Originally published in The New Yorker (web version),Sept 5, 2018
I first came across Julia Kristevas name in the late nineties, when I was a teen-ager, on the masthead of a small Bulgarian newspaper,Literaturen Vestnik, to which I had just begun contributing. She had joined the editorial board in 1995, in a purely symbolic capacity: her name was meant to lend cachet to the obscure cultural weekly, published in Sofia, where Kristeva and I grew up. Kristeva had moved thirty years before to Paris, where she became internationally celebrated as a literary theorist and psychoanalyst, shaping Continental philosophy alongside Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. A striking and glamorous figure, she was increasingly prominent as a public intellectual, writing and lecturing on nationalism, the meaning of revolt, and the female genius, among other subjects. Kristeva did not get much involved in the cultural or political life of her homeland. Still, her position on that little masthead made her subject to the purview of an organization created in 2006, shortly before Bulgaria joined the European Union: the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing the Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Armymore popularly known, in Bulgaria, as the Dossier Committee.
During the Cold War, Bulgaria was the Soviet Unions closest and most obedient satellite, a quiet backwater unperturbed by protests or dissident movements. When the Communist government collapsed, the country spiralled into poverty: factories closed, unemployment spiked, hyperinflation ate through peoples savings. Amid the chaos, many Party members held onto power. Erstwhile officers of State Security, the Bulgarian counterpart to the K.G.B., loaded old agency materials onto trucks at night and incinerated them at a metallurgical plant near Sofia, destroying an estimated forty per cent of the archive. The Dossier Committee has succeeded in gathering, in one place, everything that remains: more than eight miles of documents, which have so far been used to identify more than fifteen thousand people who worked with State Security during the forty-five years of Soviet-imposed rule. (About seven million people live in Bulgaria, down from nine million when the Berlin Wall fell.) The committee is obliged to run background checks on anyone who seeks political office or works in a public fieldsuch as education, journalism, or the lawand to reveal any links between those people and the repressive apparatus of the former regime. Evidence of affiliation does not carry legal penalties; the process is meant to strengthen public trust, and to give Bulgarians a greater understanding of their past.
Many of the countrys most prominent political and cultural figuresincluding Georgi Parvanov, the President from 2002 to 2012have been revealed as collaborators. (Parvanov first denied the charges, then said that he thought he was working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but his file indicates that he was eager to collaborate with State Security.) Recently, the committee began to comb through the staffs of literary journals, includingLiteraturen Vestnik. In late March, the committee announced that Kristeva had been a secret collaborator, working in France, in the early seventies, with the foreign-intelligence arm of State Security, the First Chief Directorate, under the code name Sabina.
Kristeva is almost certainly the most famous living intellectual from Bulgaria, and the announcement caused a minor national crisis. The committee took the rare step of putting her entire dossier online, so that everyone could read it. Kristeva took to Twitter, where she issued a communiqu, in French. The report that I may have been a member of the Bulgarian secret services under the name of Sabina is not only untrue and grotesque, she wrote. It damages my honor and reputation and is damaging for my work as well. Her lawyer, she added, would pursue legal action against publications that dared to complacently spread this allegation. She has since, nonetheless, been assailed, as well as defended, in the press and on TV. This Morning, a talk show on Bulgarias most popular TV channel, aired a segment featuring Ekaterina Bonchevawho, with her bright red hair and large round glasses, has become the most recognizable face of the Dossier Committeeand Miglena Nikolchina, the professor at Sofia University who invited Kristeva to join the editorial board ofLiteraturen Vestnik. Nikolchina said that the Dossier Committee was wrong to focus on collaborators, many of whom were coerced, rather than on the high-ranking officers who did the coercing. It was as if the actresses were to blame and not the directors, she said, invoking the #MeToo movement.
The Sabina affair has become a major case in Bulgarias ongoing public debate about how to deal with the dark legacy of State Security, whom to blame and how mucha debate that has taken on a new urgency as totalitarian ideologies rise again in Europe and elsewhere. Kristevas critics argue that her collaboration undermines her moral authority as a public intellectual; one prominent Bulgarian journalist condemned her affiliation as a link in a whole chain of complex dependencies with the former regime. Her defenders maintain that Kristevas word carries more weight than old documents written by spies working for a totalitarian state. Perhaps those secret agents invented their conversations with her, or maybe they spoke to her on some pretext and then falsely claimed that she had collaborated with them. There are indications that Kristevas dossier, like many State Security files, may have been partially cleansed in the nineties: some administrative documents appear to be missing. A few commentators havecalled for shutting down the Dossier Committee altogether.
The debate has also resurrected old arguments about the intellectuals relationship with the state, particularly in Europe. Martin Heidegger notoriously supported the Nazi regime for a time; Paul de Man was discovered, after his death, to have written anti-Semitic articles during the Second World War. A closer analogy for Kristeva might be found in the life of the East German writer Christa Wolf, who, in 1993, was revealed as a former Stasi collaborator: between 1959 and 1962, she reported on fellow-writers under the codename Margarete. The reports that she provided were mostly harmless, but Wolf professed shock at the revelation, claiming that she must have repressed the memory. Then, in her last book, an autobiographical novel called City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, she openly confronted her past. A few years ago, the French novelist Laurent Binet wrote a satirical postmodern novel called The Seventh Function of Language, in which Roland Barthes is mysteriously murdered by thugs, who are trying to obtain a manuscript that holds the secret to unlimited powers of persuasion. Foucault and Derrida make appearances, as do de Man and John Searle. The character in the book named Julia Kristeva works undercover for the Bulgarian intelligence services, headed by her own father. (Binet told me, in an e-mail, that he had no inkling of Kristevas contacts with State Security when he wrote it.)
Kristeva insists that the State Security reports made public by the Dossier Committee are equally fictional. She has called the dossier, and the reporting on it, imaginary information, post-factual politics, and fake news. In July,the French editionofVanity Fairdevoted several pages to an interview with her, in which she said that drunken, Kafkaesque bureaucrats had invented the material in the dossier in order to justify their salaries. Sure, she had gone, a few times, to the Bulgarian consulate, and exchanged a few polite words with the employees behind the counters therebut nothing more. Its quite enough for anyone to read the dossier to realize its fake, but the media have no desire to go into details, she said. Its long and its in Cyrillic.
The day after the Kristeva announcement, I visited the Dossier Committees headquarters, in downtown Sofia, in an obscure wing of the National Operaa grand neo-classical building from the Stalinist period, complete with Ionic columns and an elaborate frieze depicting the unity of peasants and the industrial proletariat. Past a metal detector and up five floors, behind a fingerprint lock and down a long corridor, there is a tiny reading room with eight desks in two rows. Few people make the trip apart from historians and the occasional gray-haired citizen hoping to find out which of his neighbors once reported on him. When I arrived, an assistant directed me to a seat and brought me three soft-bound folders, each labelled, in Cyrillic calligraphy, Sabina.
The folders contain nearly four hundred pages of material. In addition to classified reports, intercepted correspondence, and news clippings, there are early biographical documents. Kristeva was born in 1941, in the provincial town of Sliven. Her family moved to Sofia soon after the war ended. Her mother, who stayed home with the kids, had trained as a biologist. Her father had degrees in medicine and divinity but ended up working as an accountant for the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. His religious activities and prewar affiliations with nationalist groups were viewed with suspicion, the file notes, but his daughters record was exemplary. After studying French at a preschool run by Catholic nuns, and at LAlliance Franaise, she distinguished herself at Sofia University as an outstanding scholar of philology, writing articles forNarodna Mladezh, one of the countrys official newspapers. She was also a member of the Komsomol, the Communist Partys youth organization, as virtually all university students were back then. A literary worker faithful to the Partys cause, a university official noted. When the celebrity cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, made an official visit to Bulgaria, Kristeva served as his interpreter. Later, she did the same for the secretary-general of the French Communist Party. These were prestigious jobs, requiring official trust and connections.
