“Perhaps Kristeva’s 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 crowd—just one of the thousands of Bulgarians who extended, in some fashion, the reach of Bulgaria’s totalitarian regime.”
Reading some books written by Julia Kristeva— fascinating material & the author is also intriguing.
“As I talked with people about Kristeva’s dossier, I kept thinking about her code name, Sabina. It is not a typical Bulgarian name—according to one expert I spoke to, it is unique in State Security’s 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 be abducted 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 Kristeva’s dossier is an extensive interview titled “What Is the Function of Intellectuals?,” which she gave to Le Nouvel Observateur, in 1977. “ ~ Dimiter Kenarov https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/was-the-philosopher-julia-kristeva-a-cold-war-collaborator
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