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Spain and Islam Once More Fundamentalism in Sainte Thérèse D’Avila Spain and Islam Once More Fundamentalism in Sainte Thérèse d’Avila Carol Mastrangelo Bové Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XXVI, No 2 (2018) pp. 69-80 Vol XXVI, No 2 (2018) ISSN 1936-6280 (print) ISSN 2155-1162 (online) DOI 10.5195/jffp.2018.859 www.jffp.org This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. This journal is operated by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is co-sponsored by the UniversityJournal of Pittsburgh of French and Press Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française Vol XXVI, No 2 (2018) | www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2018.859 Spain and Islam Once More Fundamentalism in Sainte Thérèse d’Avila Carol Mastrangelo Bové University of Pittsburgh Julia Kristeva's Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila confronts us with the contemporary problem of violent forms of fundamentalism, especially Islamic, as it recreates the life of Saint Teresa. The novel's psychoanalytic perspective engages our emotions and sensations, and is also therapeutic for author and reader. But most of all, it engages our thinking and deals in depth with this compelling, timely issue. Sainte Thérèse is a modernist text to the degree that it foregrounds both Teresa of Avila and Sylvia Leclercq as women who attempt to break with Western orthodox thought in a rationalist cast, including the images it deems acceptable, and to subvert practices harmful to the individual psyche and to social relations. Other examples of such texts foregrounding courageous, unconventional women, which I have examined elsewhere from a psychoanalytic point of view, include Simone DeBeauvoir's novel, She Came to Stay; Jean Renoir's film Rules of the Game; and François Truffaut's movie, Jules and Jim. Virginia Woolf's novels, along with Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands: la Frontera, also hybrid like Teresa, My Love, provide further instances of such texts. Like these female protagonists, Sylvia resists language and behavior harmful to individuals and to groups especially in the two parts of her life that are most important to her: 1) the therapy she provides Paul and Elise, and 2) her research on Teresa. While she offers no explicit reason for stating that it is primarily since 9/11 that these projects have commanded her attention, it becomes clear in the novel’s context that the attacks on the World Trade Towers have something in common with rationalism's legacy, despite the very different cultural traditions with which they are associated. The element that the attacks may share with many forms of rationalism deriving especially from René Descartes's work is the drive to assert its dogma in a literal and systematic way in an attempt to unite with an authoritative father figure. For Kristeva, this drive of fundamentalism is not unlike Descartes’s view of the mind as it develops during the Enlightenment and attempts to impose its monotheistic, patriarchal hegemony on the world, believing itself Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française Vol XXVI, No 2 (2018) | www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2018.859 70 | Spain and Islam Once More undistorted by the body and its sensations and emotions. In this way, Kristeva rereads Sylvia’s engagement with both Teresa’s Catholic mysticism and her work at the clinic psychoanalytically: as therapeutic and ethical practices opposed to the legacy of rationalism, and in particular to the religious fundamentalisms, which may be linked to it. Teresa, My Love distinguishes Saint Teresa's brand of mysticism from those inscribed within rationalism, taking her revelation of Christ's injunction to her, "Seek Yourself in Me" as a point of departure.1 Kristeva writes a biographical novel, which gives coherence to the book's variety of genres as well as insights into her critique of rationalism by means of a theory of the semiotic/symbolic. Valuable in itself as fiction, the book is a new and more radical form of hybrid text, both different from but yet not unlike Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands: La Frontera. These modernist texts foreground an unconventional woman and blatantly cross genre boundaries, "jump-cutting," in Kristeva's case, among biography, fiction, philosophical tale, psychoanalytic cultural theory, and theatre, an unusual mix. One of her principal goals, as I read Teresa, My Love, is ultimately to address the contemporary problem of violent forms of "Islamic Fundamentalism," especially its connections to psychological formations arising from patriarchal, rationalist roots and leading to the hoarding of resources, hate, and aggression. There are in fact about 70 references, both direct and indirect, to "Islamic Fundamentalism" in the novel, notably referring often to the work of fundamentalist groups in the discussion of 9/11, of the explosions on the Madrid trains in 2004, and of those on the London metro in 2005. It is fair to say that Kristeva uses the term "Islamic Fundamentalism" to raise questions about violent versions of this religion. Here I use quotation marks to indicate that the vocabulary is problematic; I will sometimes use the less problematic "jihadism." Marty Martin points out that while all fundamentalisms are patriarchal, undifferentiated condemnation of these -isms encourages the recruitment of violent "Islamic Fundamentalists."2 It is possible that the term "Islamic Fundamentalism" itself inappropriately and dangerously condemns various Fundamentalists. In other words, the term has racist connotations, which make Kristeva’s novel vulnerable to the charge of racism. Some critics of American imperialism and its marginalization of "Islamic Fundamentalism" may argue that this vocabulary is part of the failure to differentiate among forms of fundamentalism, a failure that could also be applied to Teresa, My Love, and that 9/11 is a response to such marginalization. My title, "Spain and Islam Once More" points to Kristeva's exploration of religion and the confrontation with terrorism by moving back to a place and a "once upon a time" when Christians, Jews, and Muslims did a better job of living together. She harkens back to that world in the Seville episodes in which Teresa meets her greatest challenges threatened by the Inquisition. Yet, the novel depicts this most famous of Andalusian cities as a place of great Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française Vol XXVI, No 2 (2018) | http://www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2018.859 Carol Mastrangelo Bové | 71 energy and passion, the image of the life of the body resisting the constraints of the social contract including its threats. She writes: One thing has never been plainer than it is here, in Seville: the world threatens to gag you, Teresa, my love, it may end up by burning you alive. What do you expect when you move from pure ecstasy to the work of founding, when you aspire to found pure ecstasy in the world, against the world, but with the world?"3 Kristeva makes clear, as this unwieldy, 700-page novel unfolds, that the key to Teresa's dangerous project is her ability to "write a literary work," that is to say, to open a space within her psyche, an ability lacking in "Islamic Fundamentalism." Such a space enables her to transcend her isolation and the pain inflicted by a patriarchal society, which marginalizes her. She distances herself from herself as Other in a process of interior doubling. At the same time, she engages in the world by communicating with readers and also by reforming the Carmelite order. Opening this space would mean giving rein to fantasy in Teresa's experience of union with a human Christ, that is, the feminine, semiotic function of language. Kristeva implies that such a union is distinct from that of "Islamic Fundamentalists" who pursue a purely masculine God while Teresa's human Christ is androgynous. Teresa's creation of a literary text would also mean going beyond her yielding to fantasy by asserting the masculine, symbolic pole in writing up her experience. Recognizing the existence of bodily responses — physical and emotional components of herself — leads to a moving beyond bodily responses to imagining them in writing for an audience. She also recognizes and moves beyond them in her founding of seventeen new convents of Barefoot Carmelites, recreating her union with Christ, the man, in the nuns' reformed way of life. Teresa’s mysticism demands that one listen to the voice of love with its hidden layer of hate both in and outside of the psyche. Here, Kristeva/Sylvia builds upon Freud's elaboration of a similar voice, which brings the death drive into his theory of Eros and Thanatos, helping to understand psychic formations underlying behavior. From the beginning, before her stating that it is since 9/11 that she has understood the need to commit herself to her patients and colleagues and to her book on Teresa, Sylvia sees the connections between Teresa’s story of Catholic mysticism and the ways in which it may overlap with Islam, a link made evident in the headscarf meeting in Paris.4 Along with Judaism and Catholicism, Islam is a religion built on a discourse of love/hate, for instance in the holy wars, which have been part of all three faiths. Early on, Sylvia—and Kristeva speaks often through her autobiographical narrator in this book as we will notice—includes the episode in which a young Muslim woman at a meeting on the new law against the wearing of the headscarf speaks about it as a civil right.
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