Teresa, My Love – An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works and novels, including The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Hatred and Forgiveness, This Incredible Need to Believe, Murder in Byzantium, Melanie Klein, Hannah Arendt, New Maladies of the Soul, Strangers to Ourselves, and Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. She is the recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the Holberg International Memorial Prize. Lorna Scott Fox is a journalist, critic, translator, and editor currently based in London. She lived in Mexico and Spain from 1986 to 2004, where she was also active as an art critic. Her articles and reviews have appeared in several journals, including the London Review of Books and The Nation

Abbreviations and Chronology
Part 1: The Nothingness of All Things
1. Present by Default
2. Mystical Seduction
3. Dreaming, Music, Ocean
4. Homo Viator
Part 2: Understanding Through Fiction
5. Prayer, Writing, Politics
6. How to Write Sensible Experience, or, of Water as the Fiction of Touch
7. The Imaginary of an Unfindable Sense Curled Into a God Findable in Me
Part 3: The Wanderer
8. Everything So Constrained Me
9. Her Lovesickness
10. The Ideal Father and the Host
Part 4: Extreme Letters, Extremes of Being
11. Bombs and Ramparts
12. "Cristo como hombre"
13. Image, Vision, and Rapture
14. "The soul isn't in possession of its senses, but it rejoices"
15. A Clinical Lucidity
16. The Minx and the Sage
17. Better to Hide...?
18. "... Or 'to do what lies within my power' "?
19. From Hell to Foundation
Part 5: From Ecstasy to Action
20. The Great Tide
21. Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and His Majesty
22. The Maternal Vocation
23. Constituting Time
24. Tutti a cavallo
Part 6: Foundation–Persecution
25. The Mystic and the Jester
26. A Father Is Beaten to Death
27. A Runaway Girl
28. "Give me trials, Lord; give me persecutions"
29. "With the ears of the soul"
Part 7: Dialogues from Beyond the Grave
30. Act I. Her Women
31. Act II. Her Eliseus
32. Act III: Her "Little Seneca"
33. Act IV. The Analyst's Farewell
Part 8: Postscript
34. Letter to Denis Diderot on the Infinitesimal Subversion of a Nun
Notes
Sources