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Julia Kristeva
Alice Jardine
At the risk of thinking: An Intellectual biography of Julia Kristeva
At the Risk of Thinking is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world. Review theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/22/at-the-risk-of-thinking-by-alice-jardine-review-biography-of-a-feminist-intellectual About the Author Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, USA. Her publications include The Future of Difference (1980), Gynésis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan (2007), and, as translator, Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez, 1980). Mari Ruti (PhD, Harvard University) is Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of thirteen books: Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (2006); A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living (2009); The Summons of Love (2011); The Case for Falling in Love (2011); The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012); The Call of Character (2013); Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2015); The Age of Scientific Sexism (Bloomsbury, 2015); Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman (Bloomsbury, 2016); The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects (2017); Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life (2018); Distillations: Theory, Ethics, Affect (Bloomsbury, 2018); and Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue - with Amy Allen (Bloomsbury, 2019). Transcript August Baker: This is August Baker. Today I have the great privilege to be speaking with Professor Alice Jardine. Alice is a professor at Harvard University. She's worked in the forefront of critical thought since the '80s, wide ranging work. Prominent are issues of women, gender, and sexuality, and the analysis of politics, culture, and society. Today we're speaking with Professor Jardine about her recent book, which is the first biography of another public intellectual, specifically the inimitable Julia Kristeva. The book is called At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva. One of the endorsements for the book was by Noel McCaffey, and I thought it captured Alice's book very well. McCaffey said, "With a light and magical touch, Alice Jardine narrates the story of Julia Kristeva's journey from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, to the expanse of human singularity. In her intimate account Jardine shows how Kristeva became one of the most extraordinary intellectuals of our era. For every reader, here is a story that will inspire us all to think more deeply, to revolt against preconceptions, and to become our own force in creating the meaning of our lives." That's the end of the quote. I thought that was beautifully said and very true, was an inspiring book for me to read. The book has been very well-received, including winning 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Welcome, Alice. Alice Jardine: Hello, August. Thank you for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here. August Baker: We are speaking on March 29th, 2022, and about a month ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. One of the things you say in your book is that the stories dominating Kristeva's earliest memories of her childhood were shaped by two devastating totalitarian invasions. Alice Jardine: Yes, indeed. So perhaps for your listeners, I'll clarify that the book is divided into three parts. The first part covers the years from Kristeva's birth in 1941 in Sliven, Bulgaria until 1965, and Kristeva's departure for Paris. The second part is her adventures in Paris, and the third part is a sort of overview of her life and work over the last few decades since the 1980s. That first part was absolutely the most challenging part to write, in part because of my own ignorance about Eastern Europe, and certainly about the history of Bulgaria, but also because I was writing it during the Trump administration and the echoes and reverberations and strange complexities of listening both to that historical moment of Kristeva's childhood in Bulgaria and what was happening in the United States. It also brought up a lot of Kristeva's concepts and vocabulary. She writes about radical evil. She writes about the death drive, et cetera, which maybe we'll have time to get to, which of course makes today, talking about this book with you and her childhood today, even more intense. What I meant by the statement about her memories and these invasions, of course, is referring to the fact that Bulgaria was neutral, tried to be neutral, before the Second World War, but entered as a member of the Axis powers. It came into the war with the Nazis, but also took a lot of distance from the Nazi regime, and for example, refused, or tried to refuse, to round up Jewish people and would not comply with various demands of the Nazi regime. Then by the summer of 1944, the Soviets were coming in through Romania, and Bulgaria got in trouble with the Soviets who then declared war on Bulgaria and invaded in September of '44. And Kristeva, of course, was a young child in Sliven, Bulgaria, and as she recalls those years, early years of her childhood, she evokes, for example, going down to the basement of her parents' home and listening to Radio London, and she gets quite excited when she talks about that. It's a very vivid memory in her mind because they had to be very quiet. Meanwhile, they were watching through the windows at the upper wall of the basement, and as she puts it, "First there were Nazi boots and then there were Soviet boots." The other things that she tends to talk about, which I try to talk about in the book, tends to be at the level of affect or emotion. She talks about fear, she talks about hearing rumors of horrible things and running through the streets to get home. She talks about a sense of regulation, always having what she needed, but not what she wanted. She tells stories about going to her friend's house and her friend's mother giving her friend one teaspoon of water at a time and no more. She talks about disappointment. She talks about especially her father's enormous disappointment that he's trying to raise his daughters in this place that he calls "the intestines of hell." And he- August Baker: He wanted to become a priest originally. Is that right? Alice Jardine: He did. He was a very devout orthodox Christian who had studied theology and wanted to continue in his efforts to be a theologian, and of course couldn't. Toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor and that was not a good idea. Because he wanted his daughters to be educated in Sofia, he became part of essentially the sort of Sovietized ministry of religion. But he wrote a lot, he wrote lot of essays sort of in secret and continued to believe for a very long time, even though they had to be very careful not to let the authorities see them sneaking off to communion early, at dawn. Yeah. August Baker: One of the things you say is, "All my childhood was bathed in this, the smell of the incense, the profusion of flowers on the altar." Beautiful. Alice Jardine: Yes, and she has talked quite a lot about the fact that Bulgaria itself is so full of contradiction and so full of... It's where Christianity and Islam and Judaism all met, and then there were the Turks and there were the Nazis and there were the Soviets. She really sees herself as having taken in history and sort of become a product of history. Then she always pauses and says, "But what really stuck was those memories of in the early morning, in the monastery or in the church with my father. It was the music, it was the art, it was the music, it was the smell of the flowers." Eventually those sensations, those affects I think, became for her a symbol, maybe not quite the right word, but certainly a avocation of that which escapes the kind of rationality of Soviet identity in that case. But even later for her, I think it evokes what she will later in her work call the semiotic, that which is not part of meaning and logic and rationality. She's always been more drawn, I think, to that sort of mystical magic than to logic and rationality. August Baker: I'm just kind of free associating here, but one of the things I was really interested... She resisted her father's religiosity for a long time, and one of the stories you tell in the book is about ultimately her representing atheism at that conference with the Pope. Could you tell our listeners about that? Alice Jardine: Yes. She had given a huge lecture, public lecture, in Italy on her book on Teresa. There were some representatives