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Twenty-five years after her death, we are still coming to terms with the controversial figure of Hannah Arendt. Interlacing the life and work of this seminal twentieth-century philosopher, Julia Kristeva provides us with an elegant, sophisticated biography brimming with historical and philosophical insight.Centering on the theme of female genius,emphasizes three features of the philosopher's work. First, by exploring Arendt's critique of Saint Augustine and her biographical essay on Rahel Varnhagen, Kristeva accentuates Arendt's commitment to recounting lives and narration. Second, Kristeva reflects on Arendt's perspective onJudaism, anti-Semitism, and the "banality of evil." Finally, the biography assesses Arendt's intellectual journey, placing her enthusiasm for observing both social phenomena and political events in the context of her personal life.Drawing on fragments of Arendt's most intimate correspondence with her longtime lover Martin Heidegger and her husband Heinrich Blucher, excerpts from her mother's "Unser Kind" (a diary tracking Hannah's formative years), and passages from Arendt's philosophical writings, Kristeva presents a luminous story. With a thorough thematic index and bibliographical references,is a major breakthrough in the understanding of an essential thinker.Amazon.com Review
Julia Kristeva's Hannah Arendt brings together two of the best minds in 20th-century philosophy; two who are especially noteworthy because they are visionary women in a field long dominated by men. Appropriately, the book is, in part, a tribute to Arendt, one of a series of looks at female genius. Kristeva brings her considerable scholarly arsenal, which includes linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, feminism, aesthetics, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. In particular, her psychoanalytic bent makes for an incisive look at Arendt because she was "gripped from the start by that unique passion in which life and thought are one.... [She] consistently put life--both life itself and life as a concept to be analyzed--at the center of her work."

Arendt is certainly one of the 20th century's brightest intellectual luminaries. Penning The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem, she wove her accounts of philosophy with a unique penchant for narrative and personal reflection, vivified by her extraordinary life. Throughout this biography, Kristeva plies Arendt's trade, using Arendt's life to illuminate her thought. By turns she examines Arendt's use of narrative, her ratiocinations on Jewish-ness and anti-Semitism, and her political philosophy. Kristeva's insightfulness in this volume will help ensure her a place in the canon alongside Arendt. --Eric de Place ... Read more

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Living Is Thinking; Or, the Force of Memory
This is a collection of five Alexander lectures that Kristeva delivered at the University of Toronto in 1999.It attempts to delineate certain aspects of Arendt's political philosophy, including her idea of the political, the vita activa/vita contemplative distinction, and the influences of various thinkers, especially Aristotle and Heidegger on Arendt's body of work.Kristeva's main focuses are Arendt's conceptions of language, the self, "political space," and the body, addressing all with a particular focus toward their deployment and usage in political life.

During the first two lectures, Kristeva convincingly makes the case that at the center of Arendt's political thought rests several distinctions which enable us to live political lives (political in the sense of Aristotle's famous "politikon zoon," the observation that we are by nature social animals, not necessarily party politics).She says that we interpret, understand, and react to our world through and by our unique ability to create narratives.The ability to share life, action, and thought in an interactive human matrix arises from what Nietzsche called the "shaping power" of human memory.

The third lecture is a reading of several fiction writers, including Dinesen, Brecht, Sarraute, and Kafka, with emphasis on the implications their work has for political action.While interesting, I didn't find Arendt's reading, or Kristeva's reading of Arendt's reading, especially compelling.

In the last two lectures, she mostly discusses the political relevance of forgiveness, memory, and judgment.Kristeva is makes some peculiar statements about Arendt, i.e., like that Arendt wasn't aware of the large corpus of eighteenth century treatises on aesthetics and taste.I find this highly unlikely, considering Arendt's near-encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophical traditions.

