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

Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love follows 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, Kristevas probing alterego, visits the sites and embodiments of the famous mystic and awakens to her own desire for faith, connection, and rebellion.

List of contents

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

About the author

Julia Kristeva, geb. in Bulgarien, seit 1966 in Frankreich lebend, gehört zu den renommiertesten Sprachwissenschaftlerinnen und Psychoanalytikerinnen sowie kritischen intellektuellen Frankreichs. 2004 erhielt sie den norwegischen Holberg-Preis, 2006 den Hannah-Arendt-Preis für politisches Denken; zahlreiche Ehrendoktorwürden, Auszeichnungen und Preise. Sie ist Professorin am Institut Universitaire de France und schrieb einflussreiche Bücher über Psychoanalyse, Literatur und Sprache.

Summary

In the vein of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a scholar immerses herself in a quest to reconstruct the life of an ecstatic saint, turning a past world into a modern marvel.

Report

"The book is written with force, drive, and a verbal agility that carries the reader off and turns the book into a page-turner." - Verena Conley, Harvard University

Product details

• Authors: Julia Kristeva
• Assisted by: Scott Fox (Translation), Lorna Scott Fox (Translation), Lorna Scott-Fox (Translation)
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 23.12.2014
• EAN: 9780231149600
• ISBN: 978-0-231-14960-0
• No. of pages: 648
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Humanities, art, music > Religion/theology > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; FICTION / Historical / General, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women, Biography: general, Fiction, RELIGION / Christianity / Saints & Sainthood, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Critical Theory, Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology, Philosophy of religion, Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church, RELIGION / Christian Living / Women's Interests, Structuralism and Post-structuralism, PSYCHOLOGY / Psychotherapy / Psychoanalysis