Background

Sarah Kofman was born on September 14, 1934, in Paris on Rosh Hashanah, Paris, France. She was the daughter of Bereck Kofman, a rabbi, and Fineza (Koenig) Kofman.

In 1929, her family had moved to France, where they planned to raise their children. Sarah's father was taken as part of a roundup conducted by the French police and of being forced to go into hiding, and he was often separated from her mother and her five siblings, for the duration of the war.

Education

Sarah had a Ph.D. from La Sorbonne of Paris, France.

Career

The Holocaust, the study of philosophy and the undergoing of analysis - all three profoundly marked the course of Sarah Kofman’s life and are what link the texts that she authored. Thus one cannot adequately summarize Kofman’s texts and intellectual positions without invoking her biography. Yet she repeatedly denied that her autobiography could be found anywhere other than in her most impressive bibliography. Her oeuvre includes nearly thirty books and numerous articles on a wide range of authors of philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic works, ranging from Empedocles and Rousseau to Shakespeare and Diderot. In fact, Kofman, an expert reader of Freud, Nietzsche, and Derrida, created a new form of philosophical analysis and writing, a kind of philosophical (auto)biography which exposes how an author’s desires and ideas are inextricably woven together in the fabric of his or her texts. Kofman even devoted two books to the topic of autobiography: Autobiogriffures (1976) on Cat Murr by Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822) and Explosion I (1992) on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo.

Despite the fact that Kofman maintained that her “identity” was constituted by the authors she read and by the citations she employed in her writings, she began to publish more explicitly autobiographical writings in the last years of her life. The year 1987 saw the publication of Smothered Words, a book that bears three dedications: the first to the memory of her father who died at Auschwitz; the second to Robert Antelme, author and survivor of the camps; and the last in homage to Maurice Blanchot, whose theoretical texts ask how one can write after the Holocaust.

In 1994, at the age of fifty-nine, Kofman published perhaps the most difficult of all her texts, her autobiography entitled Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. On the opening page of this slim volume, Kofman suggests that the many books that she penned may have been the necessary detours to allow her to give voice to “‘that’ [‘ça’].” In an unadorned, almost childlike narrative, Kofman tells the story of her life from the age of eight to eighteen.

As a professor, Kofman took the task of teaching her students to read with the utmost seriousness. By all accounts a skilled and passionate teacher, she dedicated all her professional life to the teaching of philosophy. At the beginning of her career, she taught philosophy at two lycées (secondary schools) - first in Toulouse at Lycée Saint Sernin during the years 1960 - 1963 and then in Paris at the Lycée Claude Monet from 1963–1970. In 1970 Kofman took a position as maître-assistante at the University of Paris I, Sorbonne, where she remained a professor until the end of her life. Despite her many years of teaching and her remarkable body of work, Kofman was repeatedly denied tenure and promotion and hence remained a maître de conférences until 1991. Kofman never attributed her being denied promotion to being female or Jewish. Rather she firmly believed that she was discriminated against because in both her teaching and writing she championed marginal and radical thinkers, especially Nietzsche and Freud (Rodgers). In 1988 a number of well-respected intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Emanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, addressed a formal complaint about this “scandalous injustice” to the then Minister of Education, Lionel Jospin. It was not until three years later that Kofman was finally granted a promotion to the rank of professor at the age of fifty-seven.

After writing Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and her last book, Le mépris des Juifs: Nietzsche, les Juifs, l’antisémitisme (1994), Kofman became unable to do the things she loved most dearly - reading, writing, listening to music, watching films and looking at works of art. Later that year, on October 15, 1994, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth, Sarah Kofman ended her own life at the age of sixty.

Achievements

• Sarah Kofman is known as the author of over twenty books. She was one of the most significant postwar thinkers in France. Kofman's scholarship was wide-ranging and included work on Freud and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, feminism and the role of women in Western philosophy, visual art, and literature.
  
  Despite the importance of Kofman’s work, which she published in some two dozen books, it was not until two decades after their publication in French that they were made available to English-language readers in translation.

Works

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  • Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher

    (Socrates is an elusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and ...)

    1998
  • The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings

    (Analyzes Sigmund Freud's view of the psychology of women ...)

    1985
  • Camera Obscura: Of Ideology

    (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche - in vastly different ways all thr...)

    1999
  • Rue Ordener, Rue Labat

    (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a moving memoir by the distingu...)

    1994
  • L'Enfance de l'art: Une interprétation de l'esthétique freudienne 1970
  • The Childhood of Art 1988
  • Nietzsche and Metaphor 1972
  • Selected Writings 2007
  • Le respect des femmes: Kant et Rousseau 1982
  • Comment s'en sortir? 1983
  • Conversions: Le Marchand de Venise sous le signe de Saturne 1987
  • Nietzsche et la scène philosophique 1979
  • L'imposture de la beauté et autres textes 1995
  • Quatre romans analytiques 1973
  • Freud And Fiction 1991
  • Pourquoi rit-on?: Freud et le mot d'esprit 1986
  • Hito wa naze waraunoka: Furoito to kichi 1998
  • L Enigme de La Femme Dans Textes de Freud 1994
  • Le mépris des juifs: Nietzsche, les juifs, l'antisémitisme 1994
  • Explosion 1993
  • "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte": Freud et la spéculation 1991
  • Don Juan, ou, Le refus de la dette 1991
  • Séductions: De Sartre à Héraclite 1990
  • Paroles suffoquées 1987
  • Autobiogriffures: Du chat Murr d'Hoffmann 1984
  • Lectures de Derrida 1984
  • Un métier impossible: Lecture de "constructions en analyse" 1983
  • Autobiogriffures 1976
  • Aberrations: le devenir-femme d'Auguste Comte 1978
  • Mélancolie de l’art 1985

Views

Sarah was interested in Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially as reflected in works of literature and philosophy.

One of Sarah's most serious philosophical matters, to which Kofman devoted much of her publishing career, is how “woman” or the “feminine” functions as a blind spot, perhaps a privileged blind spot, in the philosophical or speculative systems of many esteemed thinkers in the Western canon (Hermansen). What interested Kofman was not only “the woman at the interior of philosophy” but also “the repression by male philosophers of femininity in themselves” (Guertin).

Even though the question of a woman emerges with great insistence in her work, Kofman never considered herself a feminist activist. She firmly believed that her feminist gesture was to reread the great texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition; because, for Kofman, reading is itself a political act.

Quotations: “Among the many human capacities, the ability to kill and the ability to ‘tenir parole’, that is to say, to speak and to let speak, but also to keep promises, are the two most important. To learn to read well is to teach others to ‘tenir parole.’ In doing so, one impedes killing, that is to say, one postpones the return of Auschwitz.”

Personality

Sarah was interested in feminist theory and contemporary European theories of art and literature.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Nietzsche, Derrida

Connections

There is no exact information about Sarah's personal life. Perhaps, she was never married and had no children.

Father:

Bereck Kofman

Mother:

Fineza (Koenig) Kofman

colleague:

Jean Hyppolite

January 8, 1907 – October 26, 1968

Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers.

colleague:

Gilles Deleuze

18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995

Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.

mentor:

Jacques Derrida

July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004

Jacques Derrida, born Jackie Élie Derrida, was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology.

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series brings researchers the most recent data on the worlds most-popular authors.
  2010