from the Vatican at that lecture, and they were very taken with her. She is very clear that she's an atheist. I mean, she may have these mystical memories, but she is a bonafide atheist. Slowly but surely, she began to receive invites to appear at this event in... I believe it was October of 2011. It was an event organized by Pope Benedict XVI, where a representative from the majority of the world's religions were going to gather in order to discuss the future of the church, and for the first time in history, they invited an atheist. So I include in the book this photograph that I still find quite astonishing. All of these men lined up in a row, in every possible outfit- August Baker: Yes. Costume or religious outfit. Yeah. Alice Jardine: Yes, and Kristeva at the very end standing there very modestly, and she spoke last, actually. They all spoke, and she spoke last. Pope Benedict actually was very moved by what she had to say, and he afterwards made the remarks, looking at all of these representatives, he said, "You know, no one owns the truth." August Baker: Right. Outstanding. That was quite a story. If we go back to her early childhood, it's interesting. She says there were two stories she wanted the readers to know, and at one point you address the reader and say, "There are also two stories about Kristeva's childhood that I want you to know." I guess that's four stories total. Could you give us one or two of those stories, whichever appeals to you at the moment? Alice Jardine: Of course. Well, I'll be self-involved and tell you what I think your listeners might want to know if they've read any Kristeva or know of her and her work. Because I didn't know these stories until like 2011 or '12, and it made so much sense to me. Briefly, one of them was that she hated when she was a young girl, she hated girl stuff. She was given a doll house and she loathed it. She wanted to destroy it. She hated the little dolls in the doll house. She would evidently just stomp around screaming that she didn't want to do all of that. She didn't want to wash the dishes and dress the dolls, et cetera, and that said a lot. She talks about her books and those were the precious items locked away in the cupboard. The other story she told me also made a lot of sense to me. It was new to me when she told me that she almost never cried as a child, almost never. And she would do things like, and she was very famous for it when she was quite young, she and her mother would be walking in the park and Kristeva would just take off running and she would run and run and run as fast as she could until she'd fall down, and she'd stand up and she'd have scratches and blood and it would be a mess. Her mother would come running, "What have you done?" And she would say, Kristeva would say, she'd touch her mother's face very gently and say, "Oh mama, don't worry. I'll take care of you." And that's the story [inaudible 00:13:27]. August Baker: That was such a great story. Yeah. Alice Jardine: That said a lot. August Baker: It certainly did. I love that. She started out as a journalist, and it's difficult for us to imagine what it must have been like to be a... I mean, for her high school newspaper. It's difficult for us to imagine what it would've been like to be a journalist in a communist country. She wrote some things that put her family at some risk, even when she was... I guess when she was 21. Alice Jardine: There are a couple of things to say about that period that, again, I don't think very many anglophone readers know a lot about. When she began writing as a journalist, quite young, in her teens, actually mainly for money, for extra money, and eventually became quite well-known because of her ability to write in a very palimpsestic or kind of camouflaged kind of way. She seemed to have the ability to write a sort of surface level story that would adhere to what the authorities and censors wanted. But she could wind through it the stories that she actually wanted to tell, and she was very good at it. Just before she left Paris, actually, well, 1962, she was 21 years old, and there was a dissident journalist named Albert Cohen who had written a book and no one- August Baker: Roads and Stops. Alice Jardine: Roads and Stops, and no one wanted to review it because it was very much written in... It was the Khrushchev era. It was very much written in the spirit of the thaw as they called it, in other words, a kind of renewed openness to the Western world and a lot of literary exploration. No one wanted to review it, except of course our young Kristeva who perhaps naively wrote this absolutely sparkling review of the book. The next day on the front page of the communist newspaper, there was a headline that said, "Julia Kristeva, cosmopolitan agent of the capitalist hyena." She was called a spy. She was called a Zionist, which was of course an insult, and they were terrified. Her father, who was probably the most aware of the dangers of this kind of thing, took her to a monastery and they sort of hid out because he was afraid they were going to be sent away to a camp. Then to make everything worse, Radio Free Europe did a whole session on how brilliant she was. Nothing happened to them, and I suggest that this may have been because she was not particularly political in the public sphere except for this camouflaged writing, and she was becoming quite well-known as a translator. For example, she took the cosmonauts around. Yeah, so this time period when she was writing is really, really important to understand, I think. She even wrote a book that nobody knows about, which I'm trying to get translated. 1964, she published a book called Characteristic Trends in 20th Century Western Literature. The more I looked at this time period when she was with all of these dissident journalists and dissident intellectuals, including her sweetheart, Tzvetan Stoyanov, that's really when she began to become Julia Kristeva, in an odd kind of way. I mean, this writing, which Stoyanov actually called a theoretical hurricane. He said, "Julia, you write these theoretical hurricanes." What she was trying to do was camouflage what she was actually writing, which was already a kind of window on the Western world, and in some ways, almost a preview of some of her earliest works in French, which many readers in French, in English and many other languages find very, very hard to read. Very hard, and I think it's from that time. August Baker: She eventually gets out of Bulgaria and goes to France, which easily could not have happened. It's kind of a miracle that did happen. December 15th, 1965, she gets on a plane to Paris with $5.00. It's easy to romanticize that, but I think what I found from your book was that it was extremely difficult to leave her home and her family and go and learn to think in a new language. It wasn't this heady, intellectual time when she first got to Paris. Alice Jardine: No, that's right. This was another discovery for me because I think I had sort of bought into that myth of, "Oh, Kristeva, she went off to Paris and became immediately part of the scene there." Well, no, not exactly. She desperately missed her intellectual community in Sofia. In fact, in the book I explained that I think part of her ability to find Roland Barthes and all of these other extraordinary intellectuals of the time was her effort to recreate that sense of being the center of the world and being able to really think out loud with like-minded friends. But as she was looking for these friends, she was quite depressed. She missed her community, she missed her boyfriend, Tzvetan. She missed her parents dreadfully. As you said, she was trying to learn to write in French and felt like her Bulgarian self was dying. She couldn't quite figure out how to do that. It took quite a long time. But eventually, because of this sort of parade of amazing mentors, she was able to find a community in Paris and eventually find her way and publish, and the rest is literature. She just never stopped., and met her husband to be and got married in 1967. She did manage to do it, but it wasn't easy. It was hard. A couple of times she got very sick. In fact, it was one of the reasons she and Philippe Sollers got married was she was really, really sick and had been working so hard. Don't forget, she thought she had to go back to Bulgaria. She thought she was only there for a year, and so she was just trying to... She was like a sponge. She was just going to everything and doing everything. She got really sick. Because she was from a communist country, they wouldn't give her a hospital room, and lots of stories about that. Then eventually she and