At the Risk of Thinking

An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva

Alice Jardine, Mari Ruti, Mari Ruti

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501341359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
Finalist for the 2021 Prose Awards (Biography & Autobiography category) 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.

Part I

Bulgaria, My Suffering (1941–1965)

Julia Kristeva would be the first to say that one is not—cannot be—determined by one’s childhood. Nor does she see her country of birth as constituting her identity or origin, identity for her being a constant state of questioning. In fact, she sees exile as her permanent condition and goes so far as to say that each person’s truth resides not in their belonging to an origin but in their capacity to exile themselves, to take some distance from their origins:¹

Many things from my childhood resonate with what I am doing today. But if I am Freudian, it is because I believe, like Freud, that we are not explained, we are not determined by our childhood—contrary to what many people think about Freudianism. Our childhood provides us with the seeds of personality, but what one rediscovers in analysis is that one has reconstructed one’s childhood. Something is given to us, but we have rebuilt it. Therefore, one never finds the exact, current situation in the past. Lots of people who entertain this idea are disappointed by analysis. They complain: But I can never find the memory that explains who I am now . . . I can’t find the delicate flower . . . the love . . . the enigma . . . That’s why I say that memories are not deterministic; they are invitations to travel.²

And yet . . .

A Production of History

Kristeva was born at home in Sliven, Bulgaria, at 8 a.m. on June 24, 1941, two days after World War II became a daily reality in that part of the world with the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the bombing of Kiev on June 22, 1941. Her mother, a brilliant scientist who gave up her career to dedicate herself to her family, was especially delighted to have a daughter, although she was distressed that she could not nurse her because of an infection. Her father, a brilliant theologian and writer, and Yordana, her caretaker, fed her sheep’s milk from a bottle (initiating a life-long intolerance for any kind of milk). Both of her parents as well as Yordana doted on her continually, setting in play a life-long loving loyalty to family and friends no matter what.

Figure 2.1 Map of Bulgaria. University of Texas Libraries.

Sliven is an industrial town in east-central Bulgaria. It lies in the southern foothills of the eastern Balkan Mountains at the confluence of the Novoselska and Asenovska rivers close to the Black Sea. Kristeva frequently evokes, especially in her novels, young childhood memories of running free in her maternal grandmother’s flower gardens, flowers in her hair, when her family visited her mother’s native city of Yambol not far from Sliven. Sometimes she even links her relationship to time itself to her observations of plants and flowers in her grandmother’s gardens, echoing the rhapsodic love of nature of Rousseau and Colette. She also has fond memories of playing in the sand by the sea during childhood trips to the Black Sea. Two towns in particular stand out in her memory: Sozopol and Nessebar, located near the two larger Black Sea cities of Varna and Burgas. Nessebar—originally a Thracian settlement, a Greek colony beginning in the sixth century BC, then part of the Byzantine Empire, captured by the Turks until the nineteenth century, and a sleepy village of Greek fishermen in the early twentieth century—is described vividly in Murder in Byzantium.

The historical layers of Nessebar deeply impressed the young Kristeva. She vividly remembers the town as a magnificent place that had not yet been spoiled by the postwar tourist industry. In particular, she recalls the hundreds of beautiful and historic church ruins from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Whether built during the Byzantine, Ottoman, or Bulgarian rule of the city, the churches of Nessebar represent the rich architectural heritage of the Eastern Orthodox world and provided many of Kristeva’s earliest sensorial pleasures. In At the Risk of Thought, Kristeva also evokes with affection the larger Bulgarian countryside, especially the gorgeous “valley of roses”: “Bulgaria is the country of roses, for between two mountains, a valley is planted with roses from east to west and reputable refineries extract a magnificent essence. A scented country then, but also a country with an extraordinary cultural memory.”³

Kristeva lived in Sliven until the family relocated to Sofia after the war in 1946, first to 4 Saint Sophia Street and then to 31 A. Kanchev Street. Her only sibling, a sister named Ivanka, was born in January 1945, just before the family moved.