When she was twenty-four, Kristeva won a one-year postgraduate fellowship from the French government, and received permission from the Bulgarian government to go. According to her dossier, before she left for France, in December, 1965, she was summoned to the Ministry of the Interior by a State Security operative, code-named Petrov, for a prophylactic discussion, a fairly routine procedure for people travelling across the Iron Curtain. Petrov let drop the possibility of future collaboration with our services, and, according to his subsequent report, Kristeva gave her tentative assent.
In Paris, liberated from home and family, Kristeva perfectly met the revolutionary spirit of the era. Just a few months into her thesis work, she wrote to the experimental novelist Philippe Sollers to ask if hed discuss his work with her. He invited her to his publishers office, and then to dinner. He asked what she wanted to do in France, and Kristeva replied, paraphrasing Marx, I have nothing to lose but my chains. They were married a year later. Sollers was the editor ofTel Quel, a magazine that was becoming a breeding ground for much of what we now call theory: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes were amongits contributors. For theTel Quelgroup, reality was a function of languageeven history was a text to be read. Kristeva, together with her countryman Tzvetan Todorov, introduced the French to the Russian post-formalist Mikhail Bakhtin; in a 1966 paper about his work, she coined the term intertextuality, to describe how the meaning of a text is determined by its relationship to other texts. She expanded on the idea in her first book, Smitik, about the origin and function of the novel, published three years later. Julia Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, Barthes wrote in a review.
Six months later, according to a report in the dossier, Petrov went to Paris on a business trip and gave Kristeva a call. She sounded glad to hear from him, he thought. They met the following evening for dinner, where Kristeva talked at length about her life in France, her career, her new family. She apologized for having married and settled down in Paris, which she had told Petrov, back in Sofia, she wouldnt do. But she was happy, she said. Yes, her husband, Philippe, came from a bourgeois household, but he had adopted the correct leftist positions, and had close ties to Frances Communist Party. (Tel Quelwas not anengagoutfit when it was founded, in 1960, but it grew increasingly political as the decade wore on.) When Petrov asked about Kristevas own political leanings, she said that she had become an even greater devotee of socialism than before, a reply that pleasantly surprised him. Did she remember the conversation theyd had in his office? She said that she did. We had been following her development and behavior and we were glad she had shown herself a good Bulgarian, Petrov explained. Now the time had come when she could prove herself useful to our country and our services.
Kristeva, the report says, accepted the proposal, and agreed to focus her efforts on monitoring the French cultural scene. She wouldnt need to contact State Security oftenthe agency didnt want to hinder her career, because the more famous a scholar she became, the more useful she could make herself. Petrov said that a man from the Bulgarian Embassy, called Lyubomirov, would phone her in a couple of days.
Lyubomirov filed his first report a couple of weeks later. He met Kristeva late on an early-December afternoon at La Closerie des Lilas, a caf near the Luxembourg Gardens that was a stones throw from her new family apartment and a place traditionally popular with artists and intellectuals. (Renoir and Monet were regulars once; Lenin used to play chess there.) Kristeva behaved naturally and readily talked about everything, Lyubomirov noted. She told him about power struggles within the French left, and about how the Zionist lobby had hijacked the French media, undermining the Palestinian cause. She also discussed her Bulgarian migr colleagues at Radio Paris, where she contributed weekly cultural reviews for a time. But she stuck to petty and irrelevant details: one colleague complained of a stomach ache; another was short on money and lived with her daughter in a two-room apartment. The information was nonetheless forwarded to the State Security department that monitored migrs and traitors to the motherland. Even intelligence that seemed useless could be dug out later and given the necessary ideological spin.
In return, to judge from the dossier, Kristeva got help with her family. Her younger sister Ivanka, a violinist, had recently arrived in France, and needed her passport extended so that she could study at a conservatory in Switzerland. Kristevas parents wanted to visit their daughter. These matters were taken care of.
