The Enchanted Clock

by Julia Kristeva

  Am I exaggerating in showing Claude-Siméon conversing with this king? A French exception? Premonition of 1789? Go look at his bathroom, his bathtub, his dressing tables, among other accessories. All duly immortalized in paintings on the walls, in case these furnishings happened to disappear. Which did happen, as you know. As a height of refinement, this culture of the body is ornamented with signs and coats of arms from all the artisans and trades that contributed to the beauty of the royal person. Why?

  Visitors coming from the world over had to leave Versailles without having seen the nudity of the Beloved, but certainly, necessarily, they could only be thunderstruck, as they left, by the minute technical details involved in the maintenance of his body. There too resided his glory and the glory of the crown of France. This feudal logic was not just an accommodating paternalism. By the same token, it exhibited a curious maturity, which intimated that he should affiliate the excellence of his servants with himself. Technicians who know, who know how, and who proffer their science to the service of magnificence. Exactly what I dream of!

  Fabulous equilibrium, fragile moment, to which Passemant bears witness. All three will be swept away by two enemies: automatons and the Terror.

  Already in the time of Mozart, excessive virtuosity and artisanship in the service of the technical illusion promise to replace the anxieties of men of taste with the omnipotence of the machine. Robotics is under way, for better or for worse.

  Too costly at that time—and it always will be—to construct astronomical clocks for all the schools, destined to become lay, compulsory, and republican. Along with the tyrannical and arrogant royalty, democracy was to guillotine that moment of grace where calculating thought (let’s call it “technical prowess,” Faust not yet having signed his pact with the devil) was still able to join together the beautiful, the powerful, and the magical.

  “The Passemants of today are doing much better. Wake up!” My friend and colleague Marianne Baruch is always breaking my toys. I’m used to it.

  True. Astrophysicists build spaceships not only going to the Moon and Mars but ones already leaving the solar system. How far will they go? The Americans are tired of it; they’ve just stopped! Not so interesting as all that, space conquest? Yes it is, because we are developing telecommunications and other military and technological successes thanks to it. For the rest, let the Russians and the Chinese make do! But Europe is keeping an eye open, and her cosmologists are making an impression on the world. We are also interested in the infinitely small, in labs and in the living. Our biologists, descendants of Buffon (another of Passemant’s acquaintances), are making test-tube babies, surrogate motherhood, artificial uteruses, soon human clones. You can’t stop progress. And that changes life, that’s for sure. In what sense?

  “Mama, what is the subject of History?” Stan has a paper to write. I’m supposed to know how to answer, since I write in PsychMag.

  I hesitate. It’s no longer the working class, because of digitization and unemployment. Stem cells, that’s debatable. Religion? Allah? That would be more like the end of History. The Chinese? Remains to be seen.

  My dream of Passemant drawing the king to his timepieces prompts me to hazard a reply. Couldn’t the subject of History be the desire to know, when it makes the sky descend and punctuates time with magnificent usefulness? Not bad, but when History reaches this layer, it risks repeating itself in robotic techniques and exploding in terror. Perhaps we have not reached that point. We hope automatons, the automatization of the human species, “spin,” and virtual money will spare us the apocalypse. The end of dominations, of the exploitation of men by men, of fundamentalism? Certain people return to the need to believe. Is that all?

  Passemant and Louis met among beauty: infinite promise. Having opened French time, did they not go farther than us?

  “Mama, are you French?”

  Stan surfaces from a reflection that he summarizes with this question. Is it even a question?

  French like whom? Certainly not like the native-born French. Stan’s question bothers me. Am I French? Do I want to be?

  Like everyone else, the French can be stupid and lazy. And devout, for fear of being nothing. Like you and me, and even more than that. Devout about sex, the nation, the kingdom, republican values, security, acquired advantages, their income, their retirement.

  Passemant perfected the hinges of his time. Émilie du Châtelet, his contemporary, who did not know the clockmaker but who the Cassini brothers and Nivi and Theo will not fail to remind her of, detected the illusion and took pleasure in the black fire beyond the fantastic nights.

  “French, French … Like whom?”

  “You have so many facets … Like a Picasso portrait.”

  I thought so: only Stan knows me.

  1. By the treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle (1748), France lost “La nouvelle France”—French holdings in North America—as well as a preponderance of its land in India.

  II

  BLACK MATTER

  17

  INSIDE–OUTSIDE

  Outside, the sweltering sun slams the polluted air of Paris down onto the crowds. Phantom drivers slumber at their steering wheels. Others pretend to keep moving, disabused, tired of this rigor they keep harping on. Nothing moves forward, and no one notices that I’ve left this world. Where I am there are two translucent membranes with veins of mauve silk threads that separate me from life. I feel them shiver, inside. I try to cross the border. My bodyless body rejoins an opaque flesh and infuses it. Pierces the darkness. It resists. I’m smothering, I push. I let myself go, I come back up, breathe, dive in again. I return from an artificial coma.

