are in a space not only of reflection on writing and authorship (next non-sequitur: ‘I really wonder whether it is me, Teresa, who speaks’), but of a more radical doubt regarding the nature of authorship. In French, too, the syntactic ambiguity of Kristeva’s statement is crucial and unavoidable: the ‘moi’ of ‘si c’est moi, Thérèse, qui parle’ raises the twin possibilities of ‘moi qui parle’ and ‘Thérèse qui parle’; it is both Kristeva and Thérèse interchangeably (‘moi, Thérèse’, or ‘moi, Thérèse’), ‘hors de vous en vous, hors de moi en moi’ (‘outside yourself in you, outside myself in me’), with ‘vous’ and ‘moi’ becoming defunct categories in the act of writing. ⁸

The distempered syntax in which Kristeva addresses her ‘sister’ is another form of intimacy, saluting and reciprocating the fever of St. Teresa’s account. ‘Outside yourself in you, outside myself in me, yes, Teresa my love, yes’ is the performance of what the extract begins by describing: the exchange of identities between lover and beloved, writer and object, that is so rewarding and yet so troublesome for the writer as she accompanies the oeuvre of another author. Passages like this one, displaying the tenor, the symbolic economy of identities, the confessions, and the problems of St. Teresa’s theology, recur throughout Thérèse mon amour (e.g. Kristeva, 2008b: 188–90, 198–203, 477, 506, 527–665). The question of how the writer and the reading involve themselves in the literary object is at the forefront of these commentaries on St. Teresa.

The problem – for St. Teresa and also in a sense for Kristeva – might be restated as follows: ‘le Moi de Thérèse est d’emblée co-naissant dans l’amour de l’Autre et pour l’Autre; et ne cesse de s’écrire dans la spirale de l’appel et de la réponse entre je et toi, entre toi et moi’. (‘The Ego of Teresa is born in the love of the Other and for the Other, and does not cease to be written in the spiral of call and answer between I and you, between you and I’. [Kristeva, 2008b: 36]). St. Teresa becomes herself in love, at the point where love for the Other recedes into the Other’s love, a spiral of relationship inside which identities are indiscernible: as we saw in Tales of Love, ‘the literary experience stands revealed as an essentially amorous experience, unstabilizing the same through its identification with the other’. Kristeva compacts the event into the term ‘co-naissant’, playing on its likeness to ‘connaissant’ (knowing, aware) and on the double significance of the obscure verb ‘co-naître’: to be co-born or born-in-the-world, and to be conscious of oneself in relation to others. ⁹ Teresa is co-born inside love of (and for) the Other, just as she knows herself within it. Kristeva makes the link that begs to be made with Arthur Rimbaud’s famous line ‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is an other’) when she explains that ‘Cette co-naissance ne semble pas être non plus une <<illumination>> Rimbaldienne (<<Je est un autre>>), mais plutôt une intuition proche du transfert freudien: une passion clarifiée de la recherché de soi fondée sur le lien à autrui’ (‘This co-birth doesn’t resemble being nor a Rimbaldian “illumination” (“I is an other”), but moreover an intuition close to the Freudian transference: a passion made clear by the search for self based on the bond to another’ [Kristeva, 2008b: 36]). ¹⁰

Kristeva’s translation of one of Sigmund Freud’s last notes is a subtler instance of the same insight. For Kristeva, Freud tells us in his ‘Note on Mysticism’ (1938) that mysticism is ‘l’autoperception obscure du règne, au-delà du Moi, du Ça’, literally ‘the obscure self-perception of the realm, beyond the Ego, of the Id’ (Kristeva, 2008b: 78; Kristeva, 2007: 38). The comma she inserts after ‘règne’ – not present in Freud’s original – has generated what is, for us, a helpful ambiguity. ¹¹ It makes Ego and Id two potential components of a list (‘beyond the Ego, beyond the Id’), suggesting that the realm being sensed might in fact be beyond both of them; that Mysticism might be a relationship to something beyond conscious perception, beyond even the subject, rather than an introverted drama of the unconscious. Kristeva’s syntax holds the possibility of a bond with a genuine ‘autre’ by which the subject knows him/herself, a real ‘Other’ in the co-naissant relationship of St. Teresa and God.

Guaranteeing the Miracle

The problem of knowledge called co-naissance is the flat fee for human subjectivity. Yet Kristeva has also tied the problem specifically to representation: we are all ‘subjects of the metaphor’. Likewise, although ‘esthetic religion’ or faith in the action of representation is acute in the case of love, we are ‘in love with our own productions’. The ordinary dilemmas of subjectivity gain heightened visibility in creative production and in the tenors of metaphor. It is fitting, then, that Kristeva and St. Teresa’s twin confessions of inspired uncertainty (‘si c’est moi, Thérèse, qui parle’/ ‘if it’s me, Teresa, who speaks’ and ‘no sé qué me digo’/‘I don’t know what I’m saying’) both point the finger at the act of saying, at ‘parler’ and ‘decir’ respectively: when the object of desire is in doubt – when its meaningfulness or reciprocity cannot be confirmed – metaphor stands in; in the faith both ‘religions’ place in the fidelity of metaphor, Kristeva has suggested, ‘esthetic religion’ is the body double of religion.

While Kristeva herself might not, it has been noted, ‘speak religiously’ – that is, while her biblical exegesis and engagement with the phenomena of belief might not themselves be believing – her readings of Christian faith tie some of its central difficulties to the question of language and representation (McNelly Kearns, 1992: 111; Kristeva, 2009). The principal way Kristeva frames the difficulty of writing about the beloved object, ambiguously tied both to religious and secular love, is, we saw, as a problem of narcissism. Narcissism is a problem that theology (because concerned with love and imagination) brings to the fore:

In love with our own productions, under empty skies, we have not departed from esthetic religion. Religion of the imagination, the Ego, Narcissus, esthetic religion dies harder than Hegel thought […] Since then, forsaken by faith but ever loving, hence imaginative, egoized, narcissistic, we are the faithful of the last religion, the esthetic one (Kristeva, 1987: 279).

In his paper ‘On Narcissism’ (1914), Freud proposes that one of the primary characteristics of narcissism is autoerotic sexuality (Freud, 1957: 67–104; Fonagy et al., 2012). Scanning Simone de Beauvoir’s comments on St. Teresa in The Second Sex (1949), we see her insist that St. Teresa’s mysticism, unusually, is not ‘erotomaniacal’ because of the compelling control exercised by the saint over her own body: unlike the imprisoned eros of the hysteric, St. Teresa’s eros speaks from a free, luxuriant consciousness; her writing is virile where the mystic’s, for de Beauvoir, is hysterical and sublimating (de Beauvoir, 1974: 747, 752; Hollywood, 2002: 128–31). Although her control is perhaps less clear than de Beauvoir suggests (‘no sé qué me digo’/‘I don’t know what I’m saying’), St. Teresa’s representation of God as one with herself is part of a sustained philosophy rather than a hysterical accident. If we follow de Beauvoir, the ecstasy of St. Teresa, Kristeva’s ‘Maîtresse du narcissisme’, is not a melee of sensations but a deliberate expression of God’s sensation in herself, of the unit called ‘Jesus woman’ (Kristeva, 2008: 33).

The Castillo Interior is the symbol par excellence of this unit (Kristeva, 2006: 2008b). The Castle is St. Teresa’s interior sanctuary, with God in its (her) utmost recesses: neither exterior nor entirely separate, God is at the point inside the self where the self ceases to see or recognize itself. Kristeva has spoken about the psychoanalytic resonance of the Interior Castle, invoking D.W. Winnicott’s ‘transitional phenomena’, precursors, for Winnicott, of religious and artistic experience, and Freud’s late writing on mysticism. ¹² An obvious reference for thinking psychoanalytically about St. Teresa’s theology is Freud’s famous insight that, because of the unconscious work of the drives, ‘the ego is not master in its own house’: there is an otherness inside psychic life – a force Freud sought to distance from theology and mysticism – that displaces man from the centre of his own being (Freud, 1955: 143; Kristeva, 2009: 8–9).

