The first of three chapters opens with the early years of the thinker’s life in Germany, France, and the United States. Kristeva draws primarily from Young-Bruehl’s and Courtine-Denamy’s biographies to outline the portrait of a deeply feminine and attractive woman who loved life, knew how to defend hers and to protect others’ (through her work for Jewish organizations during the 1930s), and who gained from her second husband Blücher a passion for politics. Arendt’s preoccupation with vita activa, and later with vita contemplativa in The Life of the Mind, is not about the biological processes of life, but about life as a narrative whose meaning calls for constant questioning. Because life, this space between birth and death, is linked with beginning and doing, human freedom is rooted not in an inner psychic disposition but in “renewable births tantamount to acts of freedom” (35). Tracing back Arendt’s concept of life to her doctoral dissertation on Saint Augustine, Kristeva wants us to understand the term life as the author would: as a love for the ordinary person or for the neighbor (46). Life as love is an understanding marked by the thinker’s female identity (xx), and Kristeva stresses how another important Arendtian concept, natality, is bound with birth as the giving of life. While well aware that her female genius had little interest in the feminine condition, Kristeva argues that the Arendtian reflection on birth and natality could help contemporary women rethink their condition as mothers as guarding the very possibility of life. Indeed, life is conflicted, as is love, by the presence of the Other whose boundaries must be opposed for survival. But maternal love exemplifies a different kind of bond with the Other, akin to that of the mystic or the lover. “Life, as Arendt understood it, is either feminine life, or nothing at all” (48).

Kristeva then turns to Arendt’s most biographical work, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, whose narrative functions like a Kantian example, illustrating a concept with a singular story, that of the Jew as a pariah and a parvenu. Although the perspective of a Zionist critique of assimilation inspires this book, Arendt also emerges as a biographer occasionally engaged in a quasi-psychoanalytical analysis of Varnhagen’s mental and emotional journeys that mirror her own dilemmas of a Jewess by birth. Kristeva concludes by dissecting the role of the Arendtian narrative, a narrative that she considers the most intrinsically political action because it is so readily shared. The portraits of Men in Dark Times exemplify this art that seeks to illuminate the just action, sometimes at the cost of literary or psychological appreciation (92–99).

The second chapter, “Superfluous Humanity,” focuses on two other, and more strictly political, narratives: The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its controversial thesis on “the banality of evil.” These works are exemplary of Arendt’s loyalty to the essence of life that consists both in solitary and critical questioning (speaking the truth) and in judging within the bonds of community (doing justice for her people). The competent synopses and the discussion of their author’s Jewish identity offer little new, however, to those who have read Arendt and Young-Bruehl, except for some remarks of a psychoanalytical nature such as on the nature of evil. Thus, Arendt rejected Freud’s conception of radical sadism that depends on the death drive by attempting to show that violence is neither bestial nor irrational. This is not to say that she endorsed the Platonic and Christian notion of evil as an unthinkable reality. Rather, her concern for life was such that she wanted primarily to affirm birth and the acceptance of the good (150–52).

Kristeva introduces her reflections on “Thinking, Willing, Judging” with a comparison of the Arendtian “who” with the solitary Heidegerrian Dasein. This is a “who” disclosed by action, attempting to transform labor and work into action in order to escape the “what” characteristic of life as zoe (the survival of the species) (171–77). The subsequent discussion of The Life of the Mind and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is complex, part summary, part commentary. Drawing from her psychoanalytical background, Kristeva asks some thought-provoking questions; for instance, how can natality that manifests itself in the world under the guise of the child, this fruit of love, be reconciled with politics that in some ways represents “the end of love” (237)? She is critical, as one might expect, of Arendt’s neglect of the body that becomes an “uninteresting generalization” (179). But she does not pursue these inquiries out of “respect” for “the grandeur” of a project whose limitations must not be questioned (180). Ultimately, thinking, action, and life fuse in her interpretation. The Will becomes an agent of the transformation of the law of admonition into the life of the mind as a perpetual new beginning that is founded on each new birth. Kristeva concludes by making forgiveness and promise the remedies to the irreversibility and unpredictability of the linear chain of temporality which human beings experience. Forgiveness breaks this chain of endless processes in the name of a who and becomes therefore an act of love (230–37).

Kristeva analyzes, often astutely, the strands in Arendt’s thought that link her to thinkers as different as Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In remarks that unfortunately appear in her text more like brief afterthoughts, she acknowledges that Arendt considered love as “perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces” (107), condemned “depth psychology or psychoanalysis” (179), and “wholly denounces the notion of ‘life’ as the ultimate nihilistic value” in The Human Condition (40). If this is so, Kristeva’s choice of the term life to define the central focus of Arendt’s work, and the definition of life as love she attributes to Arendt are perplexing. We know that for Arendt respect and friendship are the sentiments proper to the political realm. If one had to mention an overall theme in a work so rich and diverse, it would be Arendt’s concern with action, the disinterested and active involvement in public affairs that characterized the Greek citizens of Antiquity, the American founding fathers, the worker councils of the Soviet Revolution, and the 1956 Hungarian revolutionaries. But Kristeva questions Arendt’s admiration for the councils system, which she finds “surprising,” coming from a thinker often classified as conservative (166). She thinks that Arendt’s theorization of birth and natality illustrates her identification of life with thinking, and that the narrative is a form of action that makes the polis. But is it not rather action and the relations it establishes that makes the polis? For Arendt, “even though stories are the inevitable result of action,” narrators and actors are not to be confused; narratives at best recall and encourage action. There is little indication that Kristeva understands the painful tension in Arendt’s life between thinking and acting, her inner wrestling over her responsibilities as a thinker cum narrator and as an actor.

Kristeva is no less a formidable and erudite thinker than her subject. In a work that spans linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and fiction, she does not hesitate to engage with current political challenges. The encounter between two influential scholars who share complex origins and the condition of immigrant should have been fascinating rather than disappointing. We know, of course, what little time the author of The Human Condition had for genius (ix–x), and the juxtaposition of her name with this term reveals perhaps the most troubling aspect of Kristeva’s study: is she interpreting Arendt’s thought in a way that does justice to its main preoccupations and stand-points, or does this “body of work” (x) serve as a jumping board of sorts allowing her to develop some of her own themes? Both projects are legitimate, but Kristeva never seems to quite make up her mind between the two and the result is confusing for the reader. In her admiration for her subject, the French psychoanalyst overlooks also some important conceptual dilemmas. How should we understand exactly the relationship between action and thinking and between labor, work, and action? Likewise, how should we interpret the tension between Arendt’s urge to “understand” totalitarianism and its agents and her resistance to examining the unconscious that must remain hidden in the darkness of the human soul? These theoretical explorations that Arendt never completed remain a potent source of intellectual stimulation for her readers; they may yet explain best the compelling character of her work that Kristeva so rightly celebrates.