Sollers got married and she was able to get the medical care she needed and become more integrated into French culture, which she did, more or less. August Baker: One of the funny things you said in the book, "It is actually hard for me to think of Julia Kristeva as anyone's wife, especially Sollers." Alice Jardine: [inaudible 00:21:12] that one. My editors didn't catch that. Yeah, I talk a lot in the book. I mean, I write quite extensively about that relationship, which I've come to accept, and I've come to understand better than I used to. He is such a character and he is such a brilliant writer, but- August Baker: I don't think that our listeners probably know about Dominique Rolin [inaudible 00:21:40]- Alice Jardine: No, they probably don't. Yeah, so the short version is that when Kristeva met her future husband, Philippe Sollers, he was already very involved with a Belgian writer, a very well-known Belgian writer, named Dominique Rolin, and who was much older than Sollers. I forget, I think she was 45. He was 20-something. Anyway, long story short, he, Sollers, made it very clear to Kristeva that this was a lifetime relationship. In fact, it was. She passed away, Dominique Rolin passed away, I think it was 2012, off the top of my head, and they were quite loyal to each other. And Kristeva never, ever experienced any jealousy in her telling. And of course, the reason she gives is that her father loved her so much, so much, that it didn't bother her. Rolin was very good for Sollers' writing, which was the most important thing to him. "And so why not? Why be jealous?" she said to me. August Baker: Right. You say, quoting her, "I was never jealous of my mother, convinced as I was that my father preferred me to her and to everyone else for that matter. It's my symptom to believe it, certainly, unless it's my strength." Alice Jardine: Yeah, that relationship between Kristeva and her father, I'm sure there's much more to write about. It was absolutely determinant. Yes. August Baker: He told her to "stand upright." Alice Jardine: Yes. August Baker: "Stand up straight, and even kneel with a very straight back in a corner." Alice Jardine: Yes. She was supposed to be the older sister. She has the younger sister, very talented musician. Kristeva was supposed to be the... She was supposed to be grownup and she was supposed to control her temper and behave. I keep saying that's why she has so much spine, she's so determined and so strong. I think that early relationship with her father was part of that. Her mother too, though. We didn't say very much about her mother, who was a very brilliant scientist, mathematician, with a creative side. She was also an illustrator. But she was really the exact opposite of Kristeva' father, the sort of rational mathematician who helped Kristeva with her schoolwork. [inaudible 00:24:39]. August Baker: Right, right, right. So she becomes a journalist, essayist, academic, a professor, public intellectual. Then at a certain point, she decides to go into psychoanalysis and eventually become a psychoanalyst. You say at one point, "To read, to listen, to think was not enough. She needed to feel implicated." Alice Jardine: Yeah. August Baker: Can you tell us about the decision to go into psychoanalysis and also maybe something about her analyst? Alice Jardine: Yes. I think that that desire to be implicated, to remain implicated is, I would almost say, characterological of Kristeva. It reminds me of when I was a young student in New York and she was writing an essay on the avant garde, the American avant garde, and she pulled me in her office and said, "Okay, we have to go and see five avant garde productions of some kind in New York." I was like 22, I don't know, I was like, "Okay." Because she wanted to experience it firsthand. I would say that because she had been to Lacan's seminars in Paris, and because she was beginning to circulate in the Tel Quel Group, and not only with Sollers, her husband, but with other members of Tel Quel, many of whom were deeply involved with psychoanalytic theory. Because of her passion for language and her belief that we are all not just implicated, but actually constructed by language, she wanted to go on the couch. She wanted to speak her implication in all of these ideas that she was writing about academically, theoretically. She asked a few friends, it's a long story, but eventually she was sort of moved towards Ilse Barant, a German analyst who has a long and an interesting story herself, as a Jewish woman, with a very sad, long story in occupied France. But Kristeva, who at that point was deeply immersed in Melanie Klein and Winnicott and others, discovered in Barant an intelligence that both reassured her about her sense of language, the magic of language, and the existential importance of artistic and literary consciousness. So she found someone who shared her, I guess, for lack of a better word, I'll say epistemology, but shared what she cared about, but also someone who challenged her at every turn and who did not... I think I tell the story about going and interviewing and seeing if it was a right fit, and Kristeva talking about how her relationship with her mother was like a ball bouncing on the floor that she just touched her mother, but never actually got to- August Baker: Stayed a bit, never stayed a bit. Alice Jardine: Yeah, and balance it. "Okay, you start now." It was clear. Yeah, I mean, for me, what was fascinating about that story, to go into analysis, but she had no idea she would become an analyst when she started. But the analysis led her to three things that where anglophone readers are essential. It led her to feminism because she decided that she needed to go to China because she needed to feel implicated if she was going to write about ideograms, et cetera. So she was going to go to China, which is a whole story I tell, which there were some funny bits. She is going to go to China, and then she's going to write a book on Chinese women for this notorious publishing firm, des Femmes. Through that essay and through that book, and through that experience, she became a feminist in the eyes of American readers, she decided that she would become an analyst. This was quite far along in the process. She's, "I think this is for me." Third, she decided to become a mother. Those were the three huge, huge decisions that had reverberating consequences that came out of that decision. August Baker: You mentioned becoming a mother. Tell us about, our readers, another thing that I didn't know about her son. Is it David or- Alice Jardine: David. August Baker: Yes, David. Alice Jardine: David is a miracle. David is extraordinary, an extraordinary human being for whom I have enormous affection. I tell the story of Kristeva's pregnancy, which was quite unexceptional, and then David was born and adored. Then they began to see that something wasn't quite right. It turned out, long story short, that David had what they call an orphan disease, but a neurological disorder that led to a series of physical disabilities. But David never lost an ounce or even less, whatever, less than an ounce is, of his intelligence and memory. He has a photographic memory, and is very witty and smart. And [inaudible 00:30:37]- August Baker: You can imagine that what Stoyan gave to Kristeva, she passed on to David. Alice Jardine: Yeah. Yeah. David is very special. He's now an adult man who writes and who thinks and who plays, and he's a remarkable human being. But I think for Kristeva, as soon as she realized that she had a disabled child, she had to find a way to continue as an analyst, continue as a writer, continue as a professor, continue as a wife, continue as a world traveler, and continue as the mother of a disabled son, which- August Baker: Which is inspiring, yeah. Alice Jardine: ... she has done brilliantly. August Baker: Yes. But one point, I think you refer to the marches that she would listen to in Bulgaria, kind of march on- Alice Jardine: Yes. That was a discovery. She has gone back to Bulgaria a couple of times to make films. I was of course watching all of these films. In one of them, I'd have to look up the title of it, but it shows her, she joined during the alphabet ceremony that she had participated in as a child, which basically is a celebration of the monks who invented the Slavic alphabet. Once a year, children all over Bulgaria put on a letter that they parade around in. It's a celebration of the alphabet. Anyway- August Baker: In no other country is there a celebration of the alphabet, that I know of. That's interesting. Fascinating. Alice Jardine: I've learned that there are kind mini-celebrations