Along the same lines, Kristeva links the Interior Castle to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s concept of the monad:

Il [Leibniz] écrit dans une lettre à Morrell du 10 décembre 1696: «Et quant à sainte Thérèse, vous avez raison d’en estimer les ouvrages; j’y trouvai cette belle pensée que l’âme doit concevoir les choses comme s’il n’y avait que Dieu et elle au monde. Ce qui donne même une réflexion considérable en philosophie, que j’ai employée utilement dans une de mes hypothèses». Thérèse inspiratrice des monades leibniziennes toujours déjà contenant l’infini? Thérèse précurseur du calcul infinitésimal? (Kristeva, 2006: 49).

He [Leibniz] writes in a letter to Morrell of 10^th December 1696: “As for saint Teresa, you’re right to esteem her work; in it I found this wonderful thought that the soul must conceive things as though there were only God and herself in the world. This opens up a considerable point of philosophical reflection, which I have put to good use in one of my hypotheses.” Teresa, the inspiration of Leibnizian monads always already containing the infinite? Teresa, precursor of infinitesimal calculus?

The Interior Castle imagines God as the utmost extension of the self inward: where that self becomes strange to itself and recedes into a blind spot, what Leibniz calls infinity and what Freud calls the unconscious (Kristeva, 2008b: 37, 125, 168). ¹³ As Kristeva’s translation of Freud makes clear, this self-otherness can be granted an origin outside the mind, or attributed to the uncanny sensation of the unconscious. In Leibniz’s La Monadologie (1714), the monad is a metaphysical unit of being with an indivisible centre of force: for Leibniz, God too is a monad.

Invoking Leibniz on St. Teresa, Kristeva suggests that the God-Teresa relationship is so intimate that its metaphysics disbands any association of the monad with physical singularity. If God and St. Teresa are a monad, then God is part of St. Teresa in a way that makes it difficult to say whether her confessions are more autoerotic thrill than intercourse with another. Preempting such doubts, Kristeva flags up the fact that for Leibniz the monad points to infinity, made up of an infinite number of real and possible monads in the world. St. Teresa’s castle of the unconscious is herself, the paradox goes, yet its recesses point toward infinity and the other. Like Freud’s mysterious kingdom ‘beyond the Ego’, the Castle is the birthplace of the monad and the cradle of religious faith.

The paradox of the monad, alongside St. Teresa’s confession of her expressive limitations, is a form of intervention – we might say an ethical intervention – in the narcissism not just of relationship but of its representation. Kristeva’s engagement with narcissism can be traced back to her early writings on poetic language and the disruptive action of the semiotic, a disruption that is key to the ethical and revolutionary potential of writing. The ethical appears as a moment of exchange and, above all, tension between forms of meaning in language – the Symbolic (or semantic meaning) on the one hand, and the musical, prosodic and paralinguistic residues of the body on the other. In her early Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva explains that–

“Ethics” should be understood here to mean the negativizing of narcissism within a practice; in other words, a practice is ethical when it dissolves those narcissistic fixations (ones that are narrowly confined to the subject) to which the signifying process succumbs in its socio-symbolic realization (Kristeva, 1984: 233).

The ‘practice’ to which Kristeva refers here can be read using her own analysis of representation and symbolism: the acute narcissism of ‘esthetic religion’, the state of being she calls ‘in love with our own productions’. For Kristeva, writing in 1974, poetic language is the most ethical of languages because its physiology, the upsurge of sound and rhythm evoking the bodily drives, disrupts the authority of the signifier – and the writer/reader’s illusion of his own (Kristeva, 1980, 124–28; see Fisher, 1992: 91–106). There is an ethics, then, in poetry’s inclusion of forms of tension and resistance that trouble our sense of possessing language and meaning, unsettling the relationship between language, discursive production and the world.

