Tandis qu'elle agonise, Thérèse, mon amour

This new programming by France Culture in the Cour du Musée Calvet is based on the idea that literature, poetry, and theatre are not only weapons but also a way to distance oneself, to “disorient” oneself from current events. “A great writer must dare venture out like Don Quixote,” says Enrique Vila-Matas, special guest for this programme. The audience is therefore invited to a wild ride alongside some emblematic works, in the language of Cervantès but also in that of Diderot. With humour and whimsy, guaranteed.

Thérèse, mon amour by Julia Kristeva

The ecstatic convulsions of Saint Teresa of Avila make her possessed in the manner of Dostoyevsky, but bathed in the waters of desire, not in tears like Mary Magdalene, as she joins body and soul with the absent body of the Other. A play in which Julia Kristeva celebrates her love of Thérèse.

Julia Kristeva, writer, psychoanalyst, European woman of the 21st century, locked herself away for ten years with Thérèse, the Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, intense and extreme, who became a Saint of the Apostolic and Roman Catholic Church after her death. She has published a 600-page book on this extraordinary woman, portrayed in ecstatic rapture by Bernini in Rome. Why did Julia Kristeva devote ten years of her life to Thérèse? "If we are not to die of political cynicism and stock market coups, we have only one remedy left: to try to awaken the memory of our continent. Greek, Jewish, Christian and now Muslim memory. A dramatic memory, a wounded memory, a resistant memory, and a reborn memory, which it's up to us to awaken in order to inhabit it, incorporate it, evaluate it, transvalue it and perhaps innovate. In this monologue, Thérèse emphasizes something that is part of our European culture: a way of thinking, which is essentially philosophy or science, but which is also what she calls fiction. If life is a drama, we must, in order to come to terms with it, try to construct a way of thinking that is in unison with the sensitive body, and this is what Thérèse does here. She has a painfully sensitive body and tries to find a way of thinking in unison with it. From then on, language becomes a permanent encounter between sense and sensibility. The instruments of this encounter are metaphor and narrative. And the result is loss of self, cancellation of self, reconstruction of self. So what's it called? You could call it writing. You could also call it a novel. Finally, we can use Thérèse's term: Fiction.

With Amira Casar (Thérèse), Xavier Gallais (Jean de la Croix) and Raphaël Perraud (solo cello of the Orchestre National de France)
Original music Didier Benetti
Directed by Blandine Masson
Assistant director Justine Dibling