in other parts of Eastern Europe, but I haven't able to track down exactly where. Anyway, one of these films showed her at one of these alphabet celebrations in May, and she began marching with the crowd. It was just extraordinary to suddenly see this very elegant Parisian woman suddenly marching with such vehemence and singing this Sovietized marching song about writing. It's about writing. It was extraordinary. All of these parts of her, she's quite a puzzle. August Baker: Yeah. You said that it was on the couch... I'm sorry, feels like I'm rushing. There's so much to cover. You said that on the couch that Kristeva found many of her best ideas, and you refer to Julia's conceptual toolbox. That's a big topic, but could you just give an overview of that? Alice Jardine: Well, yeah, I can say a few short things about that. The most famous example of that is when she was in analysis with Ilse Barant. She was saying, "Oh, my mother's here. Oh my God. And there's the baby, and I'm writing this book on saline, and it's so abject." Ilse Barant said, "Oh, that's the word you want." And the notion of objection became one of Kristeva's most famous concepts. What I call in my courses, especially with my grad students, what I call her conceptual toolbox, I guess I could summarize very quickly as first of all, having to do with the question of the intellectual, and certainly today in 2022, how can you be an intellectual? She talks about being contestatory. She talks about putting reliance and care at the center of one's practice as opposed to aggression and one-upmanship, et cetera. Secondly, I would say there's a batch of concepts that have to do with going back to concepts that have been very important historically in Western philosophy, and not throwing the baby out with the bath water, as it were. She wants to reinvent humanism. She wants to rethink universalism. She wants to get away from talking about identity and focus on subjectivity very much in the psychoanalytic sense. Then thirdly, and lastly, I think she really wants intellectuals to think about vulnerable subjects, all of the kinds of human subjects who are vulnerable and not- August Baker: And marginalized. Alice Jardine: ... and marginalized. Exactly. Especially because she believes that one of the things that the Western world is suffering from right now, and not only the Western world, but maybe especially, is what she calls an ideality disorder, just meaning briefly that because of the assault of technology on our psyches, we've lost our capacity for psychic space, and we are losing our idealism. We're becoming disappointed and distressed about our ideals that we had believed in, and now we're not so sure. She really sees that as a serious crisis that needs addressing. August Baker: Right. Yeah. One of the things I really liked about your book is that you go through her... I don't know which section it is, but you go through... There's so many ideas which one associates with Kristeva, and what I found really helpful was that if you want to see her thoughts on the death drive, here's the book, when she talked about being a mother of a child with a disability, here's where you look. If you want to look at the need to believe in the desire to know, here's the book. It's kind of like a large annotated bibliography, if you will. Alice Jardine: Well, thank you for saying that, because that was one of my intentions was- August Baker: Because otherwise you don't know what to buy. There's so much, and this way you can zero in on what you want to see. Alice Jardine: Yeah. I say in the introduction that the Kristeva's relationship to this biography, it's the first one, there'll be many more. I had to be very careful. She doesn't want her private life aired until after her demise. Then I said my relationship to the book is really about not praising her or putting her on a pedestal, but really trying to honestly recount her life as I believe she's lived it. Then my readers' relationship, I wrote it for interested non-specialist readers, and so what better thing could I do than point towards various kinds of readings? Because there's so much. There's so much. August Baker: There's so much. Alice Jardine: I think at one point, I'm trying to mention 50 books, something about 50 books that isn't just a throwaway line or something terribly superficial, to actually say something meaningful that will make my reader want to go read that book. August Baker: Oh, absolutely. You succeed brilliantly at that. Alice Jardine: Thank you. August Baker: Oh boy, we're running out of time. Can you tell us, what is this Sabina? Alice Jardine: Woo. How long do we have? August Baker: In 30 seconds. No. Alice Jardine: No! August Baker: No, go. I'm just kidding. Tell us, what is this? Alice Jardine: Okay. The short version is that in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, various kinds of archives were set up that were attempting to identify folks who had been working secretly with the communist regimes and were agents or spies, if you like. Those archives in Bulgaria were declassified in 2007 and lo and behold, slowly it became apparent that Kristeva was named in those archives and that she had been an agent of the DEAS, of the horrible secret service. There's a lot to say about this. But in 2018, I remember, March 28th, 2018, I got a phone call that it was public that she had been named. Of course, she was aghast. She was horrified and has denied it totally. When The New York Times called me and asked me what I thought, I said, almost without thinking, "I believe her. I believe her completely." And I go through all the reasons why, but I said, "The most important reason is that if she had been forced in order to protect her own life or the life of her family to do that, she would've written about it when the wall came down. She couldn't have helped herself." The thing that's so sad, and I'll just say this quickly, I know we're running out of time, but the thing that's so sad about this whole affair really, ultimately, is that I mentioned her sweetheart, Tzvetan Stoyanov, back in Bulgaria. In early 1971, he accepted a challenge to go and try to convince Georgi Markov, who's probably one of the most famous poisoned dissidents in history with- August Baker: With the umbrella- Alice Jardine: With the umbrella tip, right, to convince Markov to come back to Bulgaria, and he failed. He did not. Her sweetheart did not convince Markov to come back to Sofia. In mid-June of 1971, when Tzvetan Stoyanov and Julia Kristeva were the two most famous intellectuals in Bulgaria, Stoyanov died. He died under very strange circumstances. One has to be very careful because there's no proof, but I believe that he was killed by the DEAS. In the archive that names Kristeva as a spy, they give mid-June 1971 as the date of her engagement as a spy. What's sad, really sad, is from that moment on, from mid-June 1971, they surveilled her, and her husband, and her child, and her family. We still don't quite know what they did, what they threatened her parents with back in Bulgaria, and she had no idea. No idea. It's called blind surveillance. I mean, it was a technical kind of surveillance. It really devastated her, and it really devastated her that the Western press jumped on it and didn't question all of this fake news, all of this dissembling, all of this politicking from a period that very few Anglophones understand. So- August Baker: In her self defense, when she is asked? Alice Jardine: She didn't know. She didn't know, and when they bring up like, "Well, you had tea with Mr. Kostov." August Baker: "Yes, I did." Alice Jardine: Yeah. "Yeah, he had sent me books from France when I was a student in Bulgaria. I had no idea he was a spy." Of course, he left Bulgaria in 1977. He wanted no more of it. But in any case, she has answers. "Well, what about the time you said, 'Power to the people, ironically?'" And she said, "Well, this poet, or this wannabe poet, came to my apartment door." She can talk about each incident that's brought up. But overall, it's her disappointment and worry and anger that the press can be so gullible about these... and it's happened to a lot of people. To a lot of people. August Baker: Right. Unfortunately, we're past our time, Alice. I really appreciate... There's so much more. I think that the death of her father. She's had a lot of deaths and a lot of resurrections in her life, as she says. It's a fascinating story and it makes one want to read her books and one knows where to look. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Alice Jardine: Thank you, August. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
