- #JULIA KRISTEVA POWERS OF HORROR ABJECTION CODE#
- #JULIA KRISTEVA POWERS OF HORROR ABJECTION PROFESSIONAL#
Did someone deliberately trigger the lustration procedure against Kristeva to bring to light a dossier that had been maliciously fabricated fifty years ago? There is no way to establish the veracity of this story. According to the lustration law, every journalist born before 1976 is to be subject to such a check.
Julia Kristeva was checked because she was being considered for the editorial board of the reputable Bulgarian literary magazine Literaturen Vestnik.
#JULIA KRISTEVA POWERS OF HORROR ABJECTION PROFESSIONAL#
This is indeed possible: it is well-known that officials of the communist secret service scored points by declaring recruitments, obtained professional prestige from ‘managing collaborators’, and surely enjoyed their trips to Paris.īulgaria’s lustration process was launched shortly after the collapse of the regime in 1989–1990 and is still unfolding. She sees her life’s work to have been destroyed and considers herself the victim of a conspiracy. However, she insists that the files are a complete fabrication, describing the accusations as ‘grotesque’, ‘false’ and ‘defamatory’. She even rejects the generous interpretation, namely that she was indeed in contact with the Bulgarian secret service, but without knowing that she was an agent. Yet, Kristeva has vehemently denied any collaboration with the Bulgarian secret service. Her highly original work as a literary theorist, semiotician and psychoanalyst makes her one of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, just short of a cult figure.Įxperts deem the ‘spy files’ to be authentic but lacking in damning evidence. Soon, the French left intellectual elite, and later the American liberal elite, is infatuated with Kristeva. She joins the influential circle of thinkers around the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel (among whose members are Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida). The story that stands beyond dispute is this: in 1965, at the age of twenty-four, the bright, beautiful and poor Julia Kristeva comes to Paris on a doctoral scholarship of the French government. So far, it is impossible to discern fiction from fact.
#JULIA KRISTEVA POWERS OF HORROR ABJECTION CODE#
The personal and the operational dossiers on Kristeva, under the code name ‘Sabina’, have been made public and make for a fascinating read. ‘At the end of March, the Bulgarian lustration commission revealed that Julia Kristeva – the widely admired French-Bulgarian intellectual – worked for the Bulgarian intelligence service in the 1970s. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) The unintelligible truth showing through’ ‘On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath,