Balthasar avec Kristeva: On the Recovery of a Baroque Teresa of Avila

This article suggests that Hans Urs von Balthasar’s critique of hyper‐subjectivism in Spanish Carmelite mysticism can be valuably supplemented by Julia Kristeva’s experimental novel Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. In particular, I argue that Kristeva’s characterization of St. Teresa of Avila as a “baroque” subject nuances Balthasar’s critique, as the novel complicates the apparent binaries of immanence‐transcendence and subject‐object, presenting baroque subjectivity as dramatic, plural, porous, complicated, de‐centered, ek‐static, and erotic, inhabiting and inhabited by an o/Other, a construction of the subject which resists by definition the pull of a psychological solipsism. Moreover, the article suggests that Kristeva’s novel operates as a powerful rhetorical mechanism not only for bringing Teresa to life in a new way, but also for unveiling both Balthasar’s internal inconsistencies as well as his internal resources, the latter of which include his reflections on baroque representation and theatricality, particularly with respect to Ignatius of Loyola, and his figurations of selfhood and sainthood in terms both of liquidity and as “expropriated” and “unselved.”