The Enchanted Clock

by Julia Kristeva

  The Cassinis, father and son, continue the debate while the other members of the family progressively disappear in the light of the afternoon.

  “Descartes is far from building a physics independent of metaphysics,” says the son, César-François.

  “Perhaps, but Newton deduces God from his physics. He puts forth the perfection of the world. A single law, immaterial and not mechanical, suffices to explain all terrestrial movements: gravitation!” Jacques Cassini is more deist than a moment ago.

  “Of course, father, but you must admit that gravitation reinforces materialist thought. Monsieur Passemant seems to be saying that man is capable of being the perfect clockmaker, infinitely, with time. On the condition of having enough time! And he does have it, infinitely, since he thinks it infinitely … Man can construct the infinity clock up to the year 10,000, and why not beyond?” César-François, the future cartographer of France, the author of the beautiful map of the kingdom, becomes the accomplice of the engineer, who wasn’t asking as much.

  “That’s serious, what you’re saying, my son. Serious because without issue. We need an external principle, without which man is crushed by responsibilities. Or condemned to nothingness. I remain a creationist, what can I say! And Voltairean. Although I do not deserve to be thrown into the Bastille! ‘The universe confounds me, and I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.’ That’s by Voltaire? If it isn’t yet, it will be!”

  Here Cassini the son is bolder. “I follow you, father. But with your permission I’d like to point out that a woman, the Marquise du Châtelet, predicts a counterweight to gravitation.”

  “The one they call ‘Pompon Newton,’ son? You mean it’s genuine?”

  “Only the future will tell. Science, your science of the stars in particular, is advancing by leaps and bounds. This woman pictures things before calculating and proving them. She has just deposited a thesis about fire at the Royal Academy of Sciences. Not really scientific, in my opinion, but such beautiful logic! Anthropological, and I would say also theological. Who knows, won’t this fire she talks about provide a new energy, a different kind, one day; maybe a name will be found for it, a color, I don’t know. For the time being, the Marquise du Châtelet’s thesis calls it ‘fire’: without matter, without weight, this fire will supposedly give the world lightness and movement. Do you see? A very special force without mass or weight.”

  Jacques Cassini is not sure he follows. Could the Royal Academy of Sciences be into literature now?

  “A momentum of sorts, I daresay. The soul of the world? Sublimation? Levitation? I agree, father, science has not yet found the exact substance that would correspond to this hypothesis, but it won’t be long. I can sense it, if you will. No need to wait till 9999; probably we will know it before then. For now, I wonder: is this woman proposing a dream? A passion inherent in matter? Or in God? It’s happiness, she says. Fine, she speaks from intuition. But in cosmic terms, what is this expansion that englobes and surpasses attraction-gravitation? Another God? The same God, but with two faces? Will its mathematical formula be found? Its precise measurement? The map … The clock …” César-François, half serious, half ironic, definitively impassioned, he too. Uninterruptible.

  “Unless this fire lies outside time?” Passemant interrupts him, as if in a dream.

  Claude-Siméon is not sure what he is saying or why. Could this technician who works to calculate time let himself be shaken, in front of these people more learned and more competent than he, by the hypothesis that there could be a “nontime”? A “fire” that consumes time? Something like a lining doubling the universe, on which the clock would have no hold? Aberrant! How can one be sure of it without an instrument capable of taking the measurements of this “time-out-of-time”? Given that humans speak and think only within time, would it be possible to think and speak outside of it? How can one even imagine it? Unthinkable—but is it so absurd, since they are thinking about it at this precise moment at the Observatory in Paris?

  Curiously, while taking such a risk, the engineer no longer has a headache. In fact, Claude-Siméon has never felt as serene. Calmly but with complete humility he’ll gather up the pages of his thesis, which the Academy is going to accept without a problem. Will he really read the Dissertation on the Nature and the Propagation of Fire by this Mme du Châtelet, who is not of his world either? In the city, people talk a lot about this author, much less about her fire. As for the happiness on which the lady in question is said to be a specialist as well … Could it be some sort of frivolity? A discretion, certainly, a concentration, impenetrable secret … Passemant is going to think about this along the route that takes him back to the other side of the Seine to his studio, La Pomme d’Or.