Overall, this book could have been much better if Kristeva herself was a political philosopher, though she does bring interesting points to the issue at hand considering her background in theory and psychoanalysis.It was enjoyable to get to read a synthesis of Arendt's work from someone whose work epitomizes interdisciplinarity, and does not rest purely within the realm of political science or philosophy.But this is ultimately a double-edged sword for this book.While I always found Kristeva's arguments thoughtful and well-argued, they always lacked a certain historical force that could have been better lassoed with a "tighter" focus on Arendt's purely historic-political métier.

The intellectual overview of a political science genius
It has been a long time since I went to a baseball game, but trying to keep track of the intellectual action in the biography of Hannah Arendt by Julia Kristeva reminded me of the game.Eventually, I even thought of a song, "Catfish" by Bob Dylan (Words by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy) recorded on July 28, 1975, an outtake from the album "Desire" that was finally released in a three-CD package called "The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 [rare and unreleased] 1961-1991."There was once a pitcher called Catfish Hunter, million dollar man, and Dylan's chorus said, "Nobody can throw the ball Like Catfish can."I have had the words since "The Songs of Bob Dylan" was released in 1976, but I didn't hear the song until 1991.Having an English translation from 2001 of a feminist biography of a political scientist of the mid-twentieth century captures the intellection activity that interests me about as well as "Catfish" captures the action of a baseball game.

Lazy stadium night, Catfish on the mound,
"Strike three" the umpire said,
Batter have to go back and sit down.

There are three chapters in HANNAH ARENDT, and the third has 219 notes.Basic statistics on how much Julia Kristeva is merely educating herself in public by providing a reading from Arendt's books might be obtained by counting the Ibid.s.Counting backwards, I found 133 Ibid.s in the notes for Chapter 3, including my favorite note:

"99."Letter to the Romans 7:21, drafted between 54 and 58 a.d., cited in ibid., p. 64."(p. 268).

A lot of the books I read lately keep trying to tell me when the Bible was written, but I never noticed it in a note before.Usually my favorite notes are about Nietzsche, like:

"123.Ibid., p. 165, citing Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE, no. 310"

"126.Concerning the `forgetting' that Nietzsche revives see p. 237; and Paul Ricoeur, paper presented at the Hannah Arendt Conference at the Grande Bibliotheque de France, December 6, 1997."

"128.Ibid., pp. 169-70, citing Nietzsche, THE WILL TO POWER, no. 585 A, pp. 316-19."

`131.LM, "Willing," p. 172, citing Nietzsche, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, pt. 3, "Before Sunrise." '

`187.Ibid., citing Nietzsche, "The Use and Abuse of History," pp. 6, 7.'

"189.Ibid., citing Nietzsche, THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS, p. 61"

`192.Ibid., pp. 63, 72-73 ("even in old Kant:the categorical imperative reeks of cruelty").'

Nietzsche wrote such things about Kant, and it is a bit difficult to imagine that Kristeva and Arendt would associate such ideas with the great weight of the past if Nietzsche hadn't made this connection first.Understanding philosophy is a process that can be compared to intellectually building a rehash of old, familiar plays, as if it is about something like a baseball game, which has an umpire who gets to decide when an easy pop fly is an infield fly rule call that makes the batter out, but the umpire does not have time to say anything until after it is all over when a triple play picks off the runners before they have a chance to tag up if the pitcher ducks under a line drive that gets caught right on second base before anyone has time to react, but a quick shortstop snagged the ball out of the air and flipped it to first in the only instant in which that could happen.Kristeva is capable of interpreting political science as an activity best understood in terms of the philosophy of Nietzsche:

"To the `identical will' that forges the solidarity of a group, Arendt contrasts the way men who are connected to one another through a mutual promise `act in concert.'These men dispose of the future as though it were the present, and they live together in the miraculous enlargement of what Nietzsche called the `memory of the Will,' which is what distinguishes human life from animal life.As Arendt evokes Nietzsche's concept, she hears only the joyful touches of the superman and denotes not a trace of Nietzsche's disdainful tone."(p. 236).