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By August BakerAlice Jardine
At the risk of thinking: An Intellectual biography of Julia Kristeva
At the Risk of Thinking is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world. Review theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/22/at-the-risk-of-thinking-by-alice-jardine-review-biography-of-a-feminist-intellectual About the Author Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, USA. Her publications include The Future of Difference (1980), Gynésis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan (2007), and, as translator, Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez, 1980). Mari Ruti (PhD, Harvard University) is Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of thirteen books: Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (2006); A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living (2009); The Summons of Love (2011); The Case for Falling in Love (2011); The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012); The Call of Character (2013); Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2015); The Age of Scientific Sexism (Bloomsbury, 2015); Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman (Bloomsbury, 2016); The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects (2017); Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life (2018); Distillations: Theory, Ethics, Affect (Bloomsbury, 2018); and Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue - with Amy Allen (Bloomsbury, 2019). Transcript August Baker: This is August Baker. Today I have the great privilege to be speaking with Professor Alice Jardine. Alice is a professor at Harvard University. She's worked in the forefront of critical thought since the '80s, wide ranging work. Prominent are issues of women, gender, and sexuality, and the analysis of politics, culture, and society. Today we're speaking with Professor Jardine about her recent book, which is the first biography of another public intellectual, specifically the inimitable Julia Kristeva. The book is called At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva. One of the endorsements for the book was by Noel McCaffey, and I thought it captured Alice's book very well. McCaffey said, "With a light and magical touch, Alice Jardine narrates the story of Julia Kristeva's journey from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, to the expanse of human singularity. In her intimate account Jardine shows how Kristeva became one of the most extraordinary intellectuals of our era. For every reader, here is a story that will inspire us all to think more deeply, to revolt against preconceptions, and to become our own force in creating the meaning of our lives." That's the end of the quote. I thought that was beautifully said and very true, was an inspiring book for me to read. The book has been very well-received, including winning 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Welcome, Alice. Alice Jardine: Hello, August. Thank you for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here. August Baker: We are speaking on March 29th, 2022, and about a month ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. One of the things you say in your book is that the stories dominating Kristeva's earliest memories of her childhood were shaped by two devastating totalitarian invasions. Alice Jardine: Yes, indeed. So perhaps for your listeners, I'll clarify that the book is divided into three parts. The first part covers the years from Kristeva's birth in 1941 in Sliven, Bulgaria until 1965, and Kristeva's departure for Paris. The second part is her adventures in Paris, and the third part is a sort of overview of her life and work over the last few decades since the 1980s. That first part was absolutely the most challenging part to write, in part because of my own ignorance about Eastern Europe, and certainly about the history of Bulgaria, but also because I was writing it during the Trump administration and the echoes and reverberations and strange complexities of listening both to that historical moment of Kristeva's childhood in Bulgaria and what was happening in the United States. It also brought up a lot of Kristeva's concepts and vocabulary. She writes about radical evil. She writes about the death drive, et cetera, which maybe we'll have time to get to, which of course makes today, talking about this book with you and her childhood today, even more intense. What I meant by the statement about her memories and these invasions, of course, is referring to the fact that Bulgaria was neutral, tried to be neutral, before the Second World War, but entered as a member of the Axis powers. It came into the war with the Nazis, but also took a lot of distance from the Nazi regime, and for example, refused, or tried to refuse, to round up Jewish people and would not comply with various demands of the Nazi regime. Then by the summer of 1944, the Soviets were coming in through Romania, and Bulgaria got in trouble with the Soviets who then declared war on Bulgaria and invaded in September of '44. And Kristeva, of course, was a young child in Sliven, Bulgaria, and as she recalls those years, early years of her childhood, she evokes, for example, going down to the basement of her parents' home and listening to Radio London, and she gets quite excited when she talks about that. It's a very vivid memory in her mind because they had to be very quiet. Meanwhile, they were watching through the windows at the upper wall of the basement, and as she puts it, "First there were Nazi boots and then there were Soviet boots." The other things that she tends to talk about, which I try to talk about in the book, tends to be at the level of affect or emotion. She talks about fear, she talks about hearing rumors of horrible things and running through the streets to get home. She talks about a sense of regulation, always having what she needed, but not what she wanted. She tells stories about going to her friend's house and her friend's mother giving her friend one teaspoon of water at a time and no more. She talks about disappointment. She talks about especially her father's enormous disappointment that he's trying to raise his daughters in this place that he calls "the intestines of hell." And he- August Baker: He wanted to become a priest originally. Is that right? Alice Jardine: He did. He was a very devout orthodox Christian who had studied theology and wanted to continue in his efforts to be a theologian, and of course couldn't. Toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor and that was not a good idea. Because he wanted his daughters to be educated in Sofia, he became part of essentially the sort of Sovietized ministry of religion. But he wrote a lot, he wrote lot of essays sort of in secret and continued to believe for a very long time, even though they had to be very careful not to let the authorities see them sneaking off to communion early, at dawn. Yeah. August Baker: One of the things you say is, "All my childhood was bathed in this, the smell of the incense, the profusion of flowers on the altar." Beautiful. Alice Jardine: Yes, and she has talked quite a lot about the fact that Bulgaria itself is so full of contradiction and so full of... It's where Christianity and Islam and Judaism all met, and then there were the Turks and there were the Nazis and there were the Soviets. She really sees herself as having taken in history and sort of become a product of history. Then she always pauses and says, "But what really stuck was those memories of in the early morning, in the monastery or in the church with my father. It was the music, it was the art, it was the music, it was the smell of the flowers." Eventually those sensations, those affects I think, became for her a symbol, maybe not quite the right word, but certainly a avocation of that which escapes the kind of rationality of Soviet identity in that case. But even later for her, I think it evokes what she will later in her work call the semiotic, that which is not part of meaning and logic and rationality. She's always been more drawn, I think, to that sort of mystical magic than to logic and rationality. August Baker: I'm just kind of free associating here, but one of the things I was really interested... She resisted her father's religiosity for a long time, and one of the stories you tell in the book is about ultimately her representing atheism at that conference with the Pope. Could you tell our listeners about that? Alice Jardine: Yes. She had given a huge lecture, public lecture, in Italy on her book on Teresa. There were some representatives