Snejanka Mihaylova: “Only together can we articulate diversity”

Jasmina Tacheva speaks with Dr. Snejanka Mihaylova - philosopher, author, artist, and activist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of philosophy and performance, writing, and book publishing. Dr. Mihaylova studied philosophy in Italy and specialized in theory and performing arts in Amsterdam and Maastricht. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” She is the author of Theatre of Thought (Critique and Humanism Publishing House, 2011), Practical Training in Thinking (Stedelijk Museum, 2012), and Acoustic Thought (IICD & The Last Books, 2015). She is also a co-founder of the publishing house The Last Books. Her work has been presented on numerous international platforms across Europe and the United States, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where one of her works is held in the museum’s collection.

The occasion for this conversation is Madrigal - her fourth book and debut novel, published by Nike, with artistic design by Viktoriya Staykova. We met Dr. Mihaylova on the eve of her film debut in the leading role of Lilian in Lust, directed by Ralitza Petrova, which premiered in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival. Beginning with Madrigal, the conversation opens onto larger questions of voice and listening, the mother-woman-daughter, desire, violence, and political resistance. We also discuss the queer families of late socialism, the interconnectedness of the struggles and conflicts within us and society at large, and love as a necessary condition for finding our way toward ourselves and one another.

Photo: Violeta Apostolova

Could you tell us about the journey of Madrigal - from the initial idea and the writing itself, through editing, design, and publication, to its encounter with readers?

Madrigal is a polyphonic novel. The process of writing, creating, and publishing it was polyphonic as well. At every stage, it taught me how to listen. Years ago, I received some unsolicited advice on how to become a writer: “If you want to learn how to write, listen to Bach.” For me, it worked differently. As I was learning to write, I was also learning to listen to the voices of those I wanted to write about. Everything is in the voice. The voice is the unbearable condition of thought. I use the word “thought” only provisionally, because at its deepest level, voice is pain. It is difficult for a person to bear their own truth. That is why, if you listen closely to someone speaking, you will often hear a stammer, as though they are taking in slightly more air than they can bear, as in childbirth. It is precisely in this intake of breath, in this contact between inside and outside, that something emerges which otherwise could not be spoken. I learn at every stage of my work. Madrigal is not a novel I simply sat down and wrote. It is a novel through which I was learning what place writing held in that period of my life. A book is never a finished object, but a space in which we continue searching for ourselves, or discover parts of ourselves that echo through time and change.

Photo: Viktoriya Staykova

Madrigal is your fourth book, but your first novel. How did you experience that transition?

For a long time, I worked with the triad of thought-performance-book. I decided to turn to the novel because of the voice, and because I wanted to explore what it means to tell a story, as well as the role of imagination as a restorative practice. Toni Morrison often spoke about this in her interviews. It is an ancient practice: imagination as a way of restoring broken connections. When you listen to a woman or a child, everything is in their voice. Perhaps, when I listen, I am trying to open up a shared ear, in the sense that my listening should help the other person hear themselves and discover a space of tenderness toward that first cry, toward that pain voiced with effort and in fragments. My listening should help the other person listen to themselves and soften their gaze toward the things that are not rubbish, but pain. To listen and be able to say:

“And yet this is a voice of tenderness. This hurts. This awakens tenderness. It truly does awaken tenderness.”

Madrigal is dedicated to “our mothers,” and the etymology of the title is traced through the Latin matrix and matricis - “mother,” “womb.” Do you think it is possible to understand ourselves without examining this original source?

The mother is of primary importance in the formation of the symbolic order through which we organize meaning. I tried not to make the mother into a metaphor. Not to make the mother into a generalizing concept. As women, we speak and think through relation and through the materiality of language - that is, through the body. The original source here is not metaphor, but relation. My place in the world, my relationship with myself, my relationships with others - all of this forms part of a system of meaning in which the mother is a central artery. Avoiding this question is like trying to avoid your own lungs. We are all born of a mother. This is a fact that cannot be circumvented. And yet it is constantly circumvented, because we are not equal before this fact. The mother is treated as a biological or cosmological reservoir of meaning - Mother Earth, womb, breast, and so on. In this way, the woman herself is bypassed. The mother becomes an abstract, idealized entity through which the woman is erased from culture.

