Beloved Calgary Mural
Hannah Arendt from 2001 is the first of three volumes by Julia Kristeva dedicated to exemplars of “female genius,” the second two being dedicated to Melanie Klein and Colette respectively. Melanie Klein might even make more sense as a subject and as a Kristeva cause célèbre because even though the exigencies of the where and the when of things have determined to judge Kristeva a “deconstructionist,” it's a pretty empty designation that won’t help you understand her any more than it will Jacques Derrida or Gayatri Spivak, especially since in reality what Kristeva really is is a critical theorist with a psychoanalytic bent, it’s just that she’s better at it than everybody else and more fundamentally innovative. At the heart of her work has always been a core interest in jouissance and in a basic, fundamental way she is like Hannah Arendt a woman who believes as though, perplexingly, among the first Western philosophers to have ever done so, that nothing in philosophy should be more important than finding a way to hack that thinking and living person—the biocomputer—such that their thinking and living make them happy. Arendt insists that life in the lifeworld should be liveable and lived, and not a matter of shadows and appearances. Before becoming a kind of all time de facto commentator on twentieth century totalitarianism, Arendt was a woman who came to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, her professor, by way of Karl Jaspers and St. Augustine. The female genius part begins with a preoccupation with natality that supersedes Heidegger's preoccupation with death. There is an interest in individual lives as indelible, singular narratives. Of all the core principles and exegetic loopholes that define and encapsulate Arendt’s genius, the maneuverable piece that is most feminine and most philosophically important is the way she replaces the primacy of death and considerations of the impenetrable mystery of death in Heidegger with a rejuvenating reorientation toward natality and childrearing. Ardent respects more than most major thinkers, perhaps more than any since Leibniz, the basic intelligence of any creature. Arendt, in the end, is interested in lives lived by thinking and acting beings in the company of one another and in a politics that might supplant general monoform estrangement and our much faster and louder version of 19th century alienation. In wanting to interrogate and challenge her own presuppositions as part of a daily list of basic duties, Kristeva takes the baton from Arendt and heads off running at light good enough to see right by, such that everything and everybody will look their best…and to their own advantage. “Can the beautiful be sad?” asks Kristeva rhetorically in Black Sun, her 1987 study on melancholy, before continuing: “Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?”