  I’m not dreaming, I know I’m keeping vigil by Stan. He is the one who comes back to me. I tell him I’m looking at his trembling eyelids—pale indigo petals, you remember, the color of the citronella geraniums that perfume the rockery of our garden by the Atlantic Ocean. His swollen lips attempt a smile; I hear him and volley back: “My little bird, where are you hurt, where did you, while flying about …” His eyelashes come unglued, tears or sparks, fireworks, garlands of light, words, images, memories. At the Phare des Baleines, we were buying pink panthers, inflatable or stuffed. The torchlight parade, the Fourteenth of July, the village square, the bouquet of rockets setting the steeple ablaze. My voice oxygenizes his oxygen, my film distills sensations of happiness into the glucose IV, life is a cascade of birthings and rebirths, to be and not to be—who notices that?

  Doctors and caregivers today are astrophysicists. They claim they are trying to “externalize” our brains into the dematerialized IT cloud. Professor de Latour, eminent specialist at my son’s bedside, explains that to do this they have to manage the thousands of billions of biological facts that science now has available for each of us. Especially when things get rough, he adds with a lovely smile. As we wait for the experts to appropriate the hundred thousand genetic mutations they discover daily, what are we doing here in the coma limbo, behind or in front of Stan’s eyelids?

  The smile becomes sympathetic.

  I attempt a hook, a “reliance”—my own way of externalizing myself in the digital (or not) storm of these internal coups d’état that come upon us, that we fabricate, that make us live or die. My cloud computing operates by poetic language. I make myself into mother and baby, take your pick and all at once, never one without the other. Stan understands me as much as or more than I understand him.

  Once awake, he will have had enough of my citronella geraniums and their little discreet flowerheads.

  It’s done. He forgets me in a burst of laughter. Later. Forever.

  Outside time. Without time.

  I will find him again. You will find me again. You can count on me. You too.

  Until the next internal coup d’état. There are so many, there will always be some, we won’t need to wait long: that’s life.

  18

  WHAT IS AN INTERNAL COUP D’ÉTAT?

  Whether the violence of the shock is internal or external, i
llness or aggression, your intimate state explodes; you are dispossessed of it. Neither being nor nonbeing: annihilation. If you do not succumb to this attack, as a furtive escapee from the succession of intimate coups d’état, and if you succeed in reinventing yourself through these cumulated trials, you acquire a flexible constitution. Because even though you are powerless, deprived of all mastery, you nonetheless possess the science of rhythm, the conviction that you are nothing but an apparition in the thread of time. Thus all the coups d’état themselves, wherever they may be in the world and in History, join with yours. United around your debacles, which become coups de théâtre, new beginnings, however scandalous they may be. Impromptu flashes of inspiration and survival.

  You think of a coup d’état as an illegal and brutal seizure of the central offices of power. But such situations do not occur in politics alone. They can happen during any time of one’s life, and their goal is to expropriate or at least deviate a life to the point of destroying it. They can also become a paradoxical motivation of this life, here and now, if one traverses such situations by means of rebounds, exiles from oneself, transubstantiations.

  Marianne thinks I’m dreaming. She hopes I’m not boring the professor stiff with my fantasies; she warns me Stan might suffer.

  No danger. Once I’ve tamed the coups d’état, my reality becomes something else. I am a neorealist.

  Nothing will keep my friend from diagnosing me: Nivi has been traumatized. By exile, love, maternity, everything. The tiniest pinprick pierces right through, ravages her like a solar explosion. Isn’t that right, Nivi? It’s not wrong. Things take hold of me and reduce me to an unnamable state over which I have no power, and that makes me get involved in other people’s traumas. I accompany them; from time to time they accompany me, in spurts, in waves, in as many rebirths.

  “Resuscitation, so that’s it! Pardon me, I was forgetting that you believe only in the revolution.” Marianne is humoring me to spare me her psychiatric verdict.

  Not at all, a coup d’état has nothing to do with a revolution. While revolutions are often punctuated by coups d’état, they cannot be reduced to coups d’état. The storming of the Bastille, for example, is a true revolution: brutal damage to the prior state of institutions, inevitably to bodies and souls. Heads are cut off, though in the name of History—a wildly enthusiastic fight between faiths. But the coup d’état is more underhanded, it decontaminates and decapitates rather than shouting from the rooftops; it is possessed with the desire to possess, provisional occupant of the vacancy. For example—and the memory of them is sinister, grandiose—the coups d’état of the 18th of Fructidor year V, the 22nd of Floréal year VI, and the most famous, the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte. Many others exist: Catherine II against Peter III, Lenin against Kerensky, Hitler against Weimar, Castro against Batista, Neguib against Farouk, then Nasser against Neguib, Boumedienne against Ben Bella, Oufkir against Hassan II, a failed one … The blow, usually military, is brutal, no point in arguing, on your way, nothing to see, nothing to say. The hour has struck, that’s all.

  Often a bloodbath is enough. It disrupts the political clock, and then another tick-tock restarts the gearwork of the routine, the turnover of the states. It strikes, it cuts. How long will this succession of scansions, blows, and Big Bangs last?

  Coups d’état do not restart time; they don’t modify the calendar. In contrast, changing the calendar is revolutionary. Revolutions without coups d’état exist: the Gregorian calendar proves it. Pope Gregory XIII, who was to increase the power of the Inquisition, made his mark on History primarily by replacing the Julian calendar. A revolution made to last: the Gregorian calendar is still ours.

  Let’s not let these classic coups d’état make us forget those that, though hidden, are no less harmful, shaking up internal regimes without overthrowing them. A cunning coterie, a rebellious undercurrent, an ambitious clan, even a single magnetic, spellbinding, glamorous personality suffice to eat away at the status quo more or less surreptitiously. They end up seizing a ministry, imposing a change of course, undermining a program, shaking up a cabinet, sacking a dignitary, if they don’t succeed in replacing the sovereign rulers themselves. They are chastely called “palace revolutions,” so as not to be confused with the routine succession of governmental teams (the first, the second, and so on), who care only about remodeling the façade. These coups d’état ruin a state, disfigure it, discredit it, decimate it till all it can do is float with the current like a headless duck, lacking any efficacy.

  Nivi is thinking not about such intestinal evils, as she considers her possible escapes, but about the corroding catastrophes, the fatal aggressions that affect the condition of life and its intermittent intimacy, lacking which nothing exists.

  Internal coups d’état seed your death. They leave you no other choice but to walk in death’s footsteps while trying to disperse it in shooting photons, sunny spells, and encounters. Nivi emerges from her internal coups d’état like Stan from his comas, finding them again in the dilation of cosmic time—temporary victory over mortality, which takes shelter in a jewel of French history. Oh yes, Nivi and Stan recognize its pulsation in the astronomical clock, whose obscure inventor becomes their hero. Naturally!

  While Versailles seeks pleasures and Aix-la-Chapelle celebrates the dream of peace in Europe, Passemant foresees the blows to come: Red March, decomposition of the state, massacres, spears, and guillotines. New regime—which one? Apocalypse? Unknowable, unnamable; philosophers call it revolution; the enlightened clockmaker prefers to say 9999, an alchemical figure. Blow for blow, blow after blow, obscurely but surely, Passemant sees them arrive; he senses their rhythm with the same intuitive precision that tightens screws and bolts on his parallactic telescopes. He’s not terrified, not amused either. He feels he is part of them, of these blows of time that carry, that carry off; he assumes them—better, he reproduces them, engenders them, gives birth. But to what, exactly?

  Certainly not the Encyclopedia of all knowledge, song-filled tomorrows and the rights of man, terror, democracy, clash of religions, globalization, hyperconnections. These are inevitable. They will happen with or without him, it doesn’t matter. Passemant is elsewhere, on the Moon, Venus, Saturn. Laborious, living among courtesans, having survived the pleasures of the enchanted isles, eclipsed by brilliant scholars and philosophers? No doubt, but not entirely. He replays the scene.

  His secret love—less secret than it appears, when one observes the clock carefully—plunges him into such distraction that he no longer knows where he is. So Passemant composes himself, as they say at court. He seems penetrated with respect and embarrassment. He prostrates himself and pays his respects, thinks of his social position, to be sure, but speaks of his birth in carefully chosen terms the better to emphasize the goodness, the kindheartedness, and the power of the king. Without in the least praising or applauding himself, the engineer knows how to express himself without stopping, without stuttering, without looking for his words, just getting tangled up in the musicality of his sentences. Attentive, with the countenance of an embarrassed person, then turning inward. A man who suffers from strange moments of violence, which he also forces upon himself the better to feel them. This finely nuanced mechanism is in fashion; the little duke portrayed many other examples. And the regent, who sensed the coming of the “whirlpooling abyss,” was the absolute master of such subtle disturbances. Today, His Majesty observes his clockmaker’s organization with indulgence and answers that there are things that time erases, others that time imprints. The engineer bows. Yet another internal attack. Exquisite.

  No one notices that this visionary in love with his prince is prey to a condition of timelessness. He accompanies all the times that preceded him and all those that will follow. Outside passing time, Passemant hears cosmic time beat for the benefit of those humans who know how to listen.

  Passemant seeks no escape from his internal coups d’état, which split his skull and unsettle his stomach. Neither
psychological, nor political, nor social, nor juridical, nor moral. Either he will have them or he will not. It is absurd to ignore them and criminal to be disinterested in them; they are as indispensable as they are ineffective. The engineer merely tries to make people hear the pulsation of supernovas, of neutrinos, of dark energies, to be identified after him. This subtle rhythm does not relativize explosions. Passemant puts them in perspective so as to make people feel their cosmic breadth, to externalize them and make them visible and audible to the present, to those present—to the court, to everyone.

  From there on, with those 9,999 apocalyptic years held in the clockmaker’s hand, encased in the male body of the Beloved king, his astronomer’s step becomes lighter. Nivi’s too. Walking itself becomes almost dancing, and nothing seems to her more desirable than to “travel herself.”

  19

  I HAVE AGAIN DREAMED OF YOUR ANCESTOR