When we speak of fathers, they are always more than biological figures. There is the father as creator of the world, the father of faith. But in order to reach that point, the father’s biological status must be transcended. This motif appears in scripture not only through God the Creator, but also through Abraham, the father of faith. From the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, we remember the scene in which the father leads his son away to sacrifice him at God’s own command. What God demands is not the son’s blood, but the transcendence of the biological dimension of fatherhood - its elevation into a universal and transcendent category. The mother acquires a comparable symbolic status only when she gives birth to a son. The Virgin Mary is such a figure: she transcends biology; a virgin, she gives birth to the Son of God. But what happens to the mother who gives birth to a daughter? Where is her place in this transcendent picture? That is my question. It is a question to which, over the past several years, we as women have begun to seek an answer - women who are unwilling to sacrifice the woman in order to clear the way for the universal concept of the mother.

It is true that women participate in their own subordination. Or at least they did for a long time. In the shadowy space of the idealized mother, they acquire a secondary, almost absolute power through the sacrifice of the woman. In other words, the world is governed not only by men, but also by women who have chosen to sacrifice themselves. I call this figure “the masculine mother” or “the narcissistic mother” - not as a term for the mothers of boys, but as a name for the erasure of the woman within patriarchal culture. For me, this shadow mother is the true face of totalitarian power.

Photo: Viktoriya Staykova

The novel is a polyphonic exploration of the mother, the woman, the daughter, and the bonds and divisions between them. Why is it important to bring these divisions to light and think them through?

In 1991, Luisa Muraro, an Italian philosopher who passed away just recently, published The Symbolic Order of the Mother. In this book, a triad appears, similar to the classical triads of philosophy, yet one that, for me, had until then remained unspoken: mother-daughter-woman, within which I had been living my entire life; I had learned to write, to read, and to do everything else without realizing that this very interrelation lay at the foundation of things. “Learning to love the mother,” Muraro writes, “is the fundamental meaning of philosophy.” Of course, she completely overturns the very concept of philosophy by illuminating in a new way the dialectical process of accepting a part of oneself. Melanie Klein and object relations theory can, of course, be read through this framework, but so too, if you like, can subjectivity as a whole. How does one become a subject? What is it that begins to speak through us? For me, the voice is also the key to this new paradigm of thought - an acoustic mode of thinking that begins in the womb.

What other forms of splitting, in the spirit of Melanie Klein, interest you in relation to women and to people more broadly?

I’m interested in desire. For women, this is an urgently necessary terrain. We often say that a person should listen to their intuition. But if this is truly practiced, it means that one must rebuild the connection to one’s deepest desire and learn to think and make decisions through that connection. Once this truth enters the world, however, it enters into our relations with the other. There, women and queer communities are profoundly unprepared because of the insecurity in which we have lived for centuries. People often say that women compete with one another. For me, this is not a symptom of the will to dominate - something perhaps more pronounced in male competition - but rather a sign of the deep insecurity involved in learning to walk in a man’s world. We need unity because only together, by practicing the bonds between us, can we articulate diversity. Being defensive, remaining constantly on guard, does not help. But it is entirely understandable. I do not condemn it. It is simply that, within this field, subjective truth becomes “my truth.” That, once again, is a patriarchal order. The moment we step into the world, it is as though we must begin, together, to build the language in which we want to communicate. Deep desire must be part of this conversation, and so must faith. For a long time, I was interested in women in mysticism, music, and botany. Across the centuries, these were spaces in which women could exist in the world through desire.

Photo: Viktoriya Staykova

Fantasy, perhaps again in the spirit of object relations theory, has a powerful presence in the novel: in how we imagine ourselves, others, and what is happening around us. What role does it play?

In the novel, fantasy returns as reflection and as an attempt to descend into the bodily. There are moments when the text lifts away, and I use them to summon the body. Imagination, on the other hand, is the space in which one feels one’s way across the terrain, where the relationships between the women characters begin to take their first steps. Can one woman serve as a mirror for another, and what would that mean for the inner landscape? Even when we are not whole, we can connect our separate parts, and that is the terrain of the imagination. Not as an ability to invent things, but as a way of seeing connections where they have been broken for historical, psychological, or any number of other reasons.

We are meeting at a moment when yet another woman in Bulgaria has been found murdered. Madrigal repeatedly returns to the subject of violence against women and reminds us that “for the most part, it is men who legislate around women’s bodies.” Do you think this is one of the reasons the violence continues?

