Primero Sueño: Exhaustion of Desire, Desire of Exhaustion

Abstract

This article addresses the gaps in scholarship on the implications of the “failure” of knowledge in Sor Juana’s First Dream by analyzing the performative representation of failure as a solution to ambitious desire. The endless failures eventually exhaust the shame of failing to achieve absolute knowledge by comparing her use of Phaeton’s myth to Teresa of Avila’s humility. The refiguration of failure problematizes the distinction between the secular and religious realms of knowledge in contemporary academic discourses about Sor Juana’s aesthetic impulses.