Kristeva, Julia. _Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative._ Translated by Frank Collins.  (Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press, 2001).  100pp.
Reviewed by Timothy Martinez, timothymartinez@bhsu.edu, Black Hills State University

     This book is based on Julia Kristeva's series of lectures presented as the 1999 Alexander
Lecture at the University of Toronto.  The lectures  provided a summary of Kristeva's thoughts
on Hannah Arendt being developed at the same time in the first volume of her investigation of
female genius.  As such, the ideas presented in the book being reviewed are somewhat sketchy
and still preliminary.  Nonetheless, Kristeva does manage to develop some original insights into
the sources of some of Arendt's central concerns.
      From the beginning, Kristeva is clear as to the objective of her lectures.  Her aim is to
examine Arendt's political phenomenology of the "life of the mind" as revealed in deed (unprec-
edented beginnings) and, most importantly from Kristeva's perspective, in word (narrative
memory).  Kristeva finds the roots of this understanding of the meaning of the individual
revealed in narration in Arendt's unique Heideggerian/Nietzschean "appropriation and transposi
tion" of Aristotle.  Though this point is not fully developed here, Kristeva agues that when this
move is fully understood in terms of Arendt's own reading of Heidegger and Nietzsche, the
conflict between Aristotelian and Heideggerian aspects of her thought is mitigated. While
acknowledging Arendt's debt to her former teacher, (a point made elsewhere by earlier commen-
tators such as Villa and Hinchman and Hinchman), Kristeva claims that Arendt effectively
deconstructs key aspects of Heidegger's ontology.  According to this reading, Arendt deconstructs
Heidegger's fundamental ontology and thereby escapes his eventual reliance on the use of poetic
language as the only means of escape from involvement with particular beings which for
Heidegger obscures the truth of Being.  In so doing Arendt manages to reconnect thought and
action through the activity of narration, as "a political life and/or an action recounted to others."
(27)  Arendt succeeds at gaining access to the meaning revealed in the action of the particular
person:  as a particular "who" revealed through the language of a narrative story which recounts
the action in memory without the need for complete escape from the world of involvement (i.e.,
Heidegger's transcendent "letting be").  Arendt thus rescues the lost potential of political life as
the active life.
     Like other commentators, Kristeva views Arendt engaged in a project aimed at salvaging
political life through a reorientation of action in relation to historical time.  For her part, Kristeva
finds this in Arendt's reinterpretation of the concept of guilt.  For Arendt the origin of guilt is
found not in some primordial violation of moral law, but as result of the feeling of powerlessness
that is associated with the actor's experience of lived time.  The unpredictable and irreversible
consequences of action within the flow of time are the source of this sense of powerlessness.  
     For Kristeva the final movement in this reorientation occurs when Arendt posits the
conciliatory power of forgiveness and promise:  forgiveness acquits the actor for failure and the
unintended consequences of an act, while promise "attenuates the security seeking domination of
the self and of time" (78-83).  For Arendt forgiveness and promise as predicated on otherness (I
cannot really forgive or make promises to myself), on a plurality of "whos" (I forgive acts not
their actions), can provide the "regulating mechanisms" for the frightful conditions of a truly
public life (irreversibility and unpredictability of action in the public realm) and make political
life as life among others again possible.
     Kristeva emphasizes how important it was for Arendt to maintain the particularity of each
person as a "who" with a reference to her (in)famous unwillingness to be assimilated into the
women's movement.  This can be seen in Arendt's limited theorizing on her own femininity based
on her fear that by so doing would privilege the feminine body (a generic thing trapped in its own
biological necessity) over her own distinctiveness as a "who" (i.e., as Hannah Arendt).  I think
that Kristeva makes a good point in arguing that this does not reveal hostility or alienation from
her own femininity, since, like her Jewishness, she took this as an irrefutable given "that she
simply accepts as such" (69).  As Kristeva explains, Arendt "lets us understand that the body,
while indeed being servile, is also a gift and a grace" (69).  Furthermore, the distinction between
the sexes established by the body (both female and male) serves as the fundamental basis for the
plurality which, for Arendt, provides one of the necessary conditions for action through which
each of us are revealed as a distinct person.
     Many of Kristeva's most important points often simply reiterate similar ones made
previously by other authors such as Conovan, Villa, and Bowen-Moore.  There is much still
unexamined in Arendt's own work.  For example her utilization of St. Augustine's notions of
beginnings, caritas, and memory first examined in her dissertation, and which provides the basis
for many of her later meditations, have only just begun to be explored. I would argue that many
of Kristeva's contributions in this book to areas of inquiry are limited and preliminary at best. 
The most original insights found in Kristeva's narrative construction are her psychoanalytic
interpretations of Arendt's thought and such an approach raises more questions then it really
answers.  Though these issues may be addressed in her larger work on Arendt, this may indeed be
Kristeva's intended effect.
     The most original and surely controversial aspect of Kristeva's discussion of these points
is the psychoanalytic twist that she gives to Arendt's thought especially her concept of forgive
ness.  Kristeva seems to link Arendt's impulse for forgiveness to her own personal experience,
specifically her relation with Heidegger--not just his thought or deeds, but the man himself as
teacher and lover.  She then argues that we should extend Arendt's appropriation of this religious
"practice" (Arendt clearly sees Jesus as the discoverer of this notion of forgiveness) to the
practice of psychoanalytic listening and speaking.  Thus, the psychoanalytical narrative of
Arendt's actions (her words and deeds) created by Kristeva seeks to "delink the trauma"of
Arendt's life, and thereby "allows for the rebirth of the subject" (83). The subject that is thus
reborn through the narration of psychoanalytic forgiveness is, of course, the particular person,
Hannah Arendt (the de-traumatized Hannah Arendt?).     
     Though Arendt had always maintained that psychoanalysis failed to reveal the distinctive
ness of each individual and as a science "relies on a psychic inside" in terms of which "we are all
alike," Arendt herself was well aware of the dangers of exposure in public through words and
deeds--consider the Eichmann controversy.  Just as irreversibility and unpredictability are for
Arendt the very conditions for the natality of action, they are also the very source of the frailty of
human affairs that has driven political philosophy and western civilization to abandon the active
political life in favor of administration, tyranny, violence, and totalitarianism.  Very conscious of
the uncertain and uncontrollable  nature of action taken in the public realm, Arendt herself
purposefully avoided the path followed by much of the tradition, including Heidegger.  She was
willing to take the risk.
     In much the same way that today we see public figures being "narrated" through the
increasingly penetrating gaze of the popular media, by stepping onto the public stage through her
words and deeds, Hannah Arendt has become the subject of scrutiny which seeks the meaning of
her words in the recesses of her private psyche.   This raises the question whether such tech
niques advance our ability to make judgments (which Arendt herself saw as the most political
activity of the mind) about the person so revealed in action and this person's contribution to the
(re)founding of a public space for the human freedom to begin the new and unprecedented in an
age dominated by the endless replication of the same.  

University of Toronto Press