Lyubomirov stayed in touch, according to the dossier, but Kristeva quickly became less responsive. She refused to file her reports in writing, claiming that she wouldnt be able to capture whats essential. She stood up Lyubomirov again and again, blaming her busy schedule, her absent-mindedness. When she did appear, the information she provided was often very general or publicly available; he consistently rated her contributions as of little or no value. After attending a conference on Palestinian statehood, for instance, she told Lyubomirov who was there and what their political views were. She went into detail, on the other hand, about her vacations at her husbands villa on the le de R, and their visits to his family estates around Bordeaux. Lyubomirov reprimanded her for leading a bourgeois life. Petty bourgeois, she corrected him.
Sometimes Kristeva called Lyubomirov on the phone, even though he had apparently warned her about security concerns. The Center, State Securitys headquarters in Sofia, grew annoyed, but Lyubomirov attempted to shield his agent, and himself, by claiming in a report that, as a sensitive representative of the intelligentsia, she couldnt absorb immediately our theory of communication. Nonsense, someone in Sofia scribbled in the margins.
Kristevas public political views began to diverge from those of State Security. In 1971,Tel Quelbroke with the French Communist Party and aligned itself with Maoism. In March, 1972, Kristeva signed an open letter inLe Monde, along with fifty other intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, protesting Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia. That same month, she sent a handwritten postcard to the Bulgarian Embassy in Paris. Greetings from Belgium, it read. Im at a conferenceafterward Im going on vacationIll call you after theholidays. Long Live the Peoples Power! Its addressed to a Monsieur Draganov. In a newspaper interview this spring, Kristeva denied knowing anyone of that name; later, she toldVanity Fairthat she sent the postcard, but that it was meant to be ironic.
I e-mailed Kristeva after reading the dossier, offering my interpretation of the documentsthat she had worked in some capacity for State Security in the early seventies, with the goal of helping her family, but that evidently she hadnt provided damaging informationand asking if she wished to comment. I solemnly affirm that my situation does not correspond to your reading, she replied. Later, on the phone, she insisted that no clandestine meetings ever took place, and that she never made any of the remarksabout Zionism, about her colleaguesattributed to her in the files. She had inevitable dealings with the Embassy, she said, and then the men who worked there began pestering her, and she tried to ignore them. She also disputed the notion that her husband and the magazine he edited had ties to the French Communist Party, though this is a matter of scholarly consensus. (Danielle Marx-Scouras, the author of The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel, said that the magazine supported the Party from the mid-sixties until 1971.) As for Monsieur Draganov, he was a person harassing me, she said. I was trying to get rid of him. Nobody ever asked her to become a spy, she maintained, and she never agreed to do so.
The Association of Retired Intelligence Officers is a small, dingy apartment in a residential building in downtown Sofia. There I met a man named Atanas Kremenliev, who spent his career as a spy for the First Chief Directorate. Hes eighty-four now, with thick white hair and eyebrows above a face at once deeply furrowed and surprisingly relaxed. He lit a cigarette as we sat down across from each other. He never worked with Kristeva, he said, but he knew her handler well. His name was Luka Draganov, code name Lyubomirov. One of the good intelligence officers, though quick to anger, he said.
In the early seventies, Draganov was the station chief in France. (He died several years ago.) The consensus in the agency, Kremenliev said, was that he was diligent and exacting. Draganovs own State Security operational file, which has been preserved by the Dossier Committee, confirms this description: his reports are meticulous, and he was regarded by his bosses as extremely reliable. His file also contains numerous references to Kristeva as agent Sabina.
Is it possible, I asked, that Kristeva met with Draganov, but didnt understand whom she was speaking to?
Everybody is looking for an alibi to justify and absolve himself, and shift the blame elsewhere, Kremenliev said. This is a normal human quality.
Kremenliev knew Petrov, too, he said. His real name was Stoyan Dimitrov Georgiev. He had been a deputy to the Komsomols first secretary, Ivan Abadzhiev, whom Kristeva knew from back home. Georgiev became the station chief in Vienna, and he would often travel to European capitals to supervise lower-level officers and to recruit potential agents. He died in 2011. A real professional, Kremenliev said.