We are accustomed to treating problems separately, when in fact they are interconnected. A woman is murdered, we live within genocidal global economies in which life is not valued, a teenager tormented at school because of his sexual orientation takes his own life, a homophobic law is ratified in parliament, ever more lethal weapons are produced, with children among their victims, a march for the traditional family is organized alongside the National Guard, tanks are being blessed, and entire animal and plant species are being wiped out. These are interconnected processes. They are the face of the same beast. When patriarchy or the cannibalistic forms of capitalism are mentioned, some people react as though you had insulted their firstborn. They find it extremely difficult to perceive systemic violence and the fact that not all lives are valued equally - that this is embedded in the very epidermis and at the core of the culture in which we live. There is only one way to fight this evil: through education, cultural policy, and the sustained accumulation of such work over time. Protests are, of course, extremely important, for as long as they remain available to us as a means of resistance. There is no other way.

What role does art play in resisting the growing number of femicides?

The most powerful experiences for me are protests, when we gather together and use our bodies to bear witness to our refusal to tolerate violence. Art and social practices must find points of intersection so that we can open up a more powerful political imagination. This does not necessarily have to happen thematically. I say this because creative practice is a space of freedom. But creative practice also exists in the world, and it is there that the conditions for such intersections can be created. I will allow myself to quote my favorite phrase by Michel Foucault: “Where there is power, there is resistance.”

Society still often silences or represses queer people and their relationships, whereas in Madrigal they appear freely and openly, though not without pain. Why was this approach important to you?

The idea that we should all be the same strikes me as the perverse erotic fantasy of power. It is as though power wants identical people so that it can remain endlessly intoxicated with itself. This fantasy of sameness is the most unnatural fantasy imaginable. One need only look at a tree: no two leaves are identical. What, then, can we say about human beings? People can come together if they choose, but they do so through their differences, through their diversity, to use an ecological term, not through sameness.

I was raised in a queer environment, though I only learned much later that it was called that. To me, it was simply my natural family. Some of the people in the novel are drawn from the community in which I grew up. Our house was full of women circus performers who would stay with us between tours. From the age of eight, all my friends were queer, and some of them were also growing up in queer families. We are talking about the period of late socialism. My own sexual orientation was never a matter of concern within my family. I wanted to make room for these people, to create, quite literally, a gallery of the figures from my childhood, because everything I know about joy and about living with dignity, I learned from them, not from books. Books teach you how to read yourself. But people teach you how to live.

Photo: Viktoriya Staykova

We are accustomed to thinking of listening, reading, and writing in terms of their differences, yet in Madrigal they continually intertwine and complement one another. What changes when we begin to think of them together?

What happens when we begin to live through our interconnections is that love, which may once have fallen on barren ground and failed to bear fruit in its time, is resurrected. The world is woven from relationships. They are the pulse of life itself.

You speak of writing not as a genre, but as a “state of mind.” What does that mean?

Once, I wrote to a friend that I had finished a text. He replied: “How do you know?” I loved that question. Death is part of life. In Japan, an entire culture is organized around impermanence. Even the straight line is regarded as demonic, and bridges in Japanese gardens zigzag because, as you cross from one side to the other, you are purified. It is you who straightens the line by connecting two points, not the line that straightens you. Writing is the same. It cannot be separated from life. I have been writing for as long as I can remember, and for a long time I published nothing written in words. My other books follow very different logics - neither the plot nor words lie at their foundation. For many years, I accepted that risk because, although I was not working within a particular genre - a novel, a poem, or a play - I was, in fact, engaged with writing as a way of being in the world. Now, for the first time, I have begun to organize this state of mind and body. But for nearly the first fifty years of my life, I wrote and lived without concerning myself with any particular genre.

What did you mean when you said at the book launch that writing cannot be transparent?

I did not want to unveil the lives and choices of my women characters. I did not try to decipher them or force my way into them. Wherever they needed to remain veiled, I left them that way. I don’t write or make art in order to force my way into the truth. I believe that truth reveals itself. I make art so that I can continue learning how to love. That is why I do it. I leave the truth in each person’s heart, because I know and believe that it is there. I place great trust in those who read or watch, and I leave them to do their own work, because these characters become part of their inner worlds. The person who reads or watches gives life just as the person who creates does.

In your practice, the lecture, the book, and research are interwoven with performance, and vice versa. How did this approach develop?

