At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva by Alice Jardine, New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2020

For some educational philosophers and theorists, the Bulgarian-born and French-trained public intellectual Julia Kristeva is perhaps better known for her name than her thought. Indeed, this has historically been true of my own experience. In my undergraduate studies, much space was devoted to Marx, Freire, and the critical pedagogues that followed. During my master’s degree, methodologists, posthumanists, and intersectional feminists seemed to appear on every syllabus in one form or another. Before my recent preoccupation well into the third year of my PhD, I had encountered Kristeva’s name only a handful of times in educational research, theory, and philosophy (e.g., Abdul-Jabbar, 2018; Ardnt, 2017). Indeed, a quick search of Philosophical Inquiry in Education’s (PIE) online database found only three articles containing reference to Kristeva (Bach, 2008; Backer, 2017; Schwimmer, 2017), but one of which could be called substantial (Bach, 2008). Having recently immersed myself in Kristeva’s writing, I expect this paucity is not a coincidence. Her language is dense. Her brand of feminism is unique and challenging to her contemporaries. Her emphasis on secular humanism pushes against the posthumanists as heiresses apparent to the postmodernist throne (e.g., Braidotti, 2019) and, above all, she doesn’t write specifically about education. Despite these justifications for her absence, I believe Julia Kristeva has much to teach us in education, particularly through her life as what she calls a “contestatory intellectual” (Jardine, 2020, p. 7). The recently published biography of Kristeva, At the Risk of Thinking, authored by Kristeva’s former student and close friend Alice Jardine, provides the ideal opportunity to reconsider Kristeva’s legacy, or lack thereof, in education. In this review, I seek to highlight At the Risk of Thinking for the educational philosophy and theory communities. I begin with a summary of the text’s contents and then briefly touch on its strengths and weaknesses. In my subsequent discussion, I contextualize Kristeva’s insight into totalitarianism and the heart of intellectual work within the current socio-political moment. Divided chronologically into three sections, At the Risk of Thinking traces the trajectory of Julia Kristeva’s life and thought from her birth and early education in Bulgaria, through her formative years in the Parisian intellectual community of the 1960s and 1970s, and into her years spent as an international public intellectual from the 1980s onward through today. This third section of the book is divided again into four sub-sections, each detailing Kristeva’s activity within a particular decade. The first section is narrative in nature and comprises an accounting of Kristeva’s Bulgarian upbringing. Jardine puts particular emphasis on three early intellectual influences on Kristeva: her mother, a brilliant scientist whom Jardine credits with Kristeva’s later emphasis on female genius; her father, a theologian who, Jardine suggests, may have contributed to Kristeva’s later respect for religion; and the socio-political climate of post-war Bulgaria. After World War Two, Bulgaria was governed by the national Communist Party and had close international ties with the USSR and other communist nations. As with other communist states, the position of post-war Bulgarian intellectuals was often precarious and marked by strict surveillance. Jardine attributes some of the linguistic density of Kristeva’s later writing to coming of age intellectually under this surveillance. Because much of Kristeva’s writing was critical of the Communist Party (though not communism per se), and being openly against the government could prove dangerous, Kristeva and other Bulgarian intellectuals often wrote in thickly coded language to make it more difficult for the government to discern their critical sentiments. Jardine points to Kristeva’s early life under Communist rule as a major contributing factor to her later intellectual critiques of totalitarianism. Jardine’s second section highlights …