Revolution and Time in Kristeva's Writing

Julia Kristeva's recent novel The Enchanted Clock confronts the acute feeling of closure and wounded projectivity which surfaces in contemporary representations of the divine qua machine. It thus presents a new chapter in Kristeva's theoretical explorations of revolution as a crucial and multi-faceted aspect of temporality - from the political interface of poetic language via the psychoanalytic angle on the births and rebirths of the speaking subject up to the sick ideality at the heart of new forms of revolt. Beyond the contemporary political upheavals, those new forms respond, perhaps, to a fundamental alteration of our position vis-à-vis the appropriation, by the descendants of the "enchanted clock" of the Enlightenment, of what we thought was most intimately human. Evoking Dante's neologism trasumanar, transhumanize, Kristeva's reflection moves from anamnesis to fantasy and from return to rupture in order to reopen the question of revolt as a defining characteristic of the human.