Still counting backward, I find 102 Ibid.s in the notes for Chapter 2 and only 52 Ibid.s in the notes for Chapter 1.The Introduction only had two notes, on a wide variety of topics, but both related to the nature of "genius."When political opinion surveys offer a few sample views to encompass the political orientation of the great mass of the population, only a genius could be expected to have a ready answer to questions like "Will mothers become our only safeguard against the wholesale automation of human beings?"(p. xiii).The Introduction actually seems more suited for a triple biography, as "The three women who are the subject of this work" on page xv includes two women who are hardly mentioned in the three main chapters of HANNAH ARENDT.It does not add much to understanding this book to also learn "that Melanie Klein devoted herself to studying decompensation."(p. xvii).But in considering who else has been brilliant, it pays to have some comic relief.Among the French, who must understand comedy as well as any people anywhere, it might even be popular to declare:

"Colette's only real rival would prove to be Proust, whose narrative search has a social and metaphysical complexity that goes well beyond the adventures of Claudine and her counterparts.And yet Colette far surpasses Proust in the art of capturing pleasures that have never been lost."(pp. xviii-xix). ... Read more

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"... both an excellent introduction and a thoroughgoing analysis of Kristeva's writing." -- Signs

"The book is a brilliant combination of a recuperative and a critical reading of Kristeva's work." -- Changes: An International Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy

"... a thorough, detailed, and critical analysis of the writings of Julia Kristeva." -- Elizabeth Grosz

"... the most involved and engaging study of Julia Kristeva's work to date..." -- The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

This first full-scale feminist interpretation of Kristeva's work situates her within the context of French feminism. Oliver guides her readers through Kristeva's intellectual formation in linguistics, Freud, Lacan, and poetics. This comprehensive introduction to Kristeva makes accessible her important contributions to philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalytic feminism.

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A collection of 22 interviews and one personal essay,Julia Kristeva Interviews presents an intimate and accessible portrait of one of France's most important critical thinkers and intellectual personalities.

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Beginning with a previously unpublished essay by Julia Kristeva, this collection offers profound insights into work central to current linguistic and psychoanalytic thought, and marks Kristeva as a leading theoretician of desire. This book should be of interest to advanced students and teachers of feminism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, art history. ... Read more

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Noted literary critic, psychoanalyst, and theorist Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust'sjust delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, "Proust and Time Embodied," takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust's exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next in "In Search of Madeline," she delves into Proust's concept of the little cake that flooded him with the taste of childhood regained, providing an explanation for Proust's search for the deeper levels of childhood grounded in her psychoanalytic experience. ThroughoutKristeva draws on Proust's notebooks and manuscripts, pointing out significant variations in the different versions of his work. She examines his early philosophical training and the philosophical trends in Paris at the turn of the century, seeking to explain how he his concept of the primacy of memory and sensation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

remains state of the art in proust scholarship
Major contribution to Proust scholarship, these lectures, delivered in the early 1990's, are quite useful to the student, as all the bases are covered in a svelte and tight presentation. When one reads Proust, there are a lot of pages to be read and analyzed, even more when dealing with the extensive critical tradition which his seminal novel has spawned.Thus, the concinnity of Kristeva's fluid, comprehensive, yet brief, analysis, not only displays a masterful reading of the text, but a much needed self-consious awareness of the essential secondary literature in this sprawling field. Kristeva's reading is diachronic, both in its consideration of the historical development of these materials (especially strong in her discussion of Deleuze's noted contribution to the discourse), and her rather deconstructive delineation of the development of tensions and disparities in modern existence as singularly, notoriously explicated at length in the La Recherche.

rather academic
This is a very dry and academic book and now, less than two weeks after finishing it, I cannot really remember much about it. ... Read more

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Kristeva points to Montesquieu's esprit général -his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights -in this humanistic plea for tolerance and commonality. ... Read more