This ethics takes a subtle theological turn in ‘Stabat Mater’, Kristeva’s essay on narcissism, aesthetics, and motherhood, accompanied by a poetic meditation. Kristeva urges the reader to ‘let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, broken up visions, metaphors of the invisible’ (Kristeva, 1987: 235). Invoking John 1:14, Kristeva tells a story of words’ separation from flesh and the adventure of their reunion, an elusive congress between language and being. We might recall her arguments about the troubadour for whom, in his writing, no object is impossible, not even the body of his beloved: the flesh of writing, congress of words and bodies, may be an expression of potency – the triumphant return of the repressed body and a form of resistance to the Symbolic – but it falls under the banner of ‘productions’, artful substitutes for the beloved object. The question remains as to how the physiological power of the word might serve the writer-lover and the beloved object more directly, more keenly, than it serves rhetorical production.

Kristeva provides us with a possible solution to this dilemma in her study of another literary love object, the French novelist, Colette (1873-1954). Colette: the Word’s Flesh (2002), the last in a three volume series celebrating ‘Female Genius’ (including studies of Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein), is another what we might call devotional work of criticism, paying homage and meticulous attention to Colette’s use of highly sensitized, sensual prose as an auxiliary organ of the body. Following an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva’s readings in Colette adopt the Merleau-Pontian premise that ‘The seen world is not “in” my body and my body is not ultimately “in” the visible world: flesh applied to flesh, the world does not surround it, nor is it surrounded by it’ (Kristeva, 2004: epigraph; Merleau-Ponty, 1964). For Kristeva, this chiasm of flesh and world belongs specifically to writing – to the writing of Colette (who ‘found a language to express a strange osmosis between her sensations, her desires […] and the infiniteness of the world, the blossoming of flowers, the rippling of beasts’) and to writing as Colette sees it (‘Between the real and the imagined, there is always the place of the word, the magnificent word, larger than the object’ [Kristeva, 2004: 1, 9]).

Colette’s real and lasting affair, Kristeva suggests, is with language. The magnificent word stands its own volupté in front of the object, and invites Colette, also deeply ‘in love with [her] own productions’, to relish the result. In her writing, as, we might say, in St. Teresa’s, ‘[the author’s] sex is everywhere and nowhere, as mental as it is cutaneous’, ‘a sensuality that fills the mouth, that fills language’ (Kristeva, 2004: 258, 15). This sensuality touches nothing and everything, becoming a response to its own expression as Colette enjoys her own verbal ardour and accomplishment without restraint. ‘Writing’, Kristeva concludes, as she does in Tales of Love, ‘leads only to writing’ (Kristeva, 2004: 392, 402).

Desire folding into its expression in words is a phenomenon Kristeva links in Colette to mysticism: ‘it is writing that offers, for mystical woman saints and for modern “writeresses” [ecrivains] a privileged shelter for the mysterious folds and recesses of that hypersensitive intimacy’ (Kristeva, 2004: 243, 9). That such an intimacy with language, involved in and pointing back to itself, is a substitute for physical objects and physical love is something Michel de Certeau has proposed most suggestively by describing the discourse of mysticism as ‘childbirth by the ear’ (Certeau, 1992: 80). How, then, if at all, might this body of language incorporate traces of the original beloved object? Or, how might St. Teresa’s speech convince us that it mediates something beyond language and its sensation? Kristeva’s own conclusion is that, ‘c’est votre propre âme que vous observez, Thérèse, mais à une proximité telle que vous perdez vos contours’ (‘it is your own soul that you observe, Teresa, but at such a proximity that you lose your contours’ [Kristeva, 2008b: 495]). There is no caesura between this supposed object and the soul who senses, Kristeva’s ‘femme sans frontières’; no way, it seems, to confirm the object beyond its sensation and beyond speech (Kristeva, 2008b: 40).

