Hannah Arendt was famously resistant to both psychoanalysis and feminism. Nonetheless, psychoanalytic feminist theory can offer a new interpretive strategy for deconstructing her equally famous opposition between the social and the political.

Supplementing critical readings of Arendt's most significant texts (including The Human Condition, On Revolution, Rahel Varnhagen, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and The Life of the Mind) with the insights of contemporary psychoanalytic, feminist, and social theorists, Norma Claire Moruzzi reconstitutes the relationship in Arendt's texts between constructed social identity and political agency.

Moruzzi uses Julia Kristeva's writings on abjection to clarify the textual dynamic in Arendt's work that constructs the social as a natural threat; Joan Riviere's and Mary Ann Doane's work on feminine masquerade amplify the theoretical possibilities implicit in Arendt's own discussion of the public, political mask.

In a bold interdisciplinary synthesis, Moruzzi develops the social applications of a concept (the mask) Arendt had described as limited to the strictly political realm: a new conception of (political) agency as (social) masquerade, traced through the marginal but emblematic textual figures who themselves enact the politics of social identity.

About the Author

Norma Claire Moruzzi is Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Reviews

Speaking through the Mask is a thoughtful, closely reasoned work... It succeeds as a thoroughgoing feminist reading of Arendt, written as much to show how feminist theory challenges Arendt's blind spots as to illustrate what Arendt has to teach feminism... This is an original and important book, one that manages at once to talk back to Hannah Arendt and to make it plain why so many feminists are talking about her.

* The Journal of Politics *

... complex and interesting....

* Choice *

Moruzzi provides a compelling case for using feminist psychoanalytic insights to enrich Arendt's concept of political agency.

* Women and Politics *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the 2002 Gradiva Prize for the Best Hist.



Book Information
ISBN 9780801437854
Author Norma Claire Moruzzi
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 22mm