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

Kristeva is one of my favorite psychoanalyst/semiotics expert/feminist/philosopher. She is out there in her thinking, one step away from David Leahy himself in terms of the overthrow of modernism and the total discarding of the notion of 'self.' This 600 page 'novel' is in truth an exploration of Teresa's effects on Kristeva...why she chose the format of a novel I can't figure out. Really, a distraction from her presentation and a sheer veneer on her thinking. But then, I am only on p. 150 so there is much more to be revealed. Reading Kristeva changes you, so take your time and grapple with each brilliant thought. I am looking forward to hearing how this imagined life of the saint has affected Julia herself. --I wonder if Kristeva has read Leahy?

I bought this book because I love St. Teresa of Avila, my patron saint. I knew it wouldn't be the life by her,or her life written for a Catholic saint for devotion. This book was written by a psychoanalyst. That thought made mewant to know how that type of person would understand a mystic like Saint Teresa. This book made me think "outside the box" and out of my own comfort zone. The author read and researchedSt.Teresa's life and writings with an open mind. I was surprised at her own thoughts & comments about the spirituallife of this woman, a saint & doctor of the catholic church. If you want an opinion from someone outside of the catholic faith, read this book. It didn't change anythingI believe in Saint Teresa. This book took me on a mind trip with her.

Nice for my Kindle Paperwhite.

This is the type of book that gives intellectuals a bad name. The narrative is akin to the the debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The writing is incredibly dense (think Proust) and the psycho-babble dull. The biographical sections on Theresa are the only redeeming parts - they do not compensate though for the slog through the rest of the novel.

St Teresa of Avila is one of the most studied and emulated Christian mystic. She is an extraordinary role model to be followed by a monastic religious, because she not only gives step-by-step instructions for the ‘interior’ life, but also guides life in a monastic community. She is one of the very few mystics who have recorded in detail their experiences. This record has helped and continues to help numerous mystical aspirants. However, this record has also had an effect that St Teresa could have hardly imagined: it has been made a subject of ‘psychoanalytic investigation’ and worse, turned into an ‘imagined life’ that masqueradesas a ‘novel’.The novel is not seen, because there is none. What Julia Kristeva presents in this book is an unanswered soliloquy, supposedly in front of St Teresa, made ‘scholarly’ by interspersed passages from the saint herself and also from numerous studies on her and psychoanalysis. The reader gets the jolt of life when Kristeva brands St Teresa as one who was ‘unrepentantly carnal … moved by an insatiable desire for men and women’ (9). From then on, Kristeva’s stand becomes clear and all her laborious work with a word-by-word analysis of St Teresa’s writings with the Spanish original given alongside, becomes meaningless, as they are bereft of the ‘passion’ for God, which is quite opposite to the ‘passion’ Kristeva portrays here.Kristeva assumes just too many roles! While her credentials as a philosopher, feminist, author, and psychoanalyst is generally acknowledged by the academia—though her qualifications to be a psychoanalyst, and whether she actually does psychoanalysis is highly doubtful—her being a mystic and interpreter of sacred texts is indeed a new phenomenon! This high-handed attitude has resulted in passages such as this: ‘So, while it’s true that Judaism contains veins of mysticism, that the Upanishads relish sensual joys and annihilation in the sounds of the language, that Muslim Sufism reveals Being and its impossibility together, and that Zen koans are peerless propagators of the Void, it was in Christianity that mystics male and female were to find their royal road. Like Saulon the road to Damascus’ (41).It is only the omniscient genius that Kristeva is, can authoritatively proclaim the ‘sensual joys and annihilation’ of the Upanishads, though numerous scholars who have devoted their entire lives to the study of Upanishads have never found anything even remotely sensual in these sublime texts! One can only glean the vast ignorance that Kristeva flaunts when she denies any presence of mysticism in Judaism, the Upanishads, Sufism, or Zen Buddhism!One could write an equally voluminous book if one were to properly critique the book under review. Kristeva ends her volume with a chapter titled ‘Letter to Denis Diderot on the Infinitesimal Subversion of a Nun’. What is ‘subverted’ is the not so subtle subtext that this book is indeed for the ‘faithless and lawless’ (594).This book has a play, ‘Dialogues from Beyond the Grave’ in four acts, which is at best inconclusive and vague. Psychoanalysts self-appointing themselves to ‘investigate’ saints’ lives forget that there is a sublime ‘desireless’ passion, just as there is an ‘asexual’ orientation. The popularity of this book is alarming as one is concerned with the number of people that are getting a biased perspective.Kristeva clears her objective:‘The point is neither to submit to the intellect, nor to substitute it with restless thought and imagination, but to construct a new expression that constitutes the Teresian discourse: suspension of the intellect, while also eluding that illusory, misleading, mystificatory imagination. A different imagination—let’s call it the imaginary—is ready to “fly about”, to soar free of Teresa, to free her in turn, to deliver her even from God; since God is in “the very deep and intimate part” of her, and it’s this that she seeks to liberate and be liberated from (22).Really? St Teresa of Avila wants to be ‘liberated from’ God? Obviously, the clinical psychologist Sylvia Leclercq, through whom Kristeva dissects the life of St Teresa, is assuming too much! When Leclercq/Kristeva says that St Teresa added to ‘mystical theology … her neuropsychic pathology and her feminine sensuality’ (231), she completely misses the point! Wading more than six hundred pages of undecipherable text that presupposes knowledge of Christian mysticism, psychoanalysis—especially Lacan—and the antics of Kristeva, what does the reader get? Frustration at having not understood the cerebral vomit of a scholar, supposedly holding the mecca of academia, and is left with an unnamed angst to ‘regain’ scholarship to really understand this book! As away from the saint’s life as it can get, this tome can be safely kept aside for those who believe in theorising and sexualising spiritual endeavours, who proclaim: ‘The experience reconstructed by Teresa’s works amounts to a laboratory of masochism and sadism, of which the nun herself became rapidly aware’ (179).

A truly great read by a brilliant author.

Excellent item & service

Très beau livre tant dans la forme que dans le format. Bel objet à donner en cadeau.