In the Palace of Versailles there is a fabulous golden clock, made for Louis XV by the king's engineer, Claude-Simeon Passemant. The astronomical clock shows the phases of the moon and the movements of the planets, and it will tell time--hours, minutes, seconds, and even sixtieths of seconds--until the year 9999. Passemant's clock brings the nature of time into sharp focus in Julia Kristeva's intricate, poetic novel The Enchanted Clock.

Nivi Delisle, a psychoanalyst and magazine editor, nearly drowns while swimming off the Ile de Re; the astrophysicist Theo Passemant fishes her...

Passions of the Times showcases recent essays of Julia Kristeva's that demonstrate her capacious intellect, her gifts as a stylist, and the profound contribution of her thought to the challenges of the present. Kristeva considers literature, translation, psychoanalysis, disability, gender, humanism, and universalism, among other topics.

Julia Kristeva's intricate, multifaceted novel The Enchanted Clock is built around a golden astronomical clock in the Palace of Versailles. Part detective mystery, part historical fiction, and full of ruminations on memory, love, and the transcendence of linear time, it is one of the most illuminating works of one of France's great thinkers.