THE CYBORG, DARK MATTER AND THE PURSUIT OF TRANSCENDENCE

This paper will focus on Kristeva’s 2015 novel L’Horloge enchantée. Like other fictional and non-fictional works by Kristeva, L’Horloge enchantée returns to two formative moments of European culture, namely, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in an attempt to rethink the controversial legacy of these moments in the face of contemporary challenges. The main protagonist of L’Horloge enchantée, a psychoanalyst of Jewish origins, develops a transferential relationship with two minor figures in the reign of Louis XV at the dawn of the Enlightenment: i.e., Claude-Siméon Passemant (an obscure artisan devoted to the King) and Émilie du Châtelet, precocious mathematician, translator of Newton and lover of Voltaire. As I shall demonstrate, in bringing these two figures together, Kristeva introduces a new perspective on contemporary debates focusing on the nature of the human and its relation to the machine, material existence and the desire for transcendence, temporal consciousness and the possibility of happiness. On my reading, Kristeva’s latest novel remobilizes our thinking about what comes after the human through changing the terms already introduced by contemporary discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism. She also responds to concerns about the crisis of the Humanities by exposing the uncanny proximity between the theoretical sciences and the theoretical Humanities, both converging on the vision of a reason drunk with the spirit of the imaginary. According to Kristeva, the liberation of this vision from all sorts of technophobic and technophilic myths (sources of political or religious fundamentalisms, on the one hand and a profit-oriented techno-terrorism, on the other) is a necessity.