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Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative (Alexander Lectures)

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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.