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Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Edited by Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 383p. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.
Jeffrey C. Isaac, Indiana University, Bloomington
As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl notes in her blurb on the back of this book, it is "startling" that Hannah Arendt should have become so "provocative" a subject for feminists. For Arendt, as Bonnie Honig observes, is a theorist who has widely been disparaged by feminists, for her indifference to gender issues and, even more important, for her insistence on conceptual boundaries-the private versus the public, the social versus the political, the natural versus the created-that render the politicization of gender difficult if not impossible. And yet Honig and her collaborators have managed to move beyond this negative assessment of Arendt and to construct a series of fruitful encounters between feminist concerns and Arendt's corpus.
As Honig's introduction makes clear, the guiding insight of the volume is that "the feminism question in Arendt" needs to be joined with "the Arendt question in feminism." In short, while feminist theorists, and political theorists more generally, need to come to terms with Arendt's deficiencies as a theorist from the point of view of feminist concerns, feminists need also to rethink the "women's standpoint" from which their criticisms of Arendt typically have issued. From the perspective of a more pluralistic feminism it becomes possible to reread Arendt; indeed it becomes possible to see Arendt's conceptions of agency, plurality, and representative thinking as resources for feminism.
Most of the essays in this volume make a good case for such a rereading of Arendt. While they represent a variety of perspectives, the fourteen essays seem to fall into two categories. Some-like the pieces by Honig, Susan Bickford, Mary Dietz, Lisa Disch,...