Like the K.G.B., Bulgarian State Security engaged in disinformation campaigns called active measures. Such actions could range from manipulating the media to forming front organizations and counterfeiting official documents. There were more banal forms of forgery as well: agents would bend or invent information out of ambition, work pressure, laziness. Intelligence agencies in the Eastern Bloc did not usually match the spy-movie imagethey suffered from low morale, nepotism, and insufficient education. In 1970, the year of Kristevas recruitment, a little over half the agents at the First Chief Directorate, considered the lite branch, were university graduates. Fewer than half of all employees spoke at least one foreign language. Most of the reports in Kristevas dossier are rife with spelling mistakes. (Semiology was a particular challenge.) Phonetic transcriptions of French names into Bulgarian are woefully inaccurate.
Was it possible that Draganov had made up his reports about Kristeva?
No, Kremenliev said, firmly. Inventions of this kind were typical of young spies who wanted to make a career, and exaggerated information. Draganov was absolutely not that kind of person.
Kremenliev may be inclined to view his old colleagues in a positive light, but most experts in Bulgaria agree with him. There is no doubt to me that during Kristevas initial contacts with the State Security officer, the nature of the relationship was conspiratorial and she was aware of it, Momchil Metodiev, a widely respected historian of the State Security apparatus, and the author of several books on the subject, told me. It was common for collaborators to give only oral reports to their handlers, he said, and State Security tried to preserve relationships with sources even when the information they provided was deemed unimportant.
The historian Christopher Nehring, who has worked extensively with State Security archives, told German radio, There is no precedent for State Security to forge an entire dossier, along with the internal bureaucratic forms for registration. Bulgarias intelligence agents were bureaucrats, not Balzac: the idea that a few undereducated employees of State Security invented reports about a postmodernist philosopher veers into the territory of weird conspiracy. If anything, the operatives lack of imagination made their accounts a little too detailed, reportorial. With full narrative control, perhaps they would have madeup more interesting intelligence. At the very least, they might have presented themselves in a better light, and not as the bumbling fools Kristeva seems to have regularly made out of them. She employs her typical methodsto get something from us without giving us anything in return, an exasperated State Security employee wrote at one point.
In May, 1973, State Security took Kristeva off its official registry of agents. It was suspicious of her Maoist sympathiesalso, she never provided anything useful. We achieved no results, an officer at the Center wrote. But they didnt give up entirely. Over the next five years, intelligence officers and informers lingered and snooped in her vicinity, trying to dredge up what they could. An agent called Mark tried to sidle up to her sister, apparently with the aim of seducing her and getting close to the family. That strategy seems to have led nowhere. Kristeva was becoming famous: in July, 1973, five hundred people attended the defense of her doctoral thesis. Her dissertation became the magisterial book Revolution in Poetic Language, which earned her a chair in linguistics at the University of Paris VII. The agency grew cautious. It also began regularly intercepting the mail she sent back home.
In October, 1975, according to the dossier, Kristeva met a man named Vladimir Kostov at the caf Chez Francis, near the Seine. Years before, in Bulgaria, Kristeva had worked for a newspaper that Kostov edited. Now he was the Paris correspondent for Bulgarian National Radio & Television. He was also an undercover intelligence officer.
They spoke for nearly two hours. She was pregnant with her first child. She assured Kostov that she had never engaged in public anti-Bulgarian or anti-Soviet activities. Yes, she had signed that open letter inLe Monde, but she felt obliged to do so, she said. And it was true that she and her husband had been official guests in Maos China the previous yearKristeva even wrote a regrettable book afterward, About Chinese Women, in which she offered an awkwardly feminist interpretation of foot-binding and claimed that Mao had liberated womenbut this merely reflected the general interest in China among leftists in the West, she said. The kind of information she was asked to provide was simply not within her scope, but that didnt mean she didnt want to help her homeland. Then talk turned to passports.
