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Julia Kristeva is prominent as a Bulgarian-French “cosmopolitan” (Jardine, 10) public intellectual and a brilliant polymath. Her fields of immersion cover a vast range: philosophy, anthropology, culture, history, linguistics, semiotics, literary criticism, sociology, political theory, gender, theology, social activism and – importantly for her interdisciplinary convictions and this review – psychoanalysis. She is, in her words, also a “contestatory” intellectual, and one who “has never stopped thinking … about how to live a thinking life” (Jardine, 2). Anglophones sometimes say that Kristeva’s theoretical writing is impenetrable – at least in English translation, and she has not been fully embraced by academicians in the United States by various critics on both the right and left. Yet, perceiving the passion of her creativity and importance of the topics, many become avidly intrigued and rewarded with her challenge. Academic scholars who have paid close attention to her thinking about thinking and her writing over the last five decades have themselves advanced the history of ideas in the West, such as in dealing with the complexities of feminism.
Kristeva’s compelling personality and comportment as a woman, moreover, evoke such adjectives from the press as “glamorous”, “almond-eyed” and “beautiful”. Some have criticized her lifestyle as elite, due to her taste in clothes and fondness for her large family house in the Île de Ré. Upsettingly, though, and shockingly to Kristeva, in 2018 she was accused of being a secret agent for the Communist regime in Bulgaria, allegedly having been recruited in 1971, five years after she had moved to Paris. She, others and Alice Jardine her biographer vigorously deny this. Copies of the letters she had taken to the embassy to mail to her parents appeared in this 400 page “Agent Sabina” file released publicly, and had been therefore intercepted. Her oeuvre and her career in the West have certainly been founded on the antithesis of suc