Was a Renowned Literary Theorist Also a Spy?
The strange case of Julia Kristeva
"Oh, I tried the Left Bank. At university I used to go with people who walked around with issues of Tel Quel under their arms. I know all that rubbish. You can't even read it."— Philip Roth, The Counterlife
Illisibilité: During the 1960s, Tel Quel authors wore this epithet, which means "unreadability," as a badge of honor. It was the Age of Structuralism, an era of high intellectual fashion. Left Bank intellectuals who were less enamored of the journal's supercilious brand of semiotic hermeticism accused the high-powered literati who regularly appeared in Tel Quel's pages — a list that reads like a Who's Who of French Theory — of practicing "theoretical terrorism."
A witticism that made the rounds of the Latin Quarter during the 1970s gleefully took aim at structuralism's lexical pomposity:
Q. What's the difference between a Mafioso and a structuralist?A. The latter makes you an offer that you can't understand.
Unlike in France, among North American universities Tel Quel still seems to possess a solid coterie of reverential admirers. Be that as it may, there is no circumventing the fact that things ended rather poorly for the Tel Quel brain trust, as led by the prodigiously gifted, punctuation-averse, Philippe Sollers. (From 1974 to 1981, every issue of Tel Quel began with an excerpt from Sollers's unpunctuated work-in-progress, Paradis. Sollers explained that his omission of punctuation was a form of rebellion against the "tyranny of metaphysics": "Punctuation is metaphysics itself and incarnate, including the blank spaces and scansions.") By the late-1970s, Tel Quel'sadvocacy of far-left political causes, from Stalinism to Maoism, had become such an embarrassment that Sollers, along with his wife and co-editor, Julia Kristeva, elected to scrap the entire enterprise. In 1982, Tel Quel abruptly ceased to appear. The same year, with a few editorial tweaks, it was rebaptized as L'Infini.
The misadventures of the Tel Quel group come to mind in reviewing and assessing the recent revelations concerning Kristeva's alleged role as an agent of communist Bulgaria's State Security services, the Darjavna Sigournost, or DS — in essence, the Bulgarian equivalent of the KGB. According to DS files, Kristeva's activities as an informant spanned a seven-year period during the 1970s. Yet it appears that Kristeva was first contacted by Bulgarian intelligence agents in 1965, immediately before her departure for France as a 24-year-old scholarship student. The files state that, upon being informed that, at some point in the future, her services might be needed, "Julia assented."The details concerning Kristeva's alleged involvement with the Bulgarian intelligence service were initially reported in late March by the estimable French magazine L'Obs, formerly Le Nouvel Observateur. In early April, the gist of that account was reported in an article that appeared in The New York Times.
Kristeva, for her part, has emphatically denied the allegations. They are the result of a malicious campaign to discredit her, she has claimed, dismissing the dossier as "fake news."
In April, Kristeva's lawyer, Jean-Marc Fedida, released a forcefully worded statement that was published in Le Monde and threatened legal action against journalists and news outlets that were responsible for circulating the contested allegations and claims. As Fedida told Le Monde, Kristeva is "outraged that her actions and her oeuvre could be called into question on the basis of documents … that make farcical use of totalitarian police methods." In other words, it is not Kristeva but her accusers who are the real totalitarians. Up until now, however, she has declined to explain who might be orchestrating the calumnious campaign against her, or what the culprit's motivations might be.
On this side of the Atlantic, Kristeva's professions of innocence have been echoed by her biographer, Alice Jardine, a literature professor at Harvard University. Jardine told The New York Times that, "Nobody who knows anything about her or her work believes this."
If that is the case, it is very likely because Kristeva's supporters, instead of heeding the facts and circumstances of the Bulgarian intelligence dossier, remain mesmerized by her aura as a luminary of the French Theory vogue, which, during the 1980s, had a far-reaching impact on literary studies in North America. Thus in a 1996 article, the French political historian François Hourmant described the peculiar "recognition cum veneration" that greeted Tel Quel's work in the United States. François Dosse's two-volume History of Structuralism (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) also attests to the widespread mood of uncritical adulation that surrounded Kristeva's work at the time. His chapter recounting Kristeva's arrival in France — an episode that, among acolytes of French Theory, would become the stuff of legend — is entitled: "1966: Annum Mirabile: Julia Comes to Paris!"
However, at this point, a panoply of experts has described the Bulgarian intelligence dossier as reliable and convincing. In the words of Ekaterina Boncheva — a former dissident who is now a member of the commission in charge of vetting State Security service files in accordance with lustration legislation passed in the 1990s to prevent former Communists and informants from regaining a foothold in public life — "In my 10 years of work on behalf of the Commission, there has never been a case of counterfeit files. … If Kristeva has a problem with the materials that have come to light, she should take it up with the DS, not with us."
Ironically, it was Kristeva herself who unwittingly set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the embarrassing disclosure when she sought to join the editorial board of a Sofia-based literary organ, Literaturen Vestnik ("Literary Journal"). According to the requirements of the post-Communist era lustration law, intelligence files of all persons who aspire to positions of cultural or political leadership and were born before 1976 require vetting by the seven-member Declassification Commission.
Efforts to repudiate the charges that Kristeva, whose alleged DS code name was "Sabina," acted as an agent for the Bulgarian State Security apparatus, seem increasingly implausible. Shortly after the assertions first came to light, the Declassification Commission released the entire Kristeva dossier — some 250 pages — on its website. Included among the documents was Kristeva's DS registration card, attesting to her successful recruitment in 1970. (It begins: "Julia Kristeva, born in 1941 in the village of Sliven.")
Although previous instances have come to light in which Eastern European state-security services have fabricated or removed individual documents, it would be highly unusual if not unprecedented foran entire dossier to have been manufactured, let alone a file the size of Kristeva's. Coincidently, in January, the legality of Bulgaria's post-Communist lustration law was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.
The L'Obs journalist Roumiana Ougartchinska, commenting on Kristeva's disavowals, observed appositely that, "Instead of confronting her demons, she has sought refuge in denial."
To give an idea of the farcical cat-and-mouse games in which Kristeva allegedly was forced to engage: In the spring of 1974, according to the dossier, Kristeva insouciantly skipped out on a rendezvous with her DS overseers. In an effort to placate them, she mailed an amicable postcard from Brussels to the Bulgarian Embassy in Paris, conveying her regrets, and assuring them that she would get back in touch as soon as she returned from her forthcoming vacation. Then, in keeping with the spirit of the times, Kristeva signed off in French with a mock profession of revolutionary solidarity: "Vive le pouvoir populaire!" (Long live the power of the people!)
If there is a unifying thread that defines the Kristeva dossier, it concerns what she apparently perceived as a surfeit of pro-Israel sentiment among French intellectuals and media luminaries. In 1970, in one of her initial intelligence briefings, Kristeva allegedly told her Bulgarian handlers that French radio and television were crawling with "Zionists"; persons who were "quite adept at conveying their pro-Israeli views." "It's the same," she continued, "with weeklies and dailies that pride themselves on taking 'progressive' positions." As an example of such tendencies, Kristeva lambasted Le Nouvel Observateur for misleadingly portraying the Israeli general Moshe Dayan as "a man of peace." To conclude her report, she denounced the influential French Communist writer and former Surrealist, Louis Aragon, for refusing to support the brutal, August 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague.
Time and again, in scrutinizing Kristeva's dossier, it is hard to determine whether she was acting sincerely, or instead, merely telling her Bulgarian spymasters what she thought they wanted to hear.
It is also difficult to understand why Kristeva has responded to the incriminating dossier with such unconvincing disavowals, especially in light of the fact that the quality of the intelligence that she apparently delivered was of negligible value. In fact, one is tempted to say: Its value was less than zero. Kristeva's Bulgarian minders consistently judged the smidgeons of information that she provided as "weak" and "insignificant." In fact, one of the reasons that they apparently decided, circa 1978, to cashier her as an informant was that the intelligence that she furnished was so unfailingly meager. In one of the dossier's final entries, her DS handler, referring to Kristeva by Sabina, avows that, "having definitively adopted pro-Maoist positions as of 1973, she had been excluded from the list of 'collaborators.'"
Lastly, in light of the Orwellian, tentacular reach of the Bulgarian State Security apparatus — according to one estimate, some 14,348 meters of DS files remain extant — it is hardly surprising that the DS sought to force the 24-year-old Kristeva — clearly, a rising intellectual star — to play ball. The DS was a dastardly and nefarious cabal highly adept at ruining the "lives of others." Under the circumstances, with a prestigious scholarship awaiting her in Paris, what choice did Kristeva really have?As an informant, Kristeva seems to have been a consummate failure. And by "failing," she succeeded at keeping her maladroit Bulgarian overlords at bay.
Throughout the recent, highly public exchange of claims and counterclaims, accusations and counteraccusations, Kristeva has expressed concern that her reputation as an engaged intellectual would be unfairly and permanently harmed. In truth, however, the damage had been done long ago, the cumulative effect of her uncritical support, as a member of the Tel Quel circle, for left-wing dictatorships during the 1960s and 1970s: the Soviet Union, from 1968 to 1971; and Cultural Revolutionary China, from 1971 to 1976. What makes Kristeva's partisanship for those regimes and their draconian practices so hypocritical and so objectionable is that Kristeva, as a young woman, had experienced firsthand the ultra-repressive nature of Soviet-style, bureaucratic socialism in her native Bulgaria, where, from 1954 to 1989, First Secretary Todor Zhivkov of the Bulgarian Community Party ruled with an iron fist.
In 1968 the Tel Quel ensemble — which, in 1967, had myopically allied itself with the political fortunes of the French Communist Party (PCF) — endorsed the Soviet Union's military invasion of Czechoslovakia: an act of tyranny that succeeded in crushing the last vestiges of hope for "socialism with a human face" embodied by the Prague Spring. Aping the ideological rationalizations of the Stalin era, the Telquelians argued that those who criticized Soviet ruthlessness were merely providing aid and comfort to the bourgeoisie.
As it turned out, the Warsaw Pact's brutal Prague incursion proved to be the final nail in the coffin of the French Communist Party. Thereafter, it was substantially discredited in the eyes of French youth and intellectuals. Whereas the 1960s had been an effervescent celebration of "youth culture" and "youth revolt," the bureaucratic Communism of the Brezhnev era was overseen by a clique of senescent septuagenarians.
At the time of the invasion, Tel Quel's editorial director, Philippe Sollers, expressed a "secret enthusiasm" for the Bulgarian tanks that had participated in the lopsided Warsaw Pact assault. Identifying with the Bulgarian strike force was, he explained, a way of honoring his love for Kristeva.
The decision to endorse Soviet brutality in Prague was merely one among many political blunders that the Tel Quel group committed during this period. During May 1968, Sollers, Kristeva, and company sided with the PCF's condemnation of the French student uprising. Echoing the official party line, the Telquelians dismissed the student revolt due to its "insufficiently proletarian character." In mid-May, when a group of prominent French literati — Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras — sought to form a new writers' union in support of the student strike, the Tel Quel "salon Bolsheviks" expressed their disapproval by demonstratively walking out of the assembly. As Sollers, who, as it turns out, hailed from a family of wealthy Bordeaux industrialists, pontificated at the time: "All revolution can only be Marxist-Leninist!"
In 1971, after it had become indubitably clear that the cultural cachet of Soviet Communism had been irreparably tarnished, the Tel Quel cenacle, in yet another instance of poor timing, transferred its loyalties to China — precisely at the moment when a series of chilling revelations concerning the Cultural Revolution's excesses had come to light. Thus 1971 was the year that Simon Leys's devastating exposé, Chairman Mao's New Clothes, unmasked the Cultural Revolution as a well-orchestrated political purge initiated by Mao so that he could regain the standing he had lost following the debacle of the Great Leap Forward (1958 — 1962). In The Search For Modern China (W.W. Norton, 1990), Jonathan Spence recounts the Cultural Revolution as follows: "fear and tension … gripped the country, violence grew apace. Thousands of intellectuals … were beaten to death. … Countless others committed suicide. … Many of the suicides killed themselves only after futile attempts to avoid Red Guard harassment by destroying their own libraries and art collections. Thousands more were imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, for years. Millions were relocated to purify themselves through labor in the countryside."
Undeterred by the escalating supply of testimonials certifying the Cultural Revolution's depredations and persecutions, the Tel Quel groupforged ahead. In 1974, Kristeva and Sollers, accompanied by Roland Barthes, traveled to China for three weeks of Chinese Communist Party-sponsored "revolutionary tourism": in other words, the standard Potemkin Village treatment. On their return to France the Tel Quel delegation donned matching Mao suits as a gesture of solidarity with the Chinese revolutionary project. And in fulfillment of a prior understanding with their CCP hosts, the Tel Quel ensemble penned a series of fulsome paeans lauding the progressive achievements of Chinese Communism and the virtues of the "Yan'an way." (One Telquelian, François Wahl, did write an article that was highly critical of China, in Le Monde. Wahl's claims were pilloried and dismissed in a subsequent issue of Tel Quel.)