from the Vatican at that lecture, and they were very taken with her. She is very clear that she's an atheist. I mean, she may have these mystical memories, but she is a bonafide atheist. Slowly but surely, she began to receive invites to appear at this event in... I believe it was October of 2011. It was an event organized by Pope Benedict XVI, where a representative from the majority of the world's religions were going to gather in order to discuss the future of the church, and for the first time in history, they invited an atheist. So I include in the book this photograph that I still find quite astonishing. All of these men lined up in a row, in every possible outfit- August Baker: Yes. Costume or religious outfit. Yeah. Alice Jardine: Yes, and Kristeva at the very end standing there very modestly, and she spoke last, actually. They all spoke, and she spoke last. Pope Benedict actually was very moved by what she had to say, and he afterwards made the remarks, looking at all of these representatives, he said, "You know, no one owns the truth." August Baker: Right. Outstanding. That was quite a story. If we go back to her early childhood, it's interesting. She says there were two stories she wanted the readers to know, and at one point you address the reader and say, "There are also two stories about Kristeva's childhood that I want you to know." I guess that's four stories total. Could you give us one or two of those stories, whichever appeals to you at the moment? Alice Jardine: Of course. Well, I'll be self-involved and tell you what I think your listeners might want to know if they've read any Kristeva or know of her and her work. Because I didn't know these stories until like 2011 or '12, and it made so much sense to me. Briefly, one of them was that she hated when she was a young girl, she hated girl stuff. She was given a doll house and she loathed it. She wanted to destroy it. She hated the little dolls in the doll house. She would evidently just stomp around screaming that she didn't want to do all of that. She didn't want to wash the dishes and dress the dolls, et cetera, and that said a lot. She talks about her books and those were the precious items locked away in the cupboard. The other story she told me also made a lot of sense to me. It was new to me when she told me that she almost never cried as a child, almost never. And she would do things like, and she was very famous for it when she was quite young, she and her mother would be walking in the park and Kristeva would just take off running and she would run and run and run as fast as she could until she'd fall down, and she'd stand up and she'd have scratches and blood and it would be a mess. Her mother would come running, "What have you done?" And she would say, Kristeva would say, she'd touch her mother's face very gently and say, "Oh mama, don't worry. I'll take care of you." And that's the story [inaudible 00:13:27]. August Baker: That was such a great story. Yeah. Alice Jardine: That said a lot. August Baker: It certainly did. I love that. She started out as a journalist, and it's difficult for us to imagine what it must have been like to be a... I mean, for her high school newspaper. It's difficult for us to imagine what it would've been like to be a journalist in a communist country. She wrote some things that put her family at some risk, even when she was... I guess when she was 21. Alice Jardine: There are a couple of things to say about that period that, again, I don't think very many anglophone readers know a lot about. When she began writing as a journalist, quite young, in her teens, actually mainly for money, for extra money, and eventually became quite well-known because of her ability to write in a very palimpsestic or kind of camouflaged kind of way. She seemed to have the ability to write a sort of surface level story that would adhere to what the authorities and censors wanted. But she could wind through it the stories that she actually wanted to tell, and she was very good at it. Just before she left Paris, actually, well, 1962, she was 21 years old, and there was a dissident journalist named Albert Cohen who had written a book and no one- August Baker: Roads and Stops. Alice Jardine: Roads and Stops, and no one wanted to review it because it was very much written in... It was the Khrushchev era. It was very much written in the spirit of the thaw as they called it, in other words, a kind of renewed openness to the Western world and a lot of literary exploration. No one wanted to review it, except of course our young Kristeva who perhaps naively wrote this absolutely sparkling review of the book. The next day on the front page of the communist newspaper, there was a headline that said, "Julia Kristeva, cosmopolitan agent of the capitalist hyena." She was called a spy. She was called a Zionist, which was of course an insult, and they were terrified. Her father, who was probably the most aware of the dangers of this kind of thing, took her to a monastery and they sort of hid out because he was afraid they were going to be sent away to a camp. Then to make everything worse, Radio Free Europe did a whole session on how brilliant she was. Nothing happened to them, and I suggest that this may have been because she was not particularly political in the public sphere except for this camouflaged writing, and she was becoming quite well-known as a translator. For example, she took the cosmonauts around. Yeah, so this time period when she was writing is really, really important to understand, I think. She even wrote a book that nobody knows about, which I'm trying to get translated. 1964, she published a book called Characteristic Trends in 20th Century Western Literature. The more I looked at this time period when she was with all of these dissident journalists and dissident intellectuals, including her sweetheart, Tzvetan Stoyanov, that's really when she began to become Julia Kristeva, in an odd kind of way. I mean, this writing, which Stoyanov actually called a theoretical hurricane. He said, "Julia, you write these theoretical hurricanes." What she was trying to do was camouflage what she was actually writing, which was already a kind of window on the Western world, and in some ways, almost a preview of some of her earliest works in French, which many readers in French, in English and many other languages find very, very hard to read. Very hard, and I think it's from that time. August Baker: She eventually gets out of Bulgaria and goes to France, which easily could not have happened. It's kind of a miracle that did happen. December 15th, 1965, she gets on a plane to Paris with $5.00. It's easy to romanticize that, but I think what I found from your book was that it was extremely difficult to leave her home and her family and go and learn to think in a new language. It wasn't this heady, intellectual time when she first got to Paris. Alice Jardine: No, that's right. This was another discovery for me because I think I had sort of bought into that myth of, "Oh, Kristeva, she went off to Paris and became immediately part of the scene there." Well, no, not exactly. She desperately missed her intellectual community in Sofia. In fact, in the book I explained that I think part of her ability to find Roland Barthes and all of these other extraordinary intellectuals of the time was her effort to recreate that sense of being the center of the world and being able to really think out loud with like-minded friends. But as she was looking for these friends, she was quite depressed. She missed her community, she missed her boyfriend, Tzvetan. She missed her parents dreadfully. As you said, she was trying to learn to write in French and felt like her Bulgarian self was dying. She couldn't quite figure out how to do that. It took quite a long time. But eventually, because of this sort of parade of amazing mentors, she was able to find a community in Paris and eventually find her way and publish, and the rest is literature. She just never stopped., and met her husband to be and got married in 1967. She did manage to do it, but it wasn't easy. It was hard. A couple of times she got very sick. In fact, it was one of the reasons she and Philippe Sollers got married was she was really, really sick and had been working so hard. Don't forget, she thought she had to go back to Bulgaria. She thought she was only there for a year, and so she was just trying to... She was like a sponge. She was just going to everything and doing everything. She got really sick. Because she was from a communist country, they wouldn't give her a hospital room, and lots of stories about that. Then eventually she and