Figure 2.2 Map of Sofia.

Figure 2.3 The Saint Nedelya Church. Photo by Alice Jardine.

Figure 2.4 Kristeva ringing the bell at 4 Saint Sophia Street, 2014. Photo by Alice Jardine.

Today these streets are small, winding reminders of the charm of this part of the city, not far from the Saint Nedelya Church, and relatively quiet compared to the rest of the city. During a trip to Sofia in 2014 when I accompanied Kristeva to her childhood haunts, I was struck by how central her family’s apartments were, how close they were to the church where her father sang in his free time. I was also struck by how well Kristeva remembered her way around the streets, as if she had been walking in these neighborhoods her entire life.

Kristeva’s parents could not but have felt that she was a glimpse of bright joy in the midst of the darkness of war and, indeed, they smothered their baby girl with love.

Kristeva has described herself as a “royal baby,” born into the chaos of war. She recalls:

There was a song that we sang during my childhood—a Russian song—that goes like this [Kristeva sings the song with clear delight]:

Dvadtsat’ vtorogo iyunya,

Rovno v chetyre chasa,

Kiev bombili, nam ob’’yavili,

Chto nachalasya voyna.

The 22nd of June,

At 4 o’clock precisely,

They bombed Kiev and announced,

The war has started.

It was the 22nd of June 1941 . . . Kiev was bombed and we were at war . . . I was born two days after. Sometimes when I hear this song, I imagine how dramatic it must have all been for my parents. Bulgaria was entering the war and, very quickly, it was the German presence that made itself felt since Bulgaria and Germany were allies. To give birth to a child in those circumstances was no doubt a great joy, but also at the same time a huge uncertainty. What was going to happen?

The stories dominating Kristeva’s earliest memories of her childhood were shaped by the two devastating totalitarian invasions—the first undertaken by the Nazis and the second by the Soviets—that Bulgaria experienced during the twentieth century. At the beginning of the Second World War, in 1939–41, Bulgaria remained neutral. It entered the war in March 1941 as a member of the Axis Powers. However, it quickly took its distance from the Nazis. Operating as a constitutional monarchy during most of the war (Boris III was Tsar 1918–43), the government managed to fend off the Nazis’ strongest demands. For example, Bulgaria declined to participate in Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi plan to enslave Slavs beginning with the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union; it did not declare war on the Soviets; and it actively saved its Jewish population from deportation to concentration camps.

Antisemitism was not rampant in Bulgaria at the time and there was a highly assimilated Jewish minority of about 50,000 people living in the country at the beginning of the war. What distinguishes Bulgaria from many of its European neighbors is the ferocity with which it resisted the Nazis’ orders: it was one of the few Nazi-occupied countries in Europe not to do the Nazis’ bidding when it came to Jews; the Bulgarian government stood mostly firm on its policy of not deporting Jews, even as members of the communist resistance, especially the Fatherland Front, accused the government of collaboration.⁴

As the war turned against Germany, Bulgaria also did not fully comply with Soviet demands to expel German forces from its territory. By the summer of 1944, the Soviet army was approaching Bulgaria through Romania (which had already left the Axis powers and declared war on Germany). Bulgaria tried to claim neutrality, but on September 5, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria and the Red Army invaded three days later (the communists entered Sofia the night of September 8–9, 1944). Bulgaria was forced to give up its neutrality. The communist-dominated Fatherland Front took power, and Bulgaria formally joined the Allies until the war ended. The left-wing uprisings of September 1944 (called a coup by some) led to the abolition of the monarchy, but it was not until 1946 that a single-party people’s republic was established. The Tsar went into exile and Bulgaria became part of the Soviet sphere of influence under the leadership of Georgi Dimitrov (1946–49) who, in spite of his protection of Bulgarian Jews, laid the foundations for a repressive Stalinist state that executed thousands of dissidents during its long postwar rule.⁵

