The full report concerning the involvement of Julia Kristeva with Bulgaria’s communist regime during the 1970s partially exonerates the psychoanalyst and philosopher. Last week Bulgaria’s Dossier Commission, a government body charged with revealing the identities of those in public life who worked for the country’s secret services, claimed Kristeva was an informer.
In the full documents released Friday however it notes Kristeva was an unwilling spy if at all. Having been pursued by the secret services, ‘towards the end of 1970 she began to give information about our nationals abroad, about progressive Arab organisations, especially Palestinian ones, and the activities of Maoist groups,’ an intelligence report dated 10 November 1984, translated by France 24, states. ‘The information she provided is not particularly interesting and she lacks discipline: claiming that she was busy, she would forget meetings or fail to attend them’ the report continues. Kristeva received no money and she authored no reports on her peers.
At the point Kristeva began to embrace Maoism in 1973, ‘she was definitively shut out from the apparatus of collaboration.’
Kristeva is the author of more than 30 books and worked alongside leading French intellectuals such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes. There was widespread anguish in Bulgaria at the news Kristeva, one of the country’s leading intellectuals, might have collaborated with the authoritarian regime, but this has abated since the publication of the full report.
3 April 2018