Sollers got married and she was able to get the medical care she needed and become more integrated into French culture, which she did, more or less. August Baker: One of the funny things you said in the book, "It is actually hard for me to think of Julia Kristeva as anyone's wife, especially Sollers." Alice Jardine: [inaudible 00:21:12] that one. My editors didn't catch that. Yeah, I talk a lot in the book. I mean, I write quite extensively about that relationship, which I've come to accept, and I've come to understand better than I used to. He is such a character and he is such a brilliant writer, but- August Baker: I don't think that our listeners probably know about Dominique Rolin [inaudible 00:21:40]- Alice Jardine: No, they probably don't. Yeah, so the short version is that when Kristeva met her future husband, Philippe Sollers, he was already very involved with a Belgian writer, a very well-known Belgian writer, named Dominique Rolin, and who was much older than Sollers. I forget, I think she was 45. He was 20-something. Anyway, long story short, he, Sollers, made it very clear to Kristeva that this was a lifetime relationship. In fact, it was. She passed away, Dominique Rolin passed away, I think it was 2012, off the top of my head, and they were quite loyal to each other. And Kristeva never, ever experienced any jealousy in her telling. And of course, the reason she gives is that her father loved her so much, so much, that it didn't bother her. Rolin was very good for Sollers' writing, which was the most important thing to him. "And so why not? Why be jealous?" she said to me. August Baker: Right. You say, quoting her, "I was never jealous of my mother, convinced as I was that my father preferred me to her and to everyone else for that matter. It's my symptom to believe it, certainly, unless it's my strength." Alice Jardine: Yeah, that relationship between Kristeva and her father, I'm sure there's much more to write about. It was absolutely determinant. Yes. August Baker: He told her to "stand upright." Alice Jardine: Yes. August Baker: "Stand up straight, and even kneel with a very straight back in a corner." Alice Jardine: Yes. She was supposed to be the older sister. She has the younger sister, very talented musician. Kristeva was supposed to be the... She was supposed to be grownup and she was supposed to control her temper and behave. I keep saying that's why she has so much spine, she's so determined and so strong. I think that early relationship with her father was part of that. Her mother too, though. We didn't say very much about her mother, who was a very brilliant scientist, mathematician, with a creative side. She was also an illustrator. But she was really the exact opposite of Kristeva' father, the sort of rational mathematician who helped Kristeva with her schoolwork. [inaudible 00:24:39]. August Baker: Right, right, right. So she becomes a journalist, essayist, academic, a professor, public intellectual. Then at a certain point, she decides to go into psychoanalysis and eventually become a psychoanalyst. You say at one point, "To read, to listen, to think was not enough. She needed to feel implicated." Alice Jardine: Yeah. August Baker: Can you tell us about the decision to go into psychoanalysis and also maybe something about her analyst? Alice Jardine: Yes. I think that that desire to be implicated, to remain implicated is, I would almost say, characterological of Kristeva. It reminds me of when I was a young student in New York and she was writing an essay on the avant garde, the American avant garde, and she pulled me in her office and said, "Okay, we have to go and see five avant garde productions of some kind in New York." I was like 22, I don't know, I was like, "Okay." Because she wanted to experience it firsthand. I would say that because she had been to Lacan's seminars in Paris, and because she was beginning to circulate in the Tel Quel Group, and not only with Sollers, her husband, but with other members of Tel Quel, many of whom were deeply involved with psychoanalytic theory. Because of her passion for language and her belief that we are all not just implicated, but actually constructed by language, she wanted to go on the couch. She wanted to speak her implication in all of these ideas that she was writing about academically, theoretically. She asked a few friends, it's a long story, but eventually she was sort of moved towards Ilse Barant, a German analyst who has a long and an interesting story herself, as a Jewish woman, with a very sad, long story in occupied France. But Kristeva, who at that point was deeply immersed in Melanie Klein and Winnicott and others, discovered in Barant an intelligence that both reassured her about her sense of language, the magic of language, and the existential importance of artistic and literary consciousness. So she found someone who shared her, I guess, for lack of a better word, I'll say epistemology, but shared what she cared about, but also someone who challenged her at every turn and who did not... I think I tell the story about going and interviewing and seeing if it was a right fit, and Kristeva talking about how her relationship with her mother was like a ball bouncing on the floor that she just touched her mother, but never actually got to- August Baker: Stayed a bit, never stayed a bit. Alice Jardine: Yeah, and balance it. "Okay, you start now." It was clear. Yeah, I mean, for me, what was fascinating about that story, to go into analysis, but she had no idea she would become an analyst when she started. But the analysis led her to three things that where anglophone readers are essential. It led her to feminism because she decided that she needed to go to China because she needed to feel implicated if she was going to write about ideograms, et cetera. So she was going to go to China, which is a whole story I tell, which there were some funny bits. She is going to go to China, and then she's going to write a book on Chinese women for this notorious publishing firm, des Femmes. Through that essay and through that book, and through that experience, she became a feminist in the eyes of American readers, she decided that she would become an analyst. This was quite far along in the process. She's, "I think this is for me." Third, she decided to become a mother. Those were the three huge, huge decisions that had reverberating consequences that came out of that decision. August Baker: You mentioned becoming a mother. Tell us about, our readers, another thing that I didn't know about her son. Is it David or- Alice Jardine: David. August Baker: Yes, David. Alice Jardine: David is a miracle. David is extraordinary, an extraordinary human being for whom I have enormous affection. I tell the story of Kristeva's pregnancy, which was quite unexceptional, and then David was born and adored. Then they began to see that something wasn't quite right. It turned out, long story short, that David had what they call an orphan disease, but a neurological disorder that led to a series of physical disabilities. But David never lost an ounce or even less, whatever, less than an ounce is, of his intelligence and memory. He has a photographic memory, and is very witty and smart. And [inaudible 00:30:37]- August Baker: You can imagine that what Stoyan gave to Kristeva, she passed on to David. Alice Jardine: Yeah. Yeah. David is very special. He's now an adult man who writes and who thinks and who plays, and he's a remarkable human being. But I think for Kristeva, as soon as she realized that she had a disabled child, she had to find a way to continue as an analyst, continue as a writer, continue as a professor, continue as a wife, continue as a world traveler, and continue as the mother of a disabled son, which- August Baker: Which is inspiring, yeah. Alice Jardine: ... she has done brilliantly. August Baker: Yes. But one point, I think you refer to the marches that she would listen to in Bulgaria, kind of march on- Alice Jardine: Yes. That was a discovery. She has gone back to Bulgaria a couple of times to make films. I was of course watching all of these films. In one of them, I'd have to look up the title of it, but it shows her, she joined during the alphabet ceremony that she had participated in as a child, which basically is a celebration of the monks who invented the Slavic alphabet. Once a year, children all over Bulgaria put on a letter that they parade around in. It's a celebration of the alphabet. Anyway- August Baker: In no other country is there a celebration of the alphabet, that I know of. That's interesting. Fascinating. Alice Jardine: I've learned that there are kind mini-celebrations