Kostov is eighty-six now, and still lives near Paris. He replied promptly to an e-mail. His memory of particular meetings was failing him, he explained, but he did meet with Kristeva, and the documents looked authentic to him; he recognized his writing style. (Kostovs own State Security file also includes references to Sabina.) Kristeva has since confirmed that she knew Kostov, but says that she did not know that he was an intelligence officer, and that they did not talk about politics. It seems to me that the object of such contacts has to twist the arm of her imagination very much not to understand whats going on, Kostov wrote to me, though he acknowledged that he couldnt be certain.
If Kristeva had any impulse to forget these events, he would understand, he added. Kostov defected in 1977, and the Bulgarian government sentenced him to death. In 1978, he was shot with a miniature poisonous pellet while coming out of the Paris Mtro. He became ill but survived. Two weeks after that, another Bulgarian, the dissident writerGeorgi Markov, who had made his home in London, was shot with an identical pellet, which was almost certainly fired by a State Security assassin. Markov was rushed to a hospital, where he died, four days later. As inept and ridiculous as State Security sometimes appeared to be, it was capable of unleashing enormous violence against its opponents.
After the China trip, in 1974, and the birth of her son, two years later, Kristeva increasingly turned away from politics and toward psychoanalysis. She received formal training and opened her own practice, in 1979. Her writing, once technical and rather turgid, became more eccentricecstatic, even. In 1980, she published Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, perhaps her most famous book. We become autonomous subjects, she proposed, upon our estrangement from our mothers. This is abjectionrejecting what is alien to oneself in order to create a separate, if always provisional, identity. But the abject always hovers uncannily somewhere in the background, threatening to break through the fragile borders of the self.
The idea of estrangement became crucial to Kristevas philosophical preoccupations. A foreigner, Roland Barthes once famously called her, and she has embraced the label. Over the years, she has crafted the public persona of a perpetual exile, unconstrained by borders. In 1991, she published a poetic meditation on the history of foreignness called Strangers to Ourselves, in which she describes the foreigner as a person from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. She adds, Do not send him back to his origins.
A few years later, Kristeva published an essay titled Bulgaria, My Suffering. In visceral language that borders on revulsion, she described her feelings toward her old country, and her old language, in nearly apocalyptic terms. Over this buried crypt, over this reservoir that rots and decays, I built myself a new home that I inhabit and that lives in me, she writes. Her native land, steeped in the mysticism of Orthodox Christianity,lacked the intellectual sophistication of Western culture; France, and French, offered a second, more noble birth. The tasteless and the banal were her enemies.
One of the most striking features of the Sabina dossier is its ordinariness. Kristeva furnishes apartments, goes on vacations, jumps at career opportunities, asks for passports, takes care of a baby. She is shrewd enough to wheel and deal with half-witted intelligence officers but otherwise seems unexceptional. In April, Kristeva told the German newspaperDie Zeit, The person in this dossier does not resemble me.
When I e-mailed Kristeva, she described the agencys reports, which she put in scare quotes, as imaginary constructsconstructions imaginairesa phrase that sent me back to her work in theory. It was true, from a certain perspective, that the documents were mere reports, instances of a discursive practice that attempt to constitute a subject but can never capture the subjects essence, if such an essence even exists. State Security dossiers are something like institutional folk biographies, collectively authored, mostly by not-very-talented writers with limited psychological insight into their characters. Such documents are, as a rule, riddled with ideological cant, malicious bias, and factual inaccuracies, and they frequently come to us in incomplete form. But, then, our knowledge of the past is always partial. The narrative of Sabina cant tell us who Julia Kristeva really was; that does not make it false. As Georgi Markov, the dissident writer who was murdered in London, once wrote, There is an awful discrepancy between a person and the facts he produces.
Unlike Heidegger or de Man, whose involvement with Nazism was partly rooted in convictionpassionate thinking was howHannah Arendtonce tried to explain Heideggers failure of characterKristevas interactions with Bulgarian intelligence appear thoroughly practical and opportunistic. All things considered, she was not that different from many other citizens of the Eastern Bloc, the majority of whom existed in a kind of murky middle zone between moral probity and moral degradation, between shouting Marxist-Leninist slogans in public squares and stewing in quiet outrage at home, between writing philosophy and meeting the man called Lyubomirov. Totalitarianism cultivates monsters, and monstrous crimes, but most of its subjects merely experience the insidiousness of its power, its ability to draw everybody into its all-encompassing orbit and turn victims into the victimizers of others, making everybody, save for a very rare few, complicit in at least some minor way.
