Page 67 - Nada temas, dice ella

gaining back of its demanding singu- larity. Duns Scott’s emphasis on the ecceitas was to formulate this culmina- tion of Christian faith in truth, under- stood as singular and boundless. The experiences favoured by this fulfil- ment will necessarily be writing (as
a clarification of the experience) and foundation (political act which inno- vates institutional space and commu- nal temporality). Teresa takes on the reform of the Carmelite order shod as a shoeless Carmelite a short time after having begun the writing of Book of the Life (1560). She continues to write while founding seventeen mon- asteries over a span of twenty years. In doing so, she shows herself to be ‘the most virile of monks’ (‘I am not
a woman, I am hard-hearted’, she wrote), while at the same time fer- vently defending feminine specificity: she held, for example that women are more fit than men for practicing the spiritual exercise of prayer. She also fought against the Church’s hierarchy and the royalty as an advocate of female monasticism. You can see that
it is not sexual difference (modern problem), but Teresa’s very particu-
lar economy of sublimation which is nevertheless dependent on the Catholic faith which interests me here. As an introduction to Teresa’s singular expe- rience, I shall examine several aspects of her writing and visions.
The only girl in a family of seven boys (before the birth of the last two
children, a girl and a boy), she was very attached to her mother and father, to her brother Rodrigo, to her uncle Pedro, and to her cousin, the son of her other paternal uncle, Fran- cisco, in a family with incestuous overtones. The family was well-to-do but eventually hit hard times. Teresa lost her mother at the age of thirteen. When she decided to become a Carmelite and donned the habit of the Convent of the Incarnation on November 2, 1536, she was twenty- one and her body was a battle ground. She was caught between her guilty desires, which she only mentions in her Life, specifying that her confessors prohibited her from speaking about it and idealizing exaltation as shown by her intense devotion to Mary (Virgin Mother) and Joseph (symbolic father). With marvellous lucidity, she confides in her biography how these torments drove her to convulsions and a loss
of consciousness sometimes followed by comas that lasted up to four days: French epileptologist Dr Pierre Ver- celletto, like the Spaniard, E. Garcia- Albea diagnosed this as ‘temporal epilepsy’.
These fits were accompanied by visions which the cloistered nun de- scribed as auras: not sights by the eyes of the body, but which I would willingly call ‘incarnated fantasies’: in which
all the senses perceive the enveloping, reassuring presence of the loving Hus- band. The ideal Father who persecutes
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