Teresa, My Love : : An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila / / Julia Kristeva.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Kristeva, Julia,
• TeilnehmendeR: Scott Fox, Lorna.
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (648 p.) :; ‹B›B&W Illus.: ‹/B›10,, ‹B›Line Drawings: ‹/B›7,, ‹B›Maps: ‹/B›1.

Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love turns a past world into a modern marvel, following Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed with charting her life. Traveling to Spain, Leclercq, Julia Kristeva's probing alter ego, visits the sites and embodiments of the famous mystic and awakens to her own desire for faith, connection, and rebellion. One of Kristeva's most passionate and transporting works, Teresa, My Love interchanges biography, autobiography, analysis, dramatic dialogue, musical scores, and images of paintings and sculpture to engage the reader in Leclercq's-and Kristeva's-journey. Born in 1515, Teresa of Avila outwitted the Spanish Inquisition and was a key reformer of the Carmelite Order. Her experience of ecstasy, which she intimately described in her writings, released her from her body and led to a complete realization of her consciousness, a state Kristeva explores in relation to present-day political failures, religious fundamentalism, and cultural malaise. Incorporating notes from her own psychoanalytic practice, as well as literary and philosophical references, Kristeva builds a fascinating dual diagnosis of contemporary society and the individual psyche while sharing unprecedented insights into her own character.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Abbreviations and Chronology -- Part 1. The Nothingness of All Things -- Chapter 1. Present by Default -- Chapter 2. Mystical Seduction -- Chapter 3. Dreaming, Music, Ocean -- Chapter 4. Homo viator -- Part 2. Understanding Through Fiction -- Chapter 5. Prayer, Writing, Politics -- Chapter 6. How to Write Sensible Experience, or, of Water as the Fiction of Touch -- Chapter 7. The Imaginary of an Unfindable Sense Curled into a God Findable in Me -- Part 3. The Wanderer -- Chapter 8. Everything So Constrained Me -- Chapter 9. Her Lovesickness -- Chapter 10. The Ideal Father and the Host -- Part 4. Extreme Letters, Extremes of Being -- Chapter 11. Bombs and Ramparts -- Chapter 12. "Cristo como hombre" -- Chapter 13. Image, Vision, and Rapture -- Chapter 14. "The soul isn't in possession of its senses, but it rejoices" -- Chapter 15. A Clinical Lucidity -- Chapter 16. The Minx and the Sage -- Chapter 17. Better to Hide . . . ? -- Chapter 18. ". . . or 'to do what lies within my power'"? -- Chapter 19. From Hell to Foundation -- Part 5. From Ecstasy to Action -- Chapter 20. The Great Tide -- Chapter 21. Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and His Majesty -- Chapter 22. The Maternal Vocation -- Chapter 23. Constituting Time -- Chapter 24. Tutti a Cavallo -- Part 6. Foundation- Persecution -- Chapter 25. The Mystic and the Jester -- Chapter 26. A Father Is Beaten to Death -- Chapter 27. A Runaway Girl -- Chapter 28. "Give me trials, Lord ; give me persecutions" -- Chapter 29. "With the ears of the soul" -- Part 7. Dialogues from Beyond the Grave -- Chapter 30. Act 1. Her Women -- Chapter 31. Act 2. Her Eliseus -- Chapter 32. Act 3. Her "Little Seneca" -- Chapter 33. Act 4. The Analyst's Farewell -- Part 8. Postscript -- Chapter 34. Letter to Denis Diderot on the Infinitesimal Subversion of a Nun -- Notes -- Sources