Una Teresa demasiado humana: la conquista de lo impronunciable en La lengua en pedazos, de Juan Mayorga

Juan Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos summons on the stage Teresa de Ávila and an Inquisitor, who questions her about the most polemic and transgressive aspects of her biography. Under this pretext, Mayorga explores the problems which have always tortured Teresa: the untranslatability of her mystic experience and the referential (in)ability of language. With this aim in mind, the playwright transforms the discussion between them into a dialogue between the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the Wittengstein of the Philosophic Investigations. The Inquisitor, who literally quotes the philosopher, uses linguistic strictness to support his identity, while Teresa’s interventions,which are mostly paraphrases of the Libro de la vida, takes up a stance near the pragmatic Wittgenstein at the postmodern eyes of spectators . The impossibility of a private language, the liquefaction of the meanings under the overwhelming yoke of the context and the consideration of word as a Form of Life: that is the only and fragmentary possibility of an I. Using Nietzsche and Benjamin’s philosophy of language in order to calibrate the influence of the two Wittgensteins in the play, the hell which Mayorga draws for his Teresa, who leans between the production of an authentic discourse and the fear about his overman attitudes, is here alnalyzed.