  21

  HERE I AM AT THE PLACE DE L’ÉTOILE

  I take the avenue de la Grande Armée, cross the peripheral highway, and escape past the parade of signs: l’Oréal, Hachette, Filipacchi, Alstom, Altran, Carrefour, Butagaz, Disney, Hachette Press, Epson, Guerlain, Plastic Omnium, Mineral Design Strategy, it’s endless … I turn right, then left, turn again, and I arrive at the rue de Lesseps. The old town of Levallois, or almost—what remains of that little provincial burg of the nineteenth century. Away from the big Paris publishers but right near that golden crescent of liberalism, the Défense and its nouveaux riches.

  “GlobalPsyNet will be able to give us more. The Chinese are getting themselves psychoanalyzed via Skype by our British colleagues, and we will soon do the same … It looks promising!” Marianne doesn’t lose sight of her objectives!

  Our new colleague, Loïc Sean Garret, is in charge of a brand-new concept: “The Show Business Correspondent—we say SBC, which the president Ulf Larson brings with his position, among other innovations. Loïc Sean is perfectly bilingual, and we credit him with estimable reliability and an admirable reputation. In exchange, this man is going to align us with the large-circulation presses.”

  “Do you understand the plan?”

  LSG (that’s his moniker) worked for Sunday People, for the Sun, for NoW. “He’s reached a stage in his career where he needs to go deeper, you understand, to find himself, in a sense, by meeting others …” Marianne, heavily maternal.

  The Franco-British LSG has the melancholy eyes of a guru from India under the light chestnut hair covering his forehead and the back of his neck.

  “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Mineral water.”

  He sketches his self-portrait: gay, approaching forty. Breton mother, English father—“but with mixed blood,” he wants to insist. The paternal grandmother of Loïc Sean was a beautiful Indian woman from Bombay. Our new colleague’s parents, both in business, died in an attack by Muslim fundamentalists, the mujahedeen in India and the Lashkar-e-Taiba based in Pakistan. It was in Pune, in the west. The explosion struck a packed restaurant, causing nine deaths. LSG cried for three days; he’s still crying—“Can’t you see?” He is controlling himself, but his heart is no longer in it; life has disappeared. Since then it has been a torture for him to speak English and even more to write it. He doesn’t understand: “Okay, the paternal tongue, but why?”

  “It’s true I love French, not Breton, no. ‘French is a royal language, all else is bloody gobbledygook.’ Someone said that before me … French is my maternal tongue, can’t you hear it? English came much later—the language of school, university, bank, but not of milk, you understand?”

  Mr. Garret is jubilant: he thinks he’s speaking our psych jargon; he’s making himself at home.

  “I’m normal, don’t you think?” He clowns; so lovely. “And I’m going to tell you: I don’t understand people not liking France! How can we be reproached with being too French? That’s what they say among Anglo-Saxons, as you call them, right? Ridiculous! Well then, I’m too French, I would like to be. Ok, it’s a pretention, and it will not be my last, that’s a warning.”

  He wants us to like him; he’s laying it on a bit thick.

 
“France is royal like its language, of course, and even better! How cold England is in comparison! Sober, dignified, grandiose—but dry. Taste lies on this side of the Channel, it’s well known … Your cathedrals, your castles, your cuisine are on display at the head of the aisle. Even your Republic is royal. So it cut off the heads of a monarch and some aristocrats! Pardon me! At Brussels and at the UN, France takes itself for a great power.”

  He stops abruptly, swallows his cappuccino, cools it down with a Perrier, then all in one go: “With the Élysée Palace at the summit of a pyramid of rebellious parties—blatant feudalism, isn’t it? I’m not making this up. It was le grand Charles who said it, and he made it. Brilliant! Ungovernable! As if the Sun King, or what’s left of him, could take control of our digital and laboriously narcissistic spider webs that now strangle all the so-called democratic—or undemocratic—regimes.” A little pause for breath. “Oh, but the French model is better than the others, it’s exceptional! Frankly outstanding, no? At this point it’s unique, sympathetic! Didn’t I tell you? I’m a realist, I adore the impossible. Oh yes, it’s absurd, it’s beautiful … France … I adore it.”

  LSG’s voice, in the upper registers, sparkles; his face remains like marble. Not displeased with his number.

  So when Larson, the president, offered him this job in Paris, he accepted right away. “A way of coming back to mother, don’t you think?” He’s teasing us. A psychoanalysis is out of the question—LSG doesn’t think he’s intelligent enough for that. Not as if he were fishing for compliments, he’s simply very sensitive—too sensitive, no doubt. This job at PsychMag will give him the chance to take an interest in others, a new thing for him, and bandage his wounds … “That’s what you say, isn’t it, you shrinks?” President Larson had moreover given him a push in that direction. “A true father, what are you suspecting …”

  He doesn’t believe a single word of what he’s telling us. One is not born a man; one becomes one, and masculine homosexuality is not a homogeneous category. I observe Loïc Sean, I decipher him. Little Loïc is always two years old, clutching his Breton mother. Lost in India, she cradles him in her native language and devours him with kisses. He escapes her arms only for those of his sari-clad grandmother, whose gaze implores the vacuum, just like his, inherited from her, the Indian woman. Loïc Sean was, still is, these two women who cohabit within him, love each other and hate each other. He is so dependent on them that no third person is admitted into the fold, especially not a man. Poor Papa Garret wedded to his business, white shirt and black tie, neither Indian nor British but both at the same time. Darker than Loïc Sean, naturally, and not proud of it.

  Make room for the man? That would be the height of pain and the height of pleasure. On the condition of swallowing him up in ecstasy, LSD, ephedrine.

  “You catch on quick. Of course he’s a druggie! The King (for the initiates) is addicted to designer drugs, the ones they call Meow-Meow, M-CAT, drone, bubbles, or White Magic. He intends to get clean by taking this job in Paris, from what he says … We’ll see.” Marianne is hopeful.

  “Is Ulf Larson his lover?”

  “On that you’re mistaken! Mr. Ulf is a predator, my dear. He likes the little women of Paris, including our young and beautiful interns, haven’t you noticed? No comparison with seduction à la française, none at all. A real wolf, this Ulf, a savage, I’m telling you. Brutality and rape.”

  “S/M?”

  “My information remains incomplete, but it seems our director doesn’t go that far. He just likes to screw the chicks, if you will.” Marianne the connoisseur.

  If I were our CEO’s shrink, I would be looking at the maternal side. Really, the Western male is so into revenge! But that’s none of my business, and the wolf has only just arrived in the sheep’s pen. As of now, LSG is working on a portrait of the new techno star, the irresistible Zina Z., Russian-born, the body of a goddess and the voice of Amy Winehouse. Zina is packing them in at the nightclubs, and her album sales are through the roof.

  “LSG uses his own methods, it’s logical, he’s not a therapist. He’s a close friend of Zina’s and shares her whims, goes out with her, powders his nose with her band, unearths some scoops about her private life … He even went to see her shrink.”

  “Zina has a shrink?”

  “You know, she was in detox at Sainte-Anne Hospital, she escaped from there and took refuge in Saint-Sulpice … The press had traced her route back to the psychology clinic after the rehab … Now the ball is in the King’s court; he’ll do anything.”

  “He looks fragile.”

  Marianne is hardly listening. Ulf is calling on her cell.

  “We’re as speedy now as a daily. You can see I have to go. Ciao, sweetie, love you.”

  While she exults, I retrace my steps from Levallois-Perret to … where? Saint-Eustache? The Bourse?

  Passemant’s workshop, that’s better.

  I too inhabit a multiverse. PsychMag is just a planet among others. LSG is fun, but I’d rather leave him to Marianne. I zap him. To be honest, I add him to the flow of times and lives that compact, reabsorb, and cancel one another out in my personal instant. I disseminate in them. It’s not that I forget him—I don’t forget people, but from where I stand I see only masks. If there have to be masks, let them be as beautiful as possible. For what? For whom?

  For Stan, obviously, the heart of my heart, my all. For Astro, who maintains my times suspended and connected. Truth is, I am available only for Stan; Theo knows it. The King is not of those instants.

  “I’ll be back, Marianne. Ciao, darling!”

  “You’re going back to Venice?”

  “With Stan.”

  “Finally, without your Astro!” She’s relieved.

  “You’re not with it at all! We’ll be thinking of you. And keep an eye out on the ephedrine!”

  22

  HAPPINESS AND FIRE

  With Émilie du Châtelet

  Nivi is convinced Claude-Siméon is not one to be interested in Émilie. He can never have known of the Discourse on Happiness by Voltaire’s friend, had he even wished to, because the king’s engineer passes away in 1769, and Émilie’s manuscript, held by Saint-Lambert, is published only ten years later. He also will not know, though he could have, her Lessons in Physics, dedicated to her son, the first part of which will remain for centuries the clearest exposition of Leibniz’s doctrine (in French, of course, and published during the clockmaker’s life). Nor will he read her translation of Newton’s Principia. Never mind, it will be read.

  In contrast to the manic-depressive orphan Claude-Siméon would have been if he had not been able to find his reality (or lose himself) in stars and automatons, the four-years-younger Émilie is persuaded that nature’s only purpose is happiness. While Newton and Huygens are the readings of the embroiderer’s son, the Baron de Breteuil, Louis Nicolas Le Tonnelier, dispenses to his darling daughter an education of the most uncommon rarity for people of the weaker sex at the time. Latin, Greek, German, harpsichord, theater, dance, singing, okay fine, but also calculus, algebra, geometry, and the sciences. Émilie, presented at the court as expected but preferring to study, has to accept that her manly intelligence is worth a lot more than her womanly charms. She acts the extravagant. Much to the dismay of the ladies of Versailles, this learned lady collects shoes, dresses, jewelry, and lovers. Although she becomes Marquise du Châtelet through her marriage, she prefers mathematics to her three children, to such an extent that she devotes herself to Newton’s work and undertakes to translate his Principia Mathematica.

  “I Newtonize after a fashion,” she disparages. Voltaire, in contrast, is dithyrambic: this Émilie will be his Minerva. It is she who dictates what he is going to write in his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. She provokes jealousy in Mme du Deffand, one of Voltaire’s later lovers, who writes about her, in ink mixed with bile: “Picture a woman tall and thin, no derriere, no hips, fat arms, fat legs, enormous feet; a very small head, a pinched face, a da
rk, mottled, red complexion, a flat mouth, teeth scattered and excessively rotten. Born without talents, she turned herself into a geometer to appear above other women, not realizing that singularity does not grant superiority. People have said she studied geometry to be able to understand her book.” Mme de Créquy and Mme de Staal-Delaunay share this opinion. But the medal for vilification goes to Charles Collé, songwriter and goguettier.1 When the philosopher dies in childbirth at forty-three, pregnant from her young lover Saint-Lambert, Collé says: “We have to hope that this is the last of the airs Mme du Châtelet will give herself. Really, to die in childbirth at her age is to do nothing the way others do.”

  Maybe. And too bad for the scandalmongers. Nivi prefers her to all her contemporaries because Émilie has the fire and believes happiness is possible. Happiness is a new idea in Europe—Saint-Just will say so later—and two versions of this experience already exist side by side at Versailles: Émilie’s burning passion and Passemant’s fine work. The captured infinite on one hand, the infinite expansion on the other. The infinite within oneself and the infinite without oneself. Émilie, who dies of love, and Claude-Siméon, who is consumed with driving in the screws of the hours, the minutes, the seconds, and the sixtieths of the second, up to 9999.

  As for the modest artisan, proud just to be the one who divines and reproduces the rules of the universe conceived and implemented by the Great Architect, the mere thought of happiness, even an ordinary one, suffices to make his temples start hammering, and the turmoil yanks at the roots of his hair. Claude-Siméon does know he is not God. He is angry with himself for appropriating with such pride the time that God himself created, and he can only rid himself of this insolence through anger. But against whom? Against everyone, always! All of you, he thinks. All those who hamper him, who wage battles against him, directly sabotage him by not providing the conditions necessary for the equilibrium of his tools and telescopes, among other ultradelicate machinery. Their hypersensitivity, unimaginable for the common folk, suffers from those uneven floor planks, doors that slam shut, voices that puncture the eardrums, the crazy promiscuity. So Claude-Siméon fumes, his shame follows his rage, and then he ends up withdrawing into his shell.