How to defend tyrannies by accusing intellectuals of being collaborators: The strange case of Julia Kristeva

Comment on: “Bulgaria says French thinker was a secret agent.  She calls it a ‘barefaced lie’,” [on Julia Kristeva], April 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/arts/julia-kristeva-bulgaria-communist-spy.html?comments

Why is this said now? The target? Not Bulgarians but readers of French "theory." The target is also all independently-thinking dissident and especially left-wing intellectuals, especially of the French type with their famously avant-garde and creative theorizing style. 

Like all such ad hominem attacks on intellectuals, including the "Heidegger affair" --renewed every 10 years since the war ended because it cannot be made to meaningfully stick that an oeuvre, text or artwork, is guilty of its author's personal crimes--attacking thought as such. (Is then modern logic, invented by the anti-Semite Gottlob Frege, an evil?). 

The purpose is to denounce intellectual life as such, and use the media and its far simpler and characteristically ad hominem (and "whodunit" order-is- violated-but-soon-to-be-restored policing) discourse to impugn academia (and Kristeva's field, psychoanalysis). 

To denounce and to intimidate. When the police shoot someone's dog, they imply: next time we come for you.

The significance of the claim now that she met with agents is to suggest not that a dissident intellectual might actually be a government spy, but that he might be accused of being one, or that the spy agency may try to use him without his knowledge. 

The world's government police agencies (and capital?) to dissident intellectuals and radical leftists of every kind: See how we can destroy people? Next time, we come for you. Meantime, we blame on victims our official terror.