Yet finally, like the structure of the Leibnizian monad, the Kristeva-Teresa relationship seems to suggest that the farther one goes in confessing one’s love and desire, the closer one is to sensing the other inside the confession – in the recesses, rhythms, and resistances of language. We have seen one example of Kristeva’s ‘Teresian’ ecstasy into which the identities of one and other collapse. Again occupying the ‘moi’ of St. Teresa, Kristeva seduces us into reading ‘Teresa’ (and herself) in the trance-like confession-sensation of language, euphony, and rhythm, an interface between two points of origin that unites them in sounding, moving and in and out of St. Teresa’s terms:

Il est en elle, elle en Lui, Pressenti senti englouti, sensation sans perception, dard ou cristal… un jumeau du Christ, elle est Lui, Lui est elle, la Vérité c’est moi, moi Thérèse, parano réussie, Dieu c’est moi et alors! qu’est-ce? (Kristeva, 2008b: 40).

He is in her, she in Him, Sensed felt engulfed, sensation without perception, spear or crystal… a twin of Christ, she is Him, He is her, the Truth is me, me Teresa, paranoia under control, God is me and so what! What is that?

The opening incantations sound the meeting of two in one, in dancing dactylic rhythms that mirror one another either side of the plateau ‘elle’ (‘Il est en elle, elle en Lui’/‘He is in her, she in Him’), and in a chanted assonance that sustains the sense of likeness (‘Pressenti senti englouti’/‘Sensed, felt, engulfed’) in kindred sounds. Difference, or potential difference, is sensed and toyed with at the level of the semiotic, features in which Kristeva reads an ethical affront to narcissism, and into which she places her own presence, a repeated but unassuming ‘moi’.

Kristeva’s ecstatic mimicry of St. Teresa’s transports may be a casuistic way of reading her – announcing intimacy, even substituting mimicry for interpretation – but is also a fundamentally Teresian endeavour, a passionate search inside feats of language for something unfamiliar and disruptive, something apart from the author’s own productions. Just as the reality of St. Teresa’s God is both heightened and jeopardized by being sensed in her body, so reading St. Teresa via her sensation in Kristeva’s language becomes both a problem and a solution in the work, as her writing finds itself in a shared predicament with the saint. Kristeva notes on the first page of Thérèse mon amour that the narcissism of sensation alone somehow fails to touch, falling just short of its craved effect in the world: ‘le voluptueux orgueil ne brisera jamais l’hymen’ (‘voluptuous pride will never break the hymen’ [Kristeva, 2008b: 14]). So long as its own volupté is enough, she suggests, her writing will never finally have St. Teresa.

In his thesis on the Trauerspiel (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1925), Walter Benjamin narrates the following anecdote from the life of St. Teresa.

St. Theresa sees the virgin strewing roses on her bed; she tells her confessor. “I see none,” he replies. “Our lady brought them to me,” answers the saint. In this way the display of manifest subjectivity becomes a formal guarantee of the miracle, because it proclaims the divine action itself (Benjamin, 1998: 234).

For the lover, in his musings, everything is ‘brought to me’ – all signs are addresses, coding an erotic intent that either denies or affirms his desire. Reading everything as certain, the lover’s subjectivity also throws every certainty into doubt. Yet strident, radiant subjectivity, both for St. Teresa and for Benjamin, is also the best guarantee there is. If subjectivity ‘guarantee[s] the miracle’, then Kristeva’s observations that ‘Thérèse s’exprime comme une analyste’ (‘Teresa expresses herself like an analyst’), ‘Serait-elle aussi, et contre tout vraisemblance, notre contemporaine?’ (‘Might she also be, and against all likelihood, our contemporary?’), and ‘Thérèse m’absorbe trop’ (‘Teresa absorbs me too much’) guarantee the trace of St. Teresa in Kristeva’s writing because they confess the passion of her projections and literary casuistry, and, by doing so, alert us to how far those luxuriant projections fall short of the woman, the infinity, they reach for – how far and wide language roams from our loves, all the while vibrating with their sensation (Kristeva, 2008b: 22, 16, 477). By confessing their literariness, Kristeva’s descriptions also signal their own precariousness, their status as devices and signifiers of love, not objects of love in themselves. Her language signposts a love apart from self-love (or the author’s love for her language): an ungraspable private relation beyond the narcissism of literature. In this way, Kristeva persuades that the relationship with St. Teresa is with something more than just her own productions. That there were roses strewn on a bed.