Performing/Annihilating the Word: Body As Erasure in the Visions of a Florentine Mystic

The object of this study is a unique case in the history of Western spirituality. I colloqui (The Dialogues), the transcriptions of the mystical monologues of Saint Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (Florence, 1566-1607), questions the meaning of "text" and "genre," the word's intrinsic performativity, the relationship between authorship and readership/audience, and, finally, the connection between gendered/sexual presence and discourse. Unlike any other mystical book, I colloqui is not the diegetic reportage of the ecstatic encounters between the divinity and a "blessed soul." Maria Maddalena did not intend to communicate/teach us anything; not only did she not care for any form of audience or readership, she did not even want this book to be written. Indeed, to approach I colloqui correctly, two essential elements must be kept in mind: First, Maria Maddalena's mystic performances had a specific goal: the expression of the Word. The mystic believed that through oral language she might be able to evoke the Word's being. I colloqui reports the mystic's reiterated attempt to fulfill her task; I colloqui, we may say, is a work in progress. Second, I colloqui was not written by Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. Her sisters of the Carmelite convent Santa Maria degli Angeli (Saint Mary of the Angels) in Florence transcribed, corrected, edited, and censored her monologues. As soon as the mystic entered a rapture, the nuns took pen and paper and jotted down as much as they could of her spoken words. When she whispered, trembled, screamed, performed a solo "mystery play," spoke with a male voice in the person of the Father and/or the Word, Maria Maddalena was not addressing her audience, her convent sisters. She spoke exclusively because the Word wanted her to summon His being/voice. In the mystic's monologues the Word is the Other, that nonbeing that, as Emmanuel Levinas writes, both dominates and asks us to respond fully to His request for existence; it is that which gives and subtracts sense from our own existence (I981:2 I). Three brief passages from the mystic's monologues summarize this fundamental point: