The Enchanted Clock

by Julia Kristeva

  Even his faithful Louise, who has taken charge of the embroidery workshop, sees him neither during daytime nor nighttime. Louise-Françoise, his older daughter, and even Marie-Aubine, the younger daughter, who adore the music boxes fabricated by their father, no longer dare approach him. Obviously Claude-Siméon refuses to see the inquisitive people who bury him in advice and compliments and offer to publish his work. And what else! Hypocrites, robbers—worse, naïve people who harbor the vague desire of becoming famous thanks to him! Profiteers who hope people will be talking about them and ensure their posterity, at his expense …

  Passemant cannot conceive of this mania that takes the place of philosophy for the majority of the French. Don’t they have better things to do than be happy? To understand Newton, all you have to do is put his discoveries into practice. And become one with the harmony of his work, with its beauty. No need to seek within oneself or elsewhere: happiness is excellence. It’s his clock 9999. And since God’s laws are those of matter, the order of the world is the proof of God: it says so in the Psalms. Passemant heard this just today at Saint-Eustache: “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” Naturally, Claude-Siméon understands such things as a man of science, how else? It’s not worth taking the trouble to delve into the true cause of phenomena, even less so within human souls. A job well done replaces happiness, or rather displaces happiness onto the work. On the outside: the works, the works, the works!

  Physics, astronomy, and clockmaking hardly need metaphysical hypotheses. The Cassinis have been saying it all along, on the whole, and that’s enough for Claude-Siméon. He’ll be content to reproduce divine laws. In so doing, does man become God? Passemant rejects such madness, but even so does not renounce it; he is convinced that nothing of a divine order can escape him. He wants to believe it, although … And yet, that will not escape the men who will succeed him. As a consequence of which God will be reabsorbed into our calculating and clocklike humanity … The clockmaker knows he will find inspired minds who will object that this future is not so seductive. But reassuring, certainly. In any case, the man of art hopes so, wants to believe it. Modestly, serenely. A certain joy, and the migraine evaporates. It suffices to accept one’s limits.

  We are all entrepreneurs, technicians, the more or less gifted workforce of the Great Clockmaker. That’s what he thinks. Is this to say that man no longer invents anything? But people do invent, they invent what is, what was, and what will be, by reproducing it. Neither split off nor propulsed, everything is there: finished, but to be redone. The effort to calculate time replaces enthusiasm—calm down, you men of the revolution! Since the human engenders only what is reproducible and discovers only to reproduce all the better. A true joy? But coupled with the effort to do well, do well without a break.

  The inventor remembers only one thing from young Cassini’s speech: a strange and noble woman has written an essay about the nature and propagation of a certain fire. Passemant doesn’t see what’s so interesting about that. Nevertheless the astronomic clockmaker wonders about it as he walks through Paris. What exactly is this fire she is talking about? What red and black force exerts its action on all of nature to the point of consuming it? A universal Prometheus who both unites and dissolves everything in the universe? Big Bang and expansion? Assemblages and dissolutions of the universes? Unifying cohesion that contains and connects body parts and at the same time pulls them apart, dissociates them, rarefies them? This fire of Émilie’s clearly operates at the antipodes of his 9999 homunculus. Where Passemant calculates and masters time, the marquise amplifies and annihilates it. Could this fire be what every self-respecting clockmaker considers as a sort of nothingness? Brilliant Émilie, who dares to think up the inverse of his clock! Hellfire …?

  Not a single member of the Academy would be in a position to imagine Mme du Châtelet as the only one to integrate Leibniz and his infinite identities into the attraction Newton discovered. Is Émilie already anticipating the boson and dark matter? Does she realize she is projecting her own passions onto her prophetic astrophysics?

  Claude-Siméon doesn’t want to see, any more than do the academicians, that this precursor of modern cosmology was inspired by the fires of her senses. Yet, learned and amorous, it’s all the same for her. That’s what Émilie says. Nivi is convinced of it, and too bad for those men and women who are hoping to find happiness in social networks. Or even worse, those who have the luxury of at last conceiving the child of a spermatozoid in a hospital in Belgium or Spain by means of a daily injection of the follicle-stimulating hormone Mister Gonal-f. The latest honeymoon for the third millennium …

  1. The goguettiers were participants in or organizers of the goguettes, popular singing societies where people gathered regularly to perform songs.

  23

  DO NEW PATIENTS EXIST?

  Don’t you think it’s a funny coincidence, these women in their thirties who have consulted me in the space of a month, all presenting the same symptom? A real epidemic!”

  I am often asked if there are “new patients,” ones different from those Freud analyzed. Marianne, of course, has the answer. She specializes in sleep therapy and hesitates to prescribe the new molecules to her clients, who can’t sleep unless they are exhausted from tango marathons. Does this have anything to do with Émilie, with fire, with happiness? Maybe Gonal-f is not so far off. Be that as it may, I adapt; internal coups d’état often depend on technical progress: for the duration of a tango, patients endure them or try to avoid them.

  “Oh yes, you’re falling behind, dear girl, it’s the latest fashion! My tango fans are in love with their DJ—or with the first virtuoso tango dancer they come upon, they get totally hooked … Result: gynecological catastrophe, professional disruption … In the end they appear in my office, asking me to make them get a good night’s sleep at last.”

  My friend has stopped taking Prozac. She is doing Pilates, and she too has started tangoing, “but in moderation, you know me!”

  Indeed: prudence. It was at the club that she met her patients. But that body-to-body languishing was not her forte. Marianne soon traded the dance floor for the floor mat, flourishing instead with the help of Ingrid, an athletic German who is attracting all the adepts of spiritual yoga you can count in the sixth arrondissement. Thanks to her, Marianne has better posture.

  “I had become a real tortoise, Nivi, a bit like you, sorry … But much more than you, and you never said anything! Now I walk with my chest out, you see, no need for implants. A good thing, too, with all those charlatans! No, just a few muscles, and goodbye to guilt! We shall see what we shall see!”

  Marianne transfigured: I have seen mauve lipstick color her lips, her dull uncombed hair transformed by a square-cut platinum blond hairdo, stiletto heels giving her style, miniskirts replacing her eternal jeans. But no man on the horizon—no woman, either, for that matter.

  “What do you think about surrogate mothers?”

  My silence must have been longer than usual; my friend blushes, doesn’t wait for my reply, as per usual. “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’m simply asking if it’s a good subject for PsychMag right now, that’s all.”

  Of course it’s a good subject! There is no bad subject for PsychMag, nor any moment more favorable than another. Whether it’s with Ulf or with the King, or anyone else. I dodge, I fill the airhole, I get tangled in the adjectives: intimacy is an untouchable zone. This is not the moment; it’s so rarely the moment. I look at my watch. I’m in a hurry, you too; it’s crazy how time is accelerating these days—call me, we’ll talk when you want, as you know.

  A few weeks later, PsychMag devotes an issue to assisted procreation, the early mother/infant bond, infancy, the baby’s distress, sudden death of the nursing child, transitional spaces, the desire not to be a mother, the desire to be a mother … All under the guidance of Dr. Marianne Baruch, who received carte blanche from CEO Ulf Larson. Larson, minutely attending to the needs of LSG the King, devotes himself to the life of stars to i
ncrease the circulation, leaving serious subjects to the real specialists, like my best friend. For my part, I’ve been shelved, and I’m proud of it. I’m not complaining. Since the new leadership has to make its mark, contributions by Nivi Delisle, even modest, but always very serious, too serious, risk causing difficulties. It’s out of the question to make a point of my difference and hence influence. Making a point of being gracious, I acquiesce to the globalization strategy, which after all leaves me to my dreamy escapades with Astro and Stan.

  Once a month, the editors ask me to write about the “societal issues” pop psych is so preoccupied with, such as: “Does going digital mean a new Renaissance, or does it spell the end of Planet Gutenberg?” “Text messaging: writing or drug?” Or even more unbeatable: “What is left of Homo sapiens in blogs and social networks?” Inescapable but without interest, these meditations excite colleagues and other cultural animators. Whereas the Ulf-King couple, not knowing how to dispose of them, sends them off to “Chronicle of the Month by Nivi Delisle,” reduced to the bare bones. Today I’m supposed to sound the depths of the Apocalypse by discussing the bankruptcy of reading: “What Is Reading? or, The End of the Civilization of the Book.”

  “That’s the kind of thing people love, but very very concrete, and fun, please …! Of course you can do it, you’re the best!” Marianne really wants to be seductive, her new hobbyhorse: “to write is to seduce.”

  Maybe. Why not? As for reading … I have a new patient, a freelance journalist at France Culture, about forty, unmarried, BA in sociology, parents are doctors, originally from Lyon. “I ought to be a success”—but she’s consulting me because she can’t read. “Don’t worry, I’m not illiterate. I read the books by the people I interview, editorials in the paper, letters I get in the mail, but each time I realize I don’t know what I’ve read. Not a trace. The screen is empty. Flatline EEG. Is it serious, doctor? Is it an illness? A symptom? Do you have other patients like me?”

  My analysands do not fail to ask the protective question: “Am I like the others?” If yes, then fine, even if it’s mortal. To be, to be with, to belong, to be one of. Otherwise, panic! But it’s not enough for them to “be one of”: they quickly realize that they want to “be one of” in order to “get out” all the better, to claim the exception. I want to be the unique one of, the only one of!

  Justine—let’s call her Justine—manages to read only text messages. Two lines, not more, preferably with abbreviated words, not much grammar, a concrete message. Whereupon she shuts up.

  “Concrete,” I punctuate her silence.

  “Love u. Meet at 5. Buy sugar. Boss sick, stay home. 1500 wds for your column … That’s clear, isn’t it? Info, useful words to set down a situation, a goal … They stick … No reasoning, no speeches … Those I don’t retain, they slip by me, scatter … I’m scattered.”

  She’s afraid, won’t say anything else today.

  As a teen, Justine liked to read novels. Can’t anymore. Even films repel her: she founders in the unfolding of images, can’t follow the plot; the sequence of events annoys her or puts her to sleep.

  She and I are going to follow this thread together. To unknit the anxiety and traverse the abyss that as a terrified little girl Justine dug between her body and words. To protect herself? She doesn’t know from whom, from what. She will try to say. Let’s not be in a hurry. We will gently remove the screen that put the untamed, horrified child’s fear to sleep without extinguishing it. We will then enter into the seeds of suppressed desire, in search of the unspeakable. “To go always higher, stronger, faster! To succeed!” That is exactly what dad and mom wanted. To the point of emptying everything out of Justine: senses, sensations, times, all abolished, evacuated, struck down … We will reawaken the devitalized words …

  Women are scary—too much, not enough, that depends; it’s well known. But their fears? Our fears? Ungraspable, scarcely audible in the breath that separates words. These rebellious frights have an animal substance; they liken us to the beast’s need for survival. Justine’s terror refuses reading. But it can also seize hold of the written, transport us into it, and as a result we are seized, set fire, consumed for good.

  It’s not the same fear? True, Justine’s panic and the quaking of Aubane, the Owl’s assistant, are miles apart. A graceful tit with eyes as blue as the wings of the little bird, Aubane shudders at the slightest contact with our modern encumbrances and, panicked, takes shelter in the mystery of Versailles. But once there, the tit flits about, pecks at manuscripts intact for long years, makes her nest out of the precious fragments. Stan eventually finds her full of smiles, truly enchanted, the fluttering archivist of the Château.

  “It’s simple: absence of concentration. How do you expect young people to read if they can’t pay attention? The learning-disability classrooms are full of teens like that. Your Justine is so banal! I mean, she’s typical … Normal, if you prefer. For us it’s the best! Her case lies at the heart of illiteracy … There’s your article, hon, I can see it like I was there.” Marianne encourages me with all her heart, but she’s beside the point as always. “So 3,000 characters. Okay by you?”

  I say yes, but I have my own opinion all the same. My paper will have an intimate quality; Larson and LSG will find it too French, but they’ll let it go. They’ll think I just have to have my fun, with my propensity for splitting hairs … Ah, these French shrinks, always on the other side of the mirror …!

  “That’s it, diversity, right, my dear Madame Delisle? The multiverse, if you don’t mind my quoting you …”

  My Swedish CEO has a globalized tolerance, perfectly fake. But he insists on a kiss on the cheeks, in the French manner.

  I count on Marianne, my liaison, to continue in this job as a temp in the globalized psych vulgarization.

  Bill Parker, Theo’s colleague, originally from Seattle and on assignment at the Observatory in Paris, has just encountered Justine on her way out after her session. Parker, who is studying the mystery from before the Big Bang, thinks he has detected the existence of an impalpable numerical quantity, information, the prototype of God. The “tetragrammaton,” he claims. I have a lot of affection for this ageless adolescent with the 1960s curly haircut à la Bob Dylan, occasional violinist, father of numerous children, including four with his sweet Mary, wife and lab colleague. This feminist of the last generation, as she describes herself, powerfully intelligent, doesn’t talk a lot but loves to calculate data from the Planck satellite with her husband. Who is in love with her, with Paris, and with all the beautiful things in the world, among them the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which once sheltered Galileo; the north pole from which the frozen astral sky can be observed; Passemant’s clock, which Stan showed him in Louis XV’s residence; and not forgetting the innumerable female students he meets throughout the world and who succumb to his charm. Today it’s the turn of the “beautiful redhead” leaving my office.

  “Will you introduce me?”

  Bill, true to form! With me he plays the part of the rigorous and austere scientist: astrophysics is the only profession of value, and psychoanalysis is latter-day magic. As a consequence, he ignores my discipline and, to protect me from it, Professor Parker addresses himself to Nivi Delisle only in her role as a journalist. No way am I going to tell him that “the redhead” was just leaving my couch. I shrug my shoulders, try a graceful and dissuasive pout. It doesn’t dissuade him; he insists. I end up avoiding the question: I’m not sure my Justine and Bill are living in the same timeframe … Parker goes red, then his fury descends upon me.

  “Nivi, you don’t know a thing, time is virtual, just like money! It’s a fiction that links bodies and physical systems to each other.” Could the professor be angry?

  Time is money? That’s it? Cosmology’s latest brainwave? I’m trying to make him laugh.

  “Not in the usual sense, but in a way … No, you have to forget time, I’ve already told you and repeated it, we’re not there anymore …” Is he really annoyed?
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  Events cancel each other out, agreed. Time no longer exists, only catastrophes. But globalized citizens overcome them by continuing to live all the same. And to earn your living, you have to begin by reproducing life, don’t you. Artificial reproduction has never been in better health: Bill can’t disagree, can he. I don’t remind him that before earning his living, and while earning it, he also made children—all over the place too, it’s public knowledge—because he was eager to perpetuate the duration that escapes him and that he goes looking for as far away as the galaxies.

  All I say is: “Virtual time?”

  With that I unleash his compassion. Phew! He even forgets my Justine. The professor as pedagogue is never more seductive. It’s his ultimate weapon.

  “Yes, and really, it’s clear as day! Let’s take an example. If a cup of coffee costs €1.50, fifty cups of coffee add up to a pair of shoes at €75, and you would need ten thousand cups of coffee to make a car at €15,000. You see? We link objects to each other by the intermediary of this fictive value, which is money. It has no value in and of itself; it only has value for placing things in relation. Well, it’s the same thing with time. Time can dissolve into placing things in relation. Yes, it’s true! We no longer need an abstract notion like ‘global time’! Finished! It’s enough to relate physical systems to one another.”