Baroque Monster?

I cite the jacket copy to give a description of this book in the best light:

Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love turns a past world into a modern marvel, following 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, Julia Kristeva’s alter ego, visits the sites and embodiments of the famous mystic and awakens to her own desire for faith, connection, and rebellion. One of Kristeva’s most passionate and transporting works, [this hybrid work] interchanges biography, autobiography, analysis, dramatic dialogue, musical scores, and images of paintings and sculpture to engage the reader in Leclercq’s—and Kristeva’s—journey. Born in 1515, Teresa of Avila outwitted the Spanish Inquisition and was a key reformer of the Carmelite Order. Her experience of ecstasy, which she intimately described in her writings, released her from her body and led to a complete realization of her consciousness, a state Kristeva explores in relation to present-day political failures, religious fundamentalism, and cultural malaise. Incorporating notes from her own psychoanalytic practice, as well as literary and philosophical references, Kristeva builds a fascinating dual diagnosis of contemporary society and the individual psyche while sharing unprecedented insights into her own character.

There are many passages, even chapters (there are 34 in toto in this 8 Part tome), that spark strong interest. Overall, however, the book may be, as its historical subject, a Baroque monster. It goes on and on, as Randy Newman puts it in his song about rock septuagenarians still touring, “I’m Dead and I Don’t Know It,” and never knows when to stop. There is a long last chapter, “Letter to Denis Diderot on the Infinitesimal Subversion of a Nun,” a genre not mentioned in the jacket copy, whose ironies cut so many ways, that this reader feels as if he is left with the dissolving stones of a Baroque church under his hands. Why this book now on a “saint” prophetic of the next century’s cultural style?

A rehearsal of what the book does well may help answer this question. If someone wants a default summa of Kristeva’s thinking, this is it—however self-regarding, over-expansive (some might accuse, “self-indulgent”), and yes, frustrating. The book provides extensive discussions of Kristeva’s original distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic; the role of the mother’s body in fostering primary narcissism and its cultural maladies and empowerments; the importance of the symbolic father in the individual psyche’s pre-history to channel aggressive and destructive impulses and sublimate them; the interpersonal and political dimensions of female abjection and horror, the resurgence of terror and nihilistic nationalisms, and the complete hollowing out of secular culture and the return of the specters of faith and their apotheosis in global apocalyptic violence. These touchstones of Kristeva’s career of books and more reappear and are revised, at least a bit, and are used by her alter ego, but self-consciously so. For, Leclercq would understand Teresa in her context, however different in many respects it is, including the perverse delight in ever-intensifying flesh-tearing self-flagellations. Yet what matters are the parallels, and that the book be a virtuoso performance worthy of Baroque music, painting, sculpture, and imaginative “fiction,” particularly drama. Part 7, “Dialogues from Beyond the Grave,” is over 100 pages of bad Baroque theater. Meanwhile, the mystic’s incorporation by and of the Big Other (as uncanny God/Father/Mother/Spouse/Offspring, a catachrestical compound ghost) is an exemplar of nothing truly human, despite its wasteful recurrences.

Here is a passage where Leclercq, elaborating in revisionary hyperbole, her author Kristeva’s famous redefinition of the semiotic, from simply any system of signs to a developmentally primordial indistinction between (or fusion of) thing and word, rhetorical figures and word-things. This variation is more insistent and closer...