in other parts of Eastern Europe, but I haven't able to track down exactly where. Anyway, one of these films showed her at one of these alphabet celebrations in May, and she began marching with the crowd. It was just extraordinary to suddenly see this very elegant Parisian woman suddenly marching with such vehemence and singing this Sovietized marching song about writing. It's about writing. It was extraordinary. All of these parts of her, she's quite a puzzle. August Baker: Yeah. You said that it was on the couch... I'm sorry, feels like I'm rushing. There's so much to cover. You said that on the couch that Kristeva found many of her best ideas, and you refer to Julia's conceptual toolbox. That's a big topic, but could you just give an overview of that? Alice Jardine: Well, yeah, I can say a few short things about that. The most famous example of that is when she was in analysis with Ilse Barant. She was saying, "Oh, my mother's here. Oh my God. And there's the baby, and I'm writing this book on saline, and it's so abject." Ilse Barant said, "Oh, that's the word you want." And the notion of objection became one of Kristeva's most famous concepts. What I call in my courses, especially with my grad students, what I call her conceptual toolbox, I guess I could summarize very quickly as first of all, having to do with the question of the intellectual, and certainly today in 2022, how can you be an intellectual? She talks about being contestatory. She talks about putting reliance and care at the center of one's practice as opposed to aggression and one-upmanship, et cetera. Secondly, I would say there's a batch of concepts that have to do with going back to concepts that have been very important historically in Western philosophy, and not throwing the baby out with the bath water, as it were. She wants to reinvent humanism. She wants to rethink universalism. She wants to get away from talking about identity and focus on subjectivity very much in the psychoanalytic sense. Then thirdly, and lastly, I think she really wants intellectuals to think about vulnerable subjects, all of the kinds of human subjects who are vulnerable and not- August Baker: And marginalized. Alice Jardine: ... and marginalized. Exactly. Especially because she believes that one of the things that the Western world is suffering from right now, and not only the Western world, but maybe especially, is what she calls an ideality disorder, just meaning briefly that because of the assault of technology on our psyches, we've lost our capacity for psychic space, and we are losing our idealism. We're becoming disappointed and distressed about our ideals that we had believed in, and now we're not so sure. She really sees that as a serious crisis that needs addressing. August Baker: Right. Yeah. One of the things I really liked about your book is that you go through her... I don't know which section it is, but you go through... There's so many ideas which one associates with Kristeva, and what I found really helpful was that if you want to see her thoughts on the death drive, here's the book, when she talked about being a mother of a child with a disability, here's where you look. If you want to look at the need to believe in the desire to know, here's the book. It's kind of like a large annotated bibliography, if you will. Alice Jardine: Well, thank you for saying that, because that was one of my intentions was- August Baker: Because otherwise you don't know what to buy. There's so much, and this way you can zero in on what you want to see. Alice Jardine: Yeah. I say in the introduction that the Kristeva's relationship to this biography, it's the first one, there'll be many more. I had to be very careful. She doesn't want her private life aired until after her demise. Then I said my relationship to the book is really about not praising her or putting her on a pedestal, but really trying to honestly recount her life as I believe she's lived it. Then my readers' relationship, I wrote it for interested non-specialist readers, and so what better thing could I do than point towards various kinds of readings? Because there's so much. There's so much. August Baker: There's so much. Alice Jardine: I think at one point, I'm trying to mention 50 books, something about 50 books that isn't just a throwaway line or something terribly superficial, to actually say something meaningful that will make my reader want to go read that book. August Baker: Oh, absolutely. You succeed brilliantly at that. Alice Jardine: Thank you. August Baker: Oh boy, we're running out of time. Can you tell us, what is this Sabina? Alice Jardine: Woo. How long do we have? August Baker: In 30 seconds. No. Alice Jardine: No! August Baker: No, go. I'm just kidding. Tell us, what is this? Alice Jardine: Okay. The short version is that in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, various kinds of archives were set up that were attempting to identify folks who had been working secretly with the communist regimes and were agents or spies, if you like. Those archives in Bulgaria were declassified in 2007 and lo and behold, slowly it became apparent that Kristeva was named in those archives and that she had been an agent of the DEAS, of the horrible secret service. There's a lot to say about this. But in 2018, I remember, March 28th, 2018, I got a phone call that it was public that she had been named. Of course, she was aghast. She was horrified and has denied it totally. When The New York Times called me and asked me what I thought, I said, almost without thinking, "I believe her. I believe her completely." And I go through all the reasons why, but I said, "The most important reason is that if she had been forced in order to protect her own life or the life of her family to do that, she would've written about it when the wall came down. She couldn't have helped herself." The thing that's so sad, and I'll just say this quickly, I know we're running out of time, but the thing that's so sad about this whole affair really, ultimately, is that I mentioned her sweetheart, Tzvetan Stoyanov, back in Bulgaria. In early 1971, he accepted a challenge to go and try to convince Georgi Markov, who's probably one of the most famous poisoned dissidents in history with- August Baker: With the umbrella- Alice Jardine: With the umbrella tip, right, to convince Markov to come back to Bulgaria, and he failed. He did not. Her sweetheart did not convince Markov to come back to Sofia. In mid-June of 1971, when Tzvetan Stoyanov and Julia Kristeva were the two most famous intellectuals in Bulgaria, Stoyanov died. He died under very strange circumstances. One has to be very careful because there's no proof, but I believe that he was killed by the DEAS. In the archive that names Kristeva as a spy, they give mid-June 1971 as the date of her engagement as a spy. What's sad, really sad, is from that moment on, from mid-June 1971, they surveilled her, and her husband, and her child, and her family. We still don't quite know what they did, what they threatened her parents with back in Bulgaria, and she had no idea. No idea. It's called blind surveillance. I mean, it was a technical kind of surveillance. It really devastated her, and it really devastated her that the Western press jumped on it and didn't question all of this fake news, all of this dissembling, all of this politicking from a period that very few Anglophones understand. So- August Baker: In her self defense, when she is asked? Alice Jardine: She didn't know. She didn't know, and when they bring up like, "Well, you had tea with Mr. Kostov." August Baker: "Yes, I did." Alice Jardine: Yeah. "Yeah, he had sent me books from France when I was a student in Bulgaria. I had no idea he was a spy." Of course, he left Bulgaria in 1977. He wanted no more of it. But in any case, she has answers. "Well, what about the time you said, 'Power to the people, ironically?'" And she said, "Well, this poet, or this wannabe poet, came to my apartment door." She can talk about each incident that's brought up. But overall, it's her disappointment and worry and anger that the press can be so gullible about these... and it's happened to a lot of people. To a lot of people. August Baker: Right. Unfortunately, we're past our time, Alice. I really appreciate... There's so much more. I think that the death of her father. She's had a lot of deaths and a lot of resurrections in her life, as she says. It's a fascinating story and it makes one want to read her books and one knows where to look. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Alice Jardine: Thank you, August. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.