I wanted the stage to be practiced not through the theatrical production, but as an inner stage that brings thought into focus. Lived experience seemed to me the real field in which to build the language that we would later translate into form. But it is also possible to reach form through the process itself, so that the means of expression and the form become one and the same. My Theatre of Thought, a project I began in 2008, explores precisely this relationship between thought and performativity, and the forms it can take are diverse. In the first part, I developed three systems of writing: time, or the language of the egg; space, or the crystal; and image, or the colors of butterflies’ wings. The process of writing itself becomes visible within an inner space of thought and performance. This work later developed into practical exercises in thinking and the acoustic stage. 

These are all concepts from my practice that I have developed over time and continue to work with. They form a conceptual repertoire, just as theaters and companies have a performance repertoire. One day, I will have to describe them in a book and provide concrete examples. Perhaps that will also liberate someone else’s imagination. The truth is that we can do many things with theater. Above all, we can think and feel. We can create a language that is at once new and ancient. The final result, the staged production, is, for me, the least interesting part of all. I do not mean to sound provocative, but I say this as an artist. That is why I stopped making theatrical productions and began writing books.

Another reflection of your performance practice is your leading role in Ralitza Petrova’s film Lust, which also earned you nominations for Best Actress. How did you become involved in the film?

The invitation came unexpectedly. I felt at ease in front of the camera during the first auditions with the film’s casting director. She would ask me questions: “river or sea,” “puddle or lake,” and film me on her phone. At a certain point, I began answering as though I were someone else. Not in the sense that I was pretending to be another person, but as though a space had opened up between me and my answers, a very particular place for exploration. I learned of my father’s death while I was in New York, where I had begun writing the book. All of this perplexed me and filled me with doubt. I have to admit that the idea of working directly with trauma repels me for many reasons. These coincidences confused me more than they encouraged me.

Then, at some point, after several months had passed and Ralitza and I had met, I realized that I had already begun to grow attached to the character, and perhaps also to the process of working that Ralitza and I had developed together. I began to think that perhaps Lilian herself would help me as I tried to embody her. Once I understood that this connection was there, I believed in it and accepted the role. Filmmaking is extremely demanding, and so is writing, but filmmaking demands something different. It required enormous endurance and strong nerves. The idea that a nonprofessional actor somehow performs in a more instinctive, raw, and truthful way simply because they are not professionally trained is, to me, a complete fantasy. Rawness comes from the decisions that have been made and from the expressive means that have been chosen. Now that I have some understanding of the working conditions on set, I want to start over. Acting for film has captivated me because, strange as it may seem, I feel completely natural doing it - at home in my own skin. That surprised me greatly. Perhaps, had I discovered this when I was twenty, I would have made the effort to pursue it. For many reasons, it was an extraordinarily rich experience in my life.

Photo: Jasmina Tacheva

Is there a connection between the themes of Lust and Madrigal?

While I was working on the character, it was as though I were writing through my body. Or rather, I allowed the camera to read what had already been inscribed in the body. I was not acting, rather, I allowed myself to become a version of myself that I do not like. I let everything that had been repressed - the shame, the anger, and the fear - fill me. There is only one moment in the film in which I’m acting. It is also the only moment in which I work directly with the camera. The rest of the time, my gaze is elsewhere. It is not where the camera is. My gaze was fixed on inner contents. One of those contents is the theme of absence: the possibility of spending an entire lifetime mourning someone or something lost without ever realizing it. Usually, when we think we know “who” we are mourning, that person is only a convenient ghost. The real causes are always hidden. We should not be afraid to search for the truth, even when we know that there is more than one truth, because when we search for truth, we are searching for something else - for ourselves, for God, for love. Understanding and acceptance are the foundations of liberation. Of course, these are my themes. For some people, such questions are unimportant. They find their way to themselves by other paths.

What lies ahead for you and for Madrigal?

I hope to continue writing - to have time to write, edit, and submit my manuscripts for publication. That is all I want to do. Perhaps I would also like to act in another film. Every moment in which I’m not writing, I suffer. I’m not being grandiose - it truly feels that way. I experience it as though someone were stealing my time and I were complicit in the crime. Everything takes me a very long time. I am terribly slow. And life is not endless. As for the book, I pray that it finds its way into the hearts of its readers - that it finds them and offers them shelter within its language. That it tells them: “There is room for everyone under the sun. There is room for you, too. Your story matters.”

Photo: Violeta Apostolova

Is there anything we didn’t talk about that you feel is important to mention?

I would like to end by saying that without love, we are nothing. And even when we strive to become nothing, like the saints, we still need love.

Snejanka Mihaylova

July 1, 2026

Sofia