People like Julia Kristeva may not have harmed anybody, but, wittingly or not, they transferred some of their reputation to the system, Ekaterina Boncheva told me one day, at the Dossier Committees headquarters. Boncheva, a psychologist by training, was a journalist at Radio Free Europe, and worked briefly in politics before joining the committee, in 2007. She believes that it is essential for citizens to distinguish between various levels of complicity, with vigorous public debate, and that the committees job is merely to put all the known facts before them. By denying those facts when it comes to her, Kristeva has betrayed her emphasis, throughout her career, on speaking beings, on the excavatory work of psychoanalysis, on the importance of self-questioning and the search for knowledge. By placing archives and reports in scare quotes, rejecting their underlying reality, she has in effect cast doubt on the entire effort to examine Bulgarias totalitarian past through the surviving documents of State Security, the most important repository of the institutional memory of the former regime. And by using terms like fake news to dismiss reporting on the evidence, she hasechoed the powerful political regimesof our own day. In the end, what truly disturbs in Kristevas case is not whatever help she gave to State Securitynot much, it seems, and not for very longbut her apparent attempt to silence the past. If Kristeva had decided to tell her story, she could have helped everybody, Boncheva said. Personally, I would have understood her.
In November, Columbia University Press will publish a newly translated collection of essays by Kristeva titled Passions of Our Time. The essays cover many of Kristevas favorite topics: semiotics, marginality, psychoanalysis. The word singularity appears over and over in the book, in various contexts. This is a preoccupation of Kristevas later work: the idea that each of us should strive to acquire a unique psychic life; that the rights and experience of the individual precede collectivist agendas, regardless of ideology; that human freedom is conjugated in the singular. Perhaps Kristevas evident status as a collaborator, even one who mostly took advantage of intelligence agents who were not as intelligent as she was, threatens her own cultivated image of intellectual singularity. Those agents, however feebly, tied her to her homeland, made her part of the banal crowdjust one of the thousands of Bulgarians who extended, in some fashion, the reach of Bulgarias totalitarian regime.
The analogy that Miglena Nikolchina made on morning television to #MeToo is imperfect at best, but the mechanisms of patriarchy and totalitarianism are not altogether different. As I talked with people about Kristevas dossier, I kept thinking about her code name, Sabina. It is not a typical Bulgarian nameaccording to one expert I spoke to, it is unique in State Securitys nomenclature. Agents would often, though not always, choose their code names. Did officers catch an allusion to the classical myth of the Sabine women, who were invited to attend a festival in Rome, only to beabducted by the Romans and forced to marry them? Kristeva, the mother of intertextuality, has insisted that she never heard that whimsical pseudonym before her dossier came to light, and that may be the case. But traces of her intelligence, in every sense of that word, appear all over the files.
One of the last items preserved in Kristevas dossier is an extensive interview titled What Is the Function of Intellectuals?, which she gave toLe Nouvel Observateur, in 1977. It was translated into Bulgariantwenty typewritten pagesby State Security workers. It is one of Kristevas best interviews. She discusses her largely romantic flirtation with the French Communist Party and Maoism, and how she outgrew and rejected both. She defends the independent position of the intellectual as a dissident who shouldnt serve political parties, ideologies, or collective agendas, and should preserve strangeness, oddity, and distance. At the end of the interview, alluding to Freuds book Totem and Taboo, Kristeva says, In the current situation, when an intellectual cannot honestly hide himself, the only thing he could do is to preserve the Freudian truth, according to which every society is created on the basis of a collective crime. We need to search for this crime in all societies, with a maximum degree of honesty. The State Security officer who read the interview thickly underlined the passage.