First of all, as I was working on reading the rest of The Book of Her Life this afternoon, I came across a section that seemed to have relevance for our discussion today, pg. 166-167. Here Teresa seems to be defending herself against the charge that she's being deceived by the devil, and it's fascinating to me how she counters that charge by first saying that "All the revelations it [the soul] could imagine... wouldn't move it one bit from what the Church holds" (166). On the next page she emphasizes the importance of the confessor: "... there is nothing more certain in this matter than to have greater fear and always to seek counsel, to have a master who is a learned man, and to hide nothing from him" (167). Apparently she's staying well within Catholic orthodoxy by saying that the right revelations will always be in line with Catholic teaching and that a person (particularly a woman, it seems to me) needs a confessor to vet their revelations.
Yet she immediately undercuts these statements by saying that her confessor and others "told me that they all came to the decision that my experience was from the devil" (167), which causes her incredible suffering until God grants her peace, perhaps in defiance of these church authorities (168). I wonder if this is an example of the "sovereign prime" who works outside the regular order of authority and whether we could read this as a failure of neighbor-love on the part of the church authorities toward Teresa (they're not encountering her traumatic kernel seriously enough?).
My other question has to do with clothing in the texts we've read, particularly in Kempe's Book. What is the role of clothing in these texts? Kempe "hystericizes" everyone with the white (or black!) outfits she wears, which are sanctioned by God but (again) not the church authorities. Though it's not as pertinent to Teresa, I'm still curious what people think about it. Could we take clothes as a way to visualize or externalize the traumatic kernel? To make difference in a way that's obvious and also annoying to other people?
Just following along with your thoughts here, Evelyn, I find myself wanting simply to say "Yes!": in the example from Teresa, I think a compelling case could be made for suggesting that the God who grants Teresa peace, "in defiance of the Church authorities" (nicely put) is, exactly, the Sovereign prime--and also that figure of the "Father" who is not the "guarantor of the Symbolic order" but something else, something in excess of that order.
ReplyDeleteI'm also fascinated by your observation about Margery: we've talked about food throughout the semester as a way into the problem of neighbor-love--but your suggestion here, i.e. that Margery's dress hystericizes raises the problem of the excess of the other's desire acutely. We could think of those moments in Margery as moments when those who see her are resisting the power and force of her excessive desire--thus failing to "love her as they love themselves." If, instead, they recognized in her excessive desire their own desires for excess, then they might succeed in "loving" her excess in themselves.
So, thinking on this further: would this kind of hystericization be a way to understand the response to the burka in the West? If so, then we might say that critics of the wearing of the burka in the west could be read analogously to constitute a refusal to love the neighbor as the self, a refusal to consider the possibility that some subjects actually *desire* the "excess" of this sartorial signification--specifically, perhaps, as an "excess" of desire for discipline--for discipline in gendered terms. That is, rather than see the burka as an instance of submission to ideology or oppression, this "reading" would stay true to the desire expressed in the act of wearing it--a desire that Western feminists have struggled (unsuccessfully?) to understand for a long time.
Insofar as I (and I do mean, I, myself) recoil from the gendering of dress in certain Islamic traditions, I may well be recoiling from my own desire for such discipline, my repressed attraction to such sacrifice of my own desire--the sacrifice of desire itself, paradoxically, a means of pursuing desire. And in recoiling, I am closing myself off from the radical imperative of neighbor-love. Notice that this is emphatically NOT the same thing as "multi-culti" tolerance--it is instead a willingness to conceive the possibility that I am strange enough to myself as to somewhere desire the excess of such a disciplining structure that I, in all sorts of other ways, wish to repudiate.
Not, mind you, that I LIKE this idea very much. In fact, I pretty much HATE this idea--but then, that might be precisely the kind of challenge that neighbor love asks me to consider. That could, moreover, be a way of staying true to my own desire--even if its hard for me to recognized my desire in the burka, the vehemence of my reaction to this idea suggests to me that there's something crucial about myself at stake here.