Julia Kristeva's L'horloge enchantée is a veritable tour de force, a brilliant piece of writing that infuses the novelistic genre with theatrical and essayistic undertones. Kristeva deftly weaves together multiple strands of a narrative that links a presently degraded state of France, Europe, and the world, in the grip of violence, fanaticism, rigid identity politics, anti-intellectualism, a general loss of quality of life, to the eve of revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.–Verena Conley, Harvard University