Representation, Reappropriation: The Body of the Image in the Mystical Text of Teresa of Avila

Abstract

What follows is but the attempt to draw the lessons from the mystical and visionary text of Teresa of Ávila in order to consider today issues that concern us, questions that are asked of Aesthetics, and not only as theoretical discipline that theorises on the arts and considers the beautiful, but as a reflection on aísthesis, of sensitivity, of the sensitive edge exposed by a constituent relationship which installs the human in a world. Consideration, then, of the happening, of entering the world, creative experience. This essay seeks to consider the relationship between the image and the body via the visionary discourse of the mystics, because their writings question and lend shape to a large number of formulae of thought that can help us better understand the questions facing us today. Let us imagine that the mystics made of their body a frontier or a support where what by definition has no place could take place. Place: part of space occupied by a body (Newton), the boundary of a containing object (Aristotle). This then is what is addressed here, a question of boundaries.