Moruzzi counters Arendt's hostility toward such social categories as class, race, gender, and sexual preference by developing the thematic of performativity. She does this by relying upon the mask, a creation that “provides the private ego with a stable public representation that is artificial, enabling, and salutary” (p. 36). Specifically, she proposes an analytic lens that welds together Kristevan abjection and Rivière's masquerade, and in so doing is able to address those issues that often nag at Arendt's readers: her elitism, her impatience with the civil rights movement, her unwillingness to politicize the feminine, and her insistence that compassion has no place in political life. Indeed, this innovative approach to Arendt's dislike for social categories goes a long way in introducing cohesion into a body of literature that, at times, seems refractory to systematic analysis.

In fact, Speaking Through the Mask considers such a wide array of topics pertinent to Arendt's œuvre that one wishes more time were spent unpacking the analytic lens, rather than treating her aversion to social categories. Not that the latter does not make for interesting reading: There is much to consider in pondering Arendt's thoughts on her rootlessness and Jewish identity, her strong identification with a salon hostess, her liaison with Martin Heidegger, and the fact that despite her often masculinist views, only her mother “took her for a man” (p. 58). There is much to learn about her writings on such varied topics as the Greek polis, Nazi Germany, Billy Budd Rudyard Kipling, and the South African gold rush. Yet while Moruzzi's ability to synthesize a smorgasbord of seemingly unrelated topics is commendable, perhaps more attention might have been given to the theoretical framework, the mask, through which she reads this assortment.

It is especially the ramifications of Kristevan abjection, employed as a filter for reading Arendt, that I query. For while Moruzzi's use of this filter on the whole is sound, certain aspects of abjection have been underplayed in order to allow it to serve the author's needs. She correctly uses Kristevan abjection—that terrifying foray into the preoedipal, prelinguistic lining of our socially constructed identities—as a foil to the social persona we assume. Indeed, in highlighting how powerfully the human psyche is impacted by its own lack of moorings, Julia Kristeva draws attention to the horrifying underside, the archaic memory of nonbeing, that mars all assumed identities. “Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,” Moruzzi writes, “Kristeva poses the dynamic of abjection as the acknowledgment that there are no pure boundaries” (p. 21). True. Yet if there are no pure boundaries, surely abjection on some level countervails against efforts to have the social inform the political. If abjection recalls all that remains inaccessible to speech surely to some degree it proves refractory to the dynamics of identification necessarily given play in the public sphere. Absent this identification, it remains unclear how social categories might be engaged politically.

Recall that Kristeva posits the abjection of Joycean prose as “sickly” and “unending,” for it “spreads out the abject” by giving voice to that which “eludes speech” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 1982, p. 22). Recall that she characterizes Borges's literary project as “vertiginous,” for it “does not cease wandering” (p. 23). And if abjection invokes that which may not be captured within culture, surely its effectiveness as a political tool must be questioned. In arguing that abjection's asocial lining of our public persona might be read solely as a vehicle for social engagement, rather than as a deterrent to the same, then, Moruzzi perhaps overlooks the more dramatic, terrifying aspects of Kristeva's theory. For the latter has insisted that “[a]bjection preserves what existed in the archaism of the pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (italics mine) (Powers p. 10).

In fairness, however, it must be stated that the horrors of a pre-oedipal, potentially psychotic, existence unaligned with the reality principle do simultaneously encourage our investment in a saving, linguistic order. Abjection's terrors indeed push us toward internalizing paternal prohibition. “I yearn for the Law,” Kristeva writes in “Stabat Mater” (in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader 1986, p. 175). Moruzzi's mask draws solely on this salutary effect: “[T]he abject is that which … must be rejected so that the self can establish the borders of its unified subjectivity” (p. 21). She privileges abjection's tendency to align us with the Other, rather than its pull in the opposite direction.

Despite these considerations surrounding Moruzzi's construction of the mask, her project is successful overall. Rivière's theory of the masquerade works nicely throughout the piece, and the author's beautifully crafted prose and intimate knowledge of Arendt's writings keep the text consistently engaging. Above all, Speaking Through the Mask is to be commended for its originality, for the author's theoretical lens offers a viable counter to Arendt's dismissal of the social realm. Of course, we can never know how Arendt herself would have responded to Moruzzi's argument. But it is certain that the latter's insights will significantly influence the growing body of scholarship on Arendt, given how profoundly the division between social and political categories schematized her thinking.