Julia Kristeva says not true that she was an agent for Bulgaria’s communist-era State Security
Bulgarian philospher, psychoanalyst, linguist and author Julia Kristeva, who lived in France from the mid-1960s, has rejected as untrue the report by the Dossier Commission that she was an agent for Bulgaria’s communist-era secret service State Security.
In a statement to French weekly L’Obs, Kristeva described the Dossier Commission’s conclusion as “not just funny and untrue” but also slanderous.
Kristeva said that obviously, someone wanted to hurt her.
Kristeva was checked by the Dossier Commission, Bulgaria’s statutory body empowered to check people in public life for links to the communist secret services, in her capacity as a member of the editorial board of Literaturen Vestnik (Literary Journal).
The Commission said on March 27 that she had worked, under the code name Sabina, for the first department of State Security, which was in charge of intelligence regarding the artistic and creative world and the mass media.
Kristeva, born in Sliven in Bulgaria in June 1941, had been recruited by a senior lieutenant Ivan Bozhikov in June 1971, according to the Commission.
Part of the Tel Quel intellectual movement, Kristeva worked alongside Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Tsvetan Todorov, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Lucien Goldman. A professor at the University Paris Diderot, she also had a chair at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, Columbia University in New York. Foreign Policy magazine ranked her as among the 100 greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
Since it began work in 2006, Bulgaria’s Dossier Commission has publicly identified more than 12 000 former State Security people in top government and state positions, Bulgaria’s diplomacy abroad, in the leaderships of private sector and trade union organisations, as well as in the ownership and management of public opinion survey agencies and the media, various sports associations and in the leaderships of religious groups including the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as well as Jewish and Muslim community associations.
