Norma Claire Moruzzi's recent book contributes significantly to the emergent and increasingly sophisticated literature on Hannah Arendt. Entitled Speaking Through the Mask Moruzzi's text filters a careful reading of Arendt through an innovative lens that combines Kristevan psychoanalysis and Joan Rivière's concept of social identity as masquerade. This filter, clearly hospitable to the language of performativity, works to read Arendt against herself, and to query the sharp Arendtian distinction between the categories of the social and the political—that is, between an embodied, immanent social identity and the freedom of a political life that can reach beyond such immanence. Embodied reality need not be deprived of political engagement, the author argues, but can serve as the vehicle through which private individuals enter meaningfully into the public sphere.