Author: Moruzzi, Norma Claire.
Title: Speaking Through the Mask : Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity
Description: Ithaca [NY], Cornell University Press, 2000. orig.cloth. 24x15cm, xiv,205 pp.. Minor rubbing. VG. dustwrapper. ¶ 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 insights of contemporary psychoanalytic, feminist and social theories, 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 Rivere'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 an 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" - Publisher's description.

Keywords: Hannah Arendt, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic, Group Identity, Feminism, Feminist, ,