This complicated history means that from her birth to the age of five or six, Kristeva’s earliest childhood memories, earliest stories and photos, earliest psychic inscriptions and echoes, are infused with what she calls the great “Bulgarian Ambiguity.” This land where Greek myth, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam meet; where first there were Nazi boots on the ground, then Soviet boots; where the monarchical government aligned itself with the Nazis but adamantly refused to deport Jews; where Russians took over but where Stalinism arrived slowly and relatively late in the game—this was the historical cauldron in which Julia Kristeva was formed. It is the foundation of what she sees as the overdetermined formation of her psycho-social identity by history. Calling herself a product of history, and citing Bulgaria as an important crossroads of history, Kristeva literally sees herself as a production of history:

My Hegelian-Marxist education, which subordinates the individual to the collective, leads me to say that I am a product of history: the Second World War, the Yalta Conference, the partition of our continent into two Europes—a Europe of the East and of the West; the dream of General de Gaulle, who already saw Europe as stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains and so gave doctoral fellowships to young students from the East who spoke French; then May of 1968; the fall of the Berlin Wall; Perestroika; Glasnost; the awakening of China and other emerging powers; structuralism; poststructuralism; Freudianism; the clash of religions; hyperconnectivity; the financial-economic-political-social-metaphysical-existential crisis . . . and many more.⁶

One of Kristeva’s earliest memories is of sneaking down with her parents to the basement of their home in Sliven to listen to Radio London. This was done with extreme caution because the building Kristeva’s family lived in had both communist teachers—resisters—and Germans. Kristeva has described with emotion how her family watched, through the slim line of windows at the very top of the basement wall, first Nazi boots but then Stalinist boots marching in unison along the sidewalk outside her building. Safety was inside, down below, in the basement, with Europe, with family: “My parents and I went down to the basement to listen to Radio London . . . so that no one could hear . . . I vaguely remember seeing soldiers in German uniform pass by . . . And I can still hear the sound . . . dun dun dun da . . . the signal of Radio London.”

However, when Kristeva evokes the Bulgaria of her childhood, it is the intimacy of family she remembers best. She was surrounded by affection and her earliest memories swim in the love that her parents showered upon her as a small child. It is perhaps because of this constant affection that her memories of the period are fluid, filled with sensations of curiosity and discovery: “When I speak of and think about Bulgaria, or about Sofia—both of which abound with memories—these memories, every time I evoke them, there is nothing fixed or determinant about them. What matters in my experience of memory is the voyage toward and through it . . . it’s a perpetual questioning.”⁷

Stoyan Kristev

Kristeva’s father, Stoyan Kristev (Kristev: literally “of the cross”), lost his parents as a child. He did not know his father, who was an officer in the Bulgarian Army and died at the front during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. His mother, Mithra, died shortly thereafter in childbirth. He was raised by a peasant woman named Yordana who also took care of Kristeva as a very young girl, passing away when Kristeva was three years old. Yordana did not legally adopt Stoyan but raised him as her own child in the countryside and then doted, along with Kristeva’s parents, on the “royal baby” born in the midst of the war. Kristeva called her “grandmother” and was told that her own first name, Julia, was a modern version of “Yordana,” a name whose etymology in turn harkens back to the Biblical Jordan River.

Kristeva describes herself as having been a true fille à papa (daddy’s girl): she looked like her father; her father adored her; he was a father in love. The feeling was mutual, for Kristeva adored him as well. She has often spoken of how being held by such a loving father psychically imprinted her. In fact, to this day she attributes her inability to be jealous of anyone to the intensity of her father’s love, noting that she “can never seem to envy anyone.” She explains that even when there has been conflict in her life, the legacy of having been certain of her father’s love as a child is that she has never wavered in her sense that she is right and that the other person is wrong. Kristeva recognizes that her mother and father’s “pare...