Sollers waxed lyrical about having experienced firsthand "the true, anti-bourgeois Revolution." In About Chinese Women (1974), Kristeva, for her part, carried this uniquely French "pro-Chinese" mania to unprecedented heights. She disqualified all Western criticism of postrevolutionary China as suffused with illicit cultural bias. And she rationalized the traditional Chinese custom of "foot binding" — ignoring its debilitating and disfiguring consequences for millions of Chinese women — as a legitimate local cultural practice, comparable to ritual circumcision in Judaism. In fact, when perceived in the right light, Kristeva continued, foot binding constituted an emblem of Chinese female empowerment.
In retrospect, what stands out about Kristeva's and Tel Quel's intellectual-political excesses is that, at a point when the majority of French leftists, in keeping with the libertarian spirit of May 1968, had abandoned the ideological rigidities of Marxism-Leninism in favor of autogestion and grassroots democracy, the Tel Quel coterie remained inflexibly wedded to the dogmas and pretensions of tier mondisme.
In an article he wrote during the late 1970s, "The Great Rage of Facts," Michel Foucault relied on sarcasm to pillory the ever-inventive rationalizations and delusions that French intellectuals habitually contrived in order to justify all manner of political tyranny:
Yes, yes, there were massacres, but they were a terrible error. Just reread Marx or Lenin, compare them with Stalin, and you will see where the latter went wrong. It is obvious that all those deaths could only result from a misreading. It was predictable: Stalinism-error was one of the principal agents behind the return to "Marxism-truth," to "Marxism-text," which occurred during the 1960s. If you want to be against Stalin, don't listen to the victims; they will only recount their tortures. Reread the theoreticians; they will tell you the Truth about the True.
For a majority of French leftists, the Munich Olympic massacre of September 1972, in which 11 Israeli athletes and coaches died at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, represented a point of no return vis-à-vis the delusions of third world militancy.
Be that as it may, this bloody episode failed to diminish the Telquelians' enthusiasm for the glories of "armed revolutionary struggle." Instead, they responded to the Munich tragedy with a reaffirmation of their commitment to the goals of "total revolution."
In its political newsletter, "Bulletin du Mouvement de Juin '71," the Tel Quel editorial staff, restyled as the Support Group for the Palestinian Revolution (Le Groupe de Soutien à la Révolution Palestinienne), lauded the Munich attack as "necessary" in order to liberate 200 Palestinian fighters who were being held in Israeli prisons. Moreover, they asserted that responsibility for the bloody dénouement at the nearby Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base lay with the German police and the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, who purportedly "initiated the aggression."
Reflecting on Tel Quel's delusional infatuation with Cultural Revolutionary China, the French-American essayist Guy Sorman faults them for having succumbed to the temptations of a "boundless amoralism": an "amoralism" that is inseparable from a distinctively French tradition of "revolutionary romanticism." He continues: "What links the French intelligentsia to tyrants such as Stalin, Mao, Castro has very little to do with the quest for liberty, justice, and democracy. Such values were dismissed as suitable for dopes and stooges. … Our intelligentsia adored revolutionary violence and the aesthetics of violence. Was it not this spectacle of revolution that attracted Sartre, Barthes, and company?"
In 1981, Sollers proffered a retrospective mea culpa, "Pourquoi J'ai 'été Chinois" ("Why I Was Chinese"), in order to publicly confront his wayward political past. However, too often, he seemed to hedge his bets — especially when he claimed that, in France, Maoism had essentially served as an exit strategy through which left-wing intellectuals could escape the straightjacket of Communist orthodoxy. Such claims are belied by the pro-Chinese dogmatism of the Tel Quel group's own texts.
Kristeva, for her part, responded to her political excesses by renouncing politics in toto — including feminism — as inherently totalitarian: as a sphere that perpetually sacrifices individuals to the injustices and repressions of the "collective superego." As she explained in a 1989 interview: "We must try not to propose global models. I think that we, then, risk making politics into a sort of religion. … Of the political there is already too much." Instead of striving for political solutions, Kristeva recommended that everyone who could afford it should enter into psychoanalysis — her new field of professional expertise.
One wonders whether, once the smoke from the "Bulgarian dossier" has cleared, Kristeva will see fit to confront her past in a spirit of contrition and forthrightness.
Richard Wolin is a professor of history, political science, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Second Edition: Princeton University Press, 2017).
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