ABSTRACT
The feminist reception of Hannah Arendt has been on the whole an often polemical and hyperbolic affair that has probably generated more heat than light on her work. Deconstructive feminism aims to restore the Arendtian who-ness of acting over the what-ness of Being. Arendt fulfills the phallocentric desire for release from the realm within which Woman has been traditionally configured: bodily maintenance, necessity, and life. Politics is not only the action context of speaking, which Arendt decisively redeems as freedom. For other feminists, the female body as a locus of freedom is precisely what Arendt's thinking mind embraces, and a gynocentric project is something that The Human Condition supports. In the years immediately following Arendt's death most secondary studies of her work focused primarily, if not exclusively, upon the text that appeared in Europe under the title Vita Activa and in the United States as The Human Condition.
