«Lo spazio del desiderio». Michel de Certeau e l’impossibile topografia dell’interiorità mistica

Abstract

The paper aims to make an overview of Michel de Certeau’s vision of modern mysticism. Particular attention will be given to  selected passages of La fable mystique, de Certeau’s masterpiece published in 1982, where the author ponders upon the topography of the soul in Teresa of Avila’s Castillo interior. As an exemplum of 16th and 17th century mystical writings, the Teresian soul comes to represent a paradoxical “space of desire” structured as a labyrinth with uncertain boundaries: its empty centre is inhabited by an impossible otherness, which is simultaneously the subject and object of mystical desire. A quick analysis of some Certeau’s excerpts will make it possible to show the relationship between the spatial metaphor and mystical desire of a distant Lover, present as an echo, as an ephemeral image of a disappearance. In fact, the mystical enunciations give voice to a body of writing in which, as in an impossible cartography, everything is margin, periphery, and where space is offered as an infinite opening, as an unhealable wound in the order of discourse. The impossibility to determine an “inside” and an “outside” turns the mystical interiority into an estimité which is able to re-invent the spatial notions of “center” and “periphery”.