Page 66 - Nada temas, dice ella

Ages, numerous melancholics and anorexics flocked to the church to
eat a sliver of the bleeding, mistreated body of the Man-God, which allowed them to subsist many years in a state of exaltation, in spite of their hunger through oral and symbolic satisfaction. For having made idealization-resexu- alization oral, Christianity simultane- ously made the word itself the ultimate object of desire and love: ‘Nothing entering a man from the outside can defile him but the things that come out of a man render the person unclean.’ (Matthew 15, 11 and Mark 7,15). Teresa is not only conscious of this essential orality of her love for the Husband, endowed with maternal attributes,
but she forcefully claims it, and with disarming ingenuity, takes the plunge that leads from this God with breasts to the pleasure of saying, from the pleasure of nursing to verbal sublima- tion: ‘The soul said that it savored
the milk flowing from God’s breast’, wrote the saint in her Thoughts on God’s Love (5: 5). In the same breath she tirelessly comments on the fa- mous verse of the Song of Songs ‘May he kiss me with kisses of his lips’, before punctuating: ‘These words can be understood in many ways ... but the soul is not concerned with that. What it wants is to pronounce it’ (el alma no quiere ninguno, sino decir estas palabras (1: 10). From the pleasure of nursing at the breast to the pleasure of saying: what is the difference? Is it not the
same jouissance? Teresa is on her way to becoming a psychoanalyst. Conse- quently genitality disappears from her fantasies, for it is displaced and becomes the pleasure of rebirth through orality. This rebirth is doubly assured: by the cannibalistic identifi- cation with the beaten Father on the one hand and on the other, the regain- ing of Time as a form of eternity of the word, which becomes the original object of desire (object ‘a’), a narration open to the infinite search for neces- sarily subjective meaning.
These three aspects of Christian faith which the mystic highlights
– 1. an ideal Father exists, Faith is the love of and for this father; 2. this ide- alization resexualizes itself: the Father is a beaten father and I take pleasure alongside him in his castration and death; 3. but I also identify with Him through the orality of the Eucharist and the word, a veritable creator of parthenogenesis, of a self-engendering of the Ego which opens Time and sublimation for me – provide a subtle and highly efficient device. One that at once provokes, accompanies and modulates the accidents incurred by the untangling of drives, which is to say the dissociation of the erotic drive and the death instinct: somatization, perversion, sublimation.
One understands that in a libidinal system thus constituted, the feminine and the maternal are absorbed in the subject of sublimation’s permanent
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