Hannah Arendt

The author of Desire in Language and Powers of Horror takes on the author of The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in a new intellectual biography. Theorist, critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who for many years has been professor of linguistics at the University of Paris, finds Hannah Arendt ""gripped from the start by that unique passion in which life and thought are one,"" and traces both threads rigorously and with strong interpretive opinions. The book is the first of three in Kristeva's series on the Female Genius in the 20th century books on Melanie Klein and Colette are to follow. ( Aug.)