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6 T he not h i n gn ess of a ll t h i n gs
formed of words, images, and physical sensations pertaining to both the spirit and the flesh: “the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal,” she admitted. The experience, too, is a double one straightaway: while being the passive “object” of her transports, the nun is also the penetrating “subject,” who approaches “graces” and “raptures” with an astounding, unprecedented lucidity. Lost and found, inside and out and vice versa, this woman was a flux, a constant stream, and water would be the undulating metaphor of her thought: “I . . . am so fond of this element that I have observed it more attentively than other things.”5
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I ran into her again on the cover of a Lacan Seminar, while doing my MA in psychology.6 I’d already admired Bernini’s sculpture, whose voluptuousness so stirred the susceptible Stendhal,7 in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome—long before this learned publication promised to tell us everything about female jouissance and its insatiable cry for “More!” Every summer, docile cultural tourists that we were, my small family spent vacations plowing up and down the Italian peninsula. I didn’t know very much in those days about the illustrious Carmelite nun, but at the La Procure bookshop, opposite the church of Saint-Sulpice, I had purchased her Collected Works—two onion-leafed volumes fat with unreadable prose. The kind of impulse buy you commit on the eve of a solitary weekend, instantly banished to the top of the bookcase and as soon forgotten. I may as well tell you right away, I’m not a believer. I was christened as a matter of course, but Jesus was never a dinner-table topic at our house. My father was a general practitioner in the 13th arrondissement, and my mother taught literature at the lycée in Sceaux. Everyone worked too hard to see much of one another or to talk; it was a standard secular family of a kind very common in France, efficient and rational. Any discussions revolved, on Mother’s side, around literary prizes and the horrors of the world—much the same thing, perhaps. Whereas my father, who purported to be a left-leaning Gaullist, was forever grumbling about how France would never recover from the Algerian war, or how beggars were ruining the city center, or how some people believed in nothing but their doctor: a big mistake, as he was in a position to know. Anxious to spare Mother and me the “trials of life,” he’d made sure to give us “nothing but the best, my darlings.” That was his hobbyhorse, being more of an elitist