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"Deconstruction," "psychoanalysis," and "semiotics" have become part of the vocabulary of contemporary culture. Reading Theory introduces the principal texts by Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva that lie behind these terms and that provide their contexts. This book concentrates its attention on making accessible what these three theorists have written, rather than offering a synthetic abstraction of the fashionable terminology of theory. In addition to these detailed readings Michael Payne examines and introduces the manifestos of each writer, their "readings" of paintings, and provides a systematic response to their critics. ... Read more

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A brilliant "translation" of some heavy theoretical texts.
Mike Payne's book is a godsend to literary theory students.It distills the heavily theoretical works of Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva, and makes them more easily understandable (if it is possible to truly understand these texts).I had the pleasure of being one of Prof. Payne's students at Bucknell, and I must say that he is as brilliant in class as he is on paper. ... Read more

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In this book Julia Kristeva extends the definition of revolt beyond politics per se. Kristeva sees revolt as a state of permanent questioning and transformation, of change that characterizes psychic life and, in the best cases, art. For her revolt is not simply about rejection and destruction--it is a necessary process of renewal and regeneration. ... Read more

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Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this intellectual biography of Colette -- the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy "Female Genius" -- will be considered a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century.Colette (1873-1954) was a prolific novelist who celebrated sexual pleasure and invented a language for it at a time when women writers were inhibited about dealing with the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world and the joys and pains of love served as her main themes, and her novels --Cheri, La Chatte, andGigi, among them -- blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction long before autobiographical novels became commonplace. She married three times, had male and female lovers, and for a time supported herself as a mime, dancing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died, she received the first state funeral the French Republic had ever given a woman. Colette's writing was inspired by entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, andfin de siecle gay aesthetes.She admired those who lived on the sexual edge and was accused of moral corruption in intellectual matters -- she published in pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic journals during the Occupation, even as she fought to keep her Jewish third husband from deportation. Kristeva deftly examines Colette's controversial life and work and considers two of her most important influences, Honore de Balzac and Marcel Proust. In a multifaceted approach, Kristeva considers Colette's use of metaphor, the characters in her novels, and the development of her writing within the context of her life. Paying particular attention to the language the French writer used to "say the unsayable and name the unnameable," Kristeva offers an elegant and sophisticated critique of Colette's psychological conflicts, particularly her sexual relationships and how these conflicts are both recorded in and resolved through the act of writing. Appealing to Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as the Oedipus complex, perversion, the symbolic, and melancholy, Kristeva opens Colette's oeuvre to psychoanalytic interpretation.The impression that remains is of a woman intent on experiencing the world's pleasures -- itsjouissance -- in a melding with the world's flesh. ... Read more

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Considers the social and political significance of Kristeva's oeuvre. ... Read more

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In this survey of Julia Kristeva's work, the author outlines her intellectual development, from her work on Bakhtin through her theories of the "symbolic" and the "semiotic" to her analysis of horror, love, melancholy and cosmopolitanism. ... Read more

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This bibliography surveys the entirety of Kristeva's work published in French and English through 1996. It lists her books, edited collections, contributions to anthologies, articles in journals and newspapers, interviews in French and English, as well as her Curriculum Vitae. It also provides an extensive chronological listing of secondary sources in both French and English, a subject index organized by English subject headings, and a complete name index. ... Read more

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This book examines the causes of the abject response in canonical novels, such as Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist", Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Aurora Floyd" and Lady Audley's "Secret". In "Powers of Horror", Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject's primal, psychological relation to the mother. The author suggests that these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which are called "abject response". By developing Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as a model for reading physical acts of violence against women, the book yields specific answers to its overriding questions: why was a female body so threatening in nineteenth-century fiction? The answer lies in social constructions of women as powers of horror, which the male subject imbibes and which lead to domestic violence if improperly balanced. In addition, the book examines critical interpretations, including those of feminists, which also inadvertently abject the female body.By examining parallel abjections in nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century criticism, this books reveals the more insidious remnants of Victorian ideology in our present culture, as well as the ways in which these remnants inadvertently perpetuate domestic violence. Thus, this book should engage scholars and students of the Victorian period, women's studies, and feminist theory. ... Read more