Sarah Kofman

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Sarah Kofman

Sarah Kofman (born September 14, 1934 in Paris ; died October 15, 1994 there ) was a French philosopher and essayist . Alongside Jacques Derrida, she is considered the most important representative of the philosophy of deconstruction .

Life

Sarah Kofman is the third of six children of Polish-Jewish parents, Fineza (née Koenig) and Rabbi Berek Kofman, who emigrated to France in 1929. Yiddish and Polish were spoken in the family . In January 1942, Berek Kofman, who was listed as a stateless person in the police register of the Vichy regime , applied for French citizenship for his daughter Sarah. In July he was deported to the Drancy assembly camp, with the 12th deportation train on July 29 to Auschwitz concentration camp , where he was murdered. In her 1994 autobiography, Sarah Kofman wrote: “ On July 16, 1942, my father knew that he would be 'picked up'. There had been rumors that a major mass arrest was being prepared for that day. As the rabbi of a small synagogue in the 18th arrondissement on Rue Duc, he left home very early to alert as many Jews as possible and get them to go into hiding as quickly as possible. Then he came back and waited: he feared that if he went into hiding himself, his wife and six small children (three girls and three boys between the ages of two and twelve) would be taken in his place. He waited and prayed that if only his wife and children would be saved, he would be arrested. "

The mother hid Sarah and her siblings between July 1942 and February 1943 in the countryside near Paris. Since Sarah refused to eat un- kosher meals from French farmers, her mother brought her back to the family's Parisian apartment on Rue Ordener. After a raid by the Gestapo, Fineza fled with the seven-year-old and was hidden with her by a young widow from the neighborhood, a Christian French woman, in her apartment on Rue Labat in the 18th arrondissement (Paris) until the liberation of Paris in August 1944 . The “lady from Rue Labat” or “Mémé” (English: Omi), as Sarah called her, soon treated the Jewish girl like a daughter, named her Suzanne and introduced her to the secular, bourgeois French way of life. During this time Sarah became estranged from the Jewish Orthodox culture and the Yiddish language, forgot her father and fell out with her mother.

Her siblings survived outside of Paris. Most of the father's family members in Poland died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising .

Traumatized by the experience of the escape, Sarah and her sister Annette spent nine months in a sanatorium for children and then lived in a home for children of deportees. In 1953 she graduated from high school. From 1955 to 1960 she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. After graduating, she taught at the Lycée Saint Sernin in Toulouse and from 1963 to 1970 at the Lycée Claude Monet in Paris.

plant

From 1970 to 1988 Sarah Kofman was Jacques Derrida's assistant at the Sorbonne in Paris . She had started her dissertation on the cultural concept of Nietzsche and Freud in 1966 with Jean Hyppolite at the Collège de France , which was taken over by Gilles Deleuze in 1971 after his death in 1968 . In 1976 she completed her doctorate with a collection of previously published works under the title Travaux sur Nietzsche et sur Freud . From 1991 until her death she taught philosophy at the Sorbonne as a professor ( maître de conférences ) . Her work includes nearly 30 books and numerous articles on philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic work, including from Empedocles , Rousseau and Shakespeare to Nietzsche , Freud and Jacques Derrida. In several of her writings she dealt with theories of the feminine; her best known is L'Énigme de la femme. La femme dans les textes de Freud (1980).

It was only in her last books that she turned to the Holocaust . In 1987 she published her essay Paroles suffoquées , which she dedicated to Robert Antelme , Maurice Blanchot and their father. A few days after the publication of her autobiographical sketches with the title Rue Ordener, Rue Labat about her childhood in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, when she learned to forget her Jewish identity, Sarah Kofman - as Brault and Naas wrote, wrote on 150. Nietzsche's birthday - life in October 1994.

Fonts (selection)

  • Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Autobiographical fragment (“Rue Ordener, Rue Labat”). Edition Diskord, Tübingen 1995, ISBN 3-89295-589-1 (translated by Ursula Beitz).
    • New edition: Diaphanes Verlag, Zurich / Berlin 2014.
  • Rousseau and the women . Konkursbuch Verlag, Tübingen 1986, ISBN 3-88769-303-5 (translated by Ruthard Stäblein).
  • Conversions. "The Merchant of Venice" under the sign of Saturn ("Conversions"). 2nd Edition. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7092-0052-0 (translated by Monika Buchgeister).
  • The laughing third. Freud and the joke ("Pourquoi rit-on?"). Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-621-26519-8 (translated by Monika Buchgeister-Niehaus and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa).
  • The childhood of art. An interpretation of the Freudian aesthetic ("L'enfance de l'art"). Fink Verlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-7705-2860-3 (translated by Heinz Jatho).
  • Read Derrida. ("Lectures de Derrida"). 3. Edition. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7092-0051-3 (translated by Monika Buchgeister-Niehaus and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa).
  • The contempt of the Jews. Nietzsche, the Jews, anti-Semitism (“Le mépris des Juifs”). diaphanes , Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-935300-11-5 (translated by Bernhard Nessler).
  • Choked words. ("Paroles suffoquées"). 2nd Edition. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-85165-720-9 (translated by Birgit Wagner).
  • Melancholy of art. ("Mélancolie de l'art"). 3. Edition. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-85165-816-3 (translated by Birgit Wagner).
  • Write like a cat… On ETA Hoffmann's ›Life Views of the Katers Murr‹ (“Autobiogriffure. You chat Murr d'Hoffmann”). 3. Edition. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-7092-0093-3 (translated by Monika Buchgeister-Niehaus and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa).
  • Camera obscura. From ideology ("Camera obscura. De l'idéologie"). Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-85132-744-1 (edited and translated by Marco Gutjahr).
  • Nerval. Le charme de la beauté; Lecture de "Sylvie". Édition L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne 1979 (Cistre; 6).
  • Nietzsche et la métaphore. 2nd Edition. Galilée, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-7186-0249-X (Débats).
    • English translation by Duncan Large: Nietzsche and Metaphor. Athlone Press, London / Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1993.
    • German translation by Florian Scherübl: Nietzsche and the metaphor. Wolff Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-941461-14-7 .
  • L'énigme de la femme. La femme dans les textes de Freud. 2nd Edition. Galilée, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-7186-0192-2 .
    • English translation by Catherine Porter: The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings. Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1985.
  • Nietzsche et la scene philosophique. 2nd Edition. Galilée, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-7186-0304-6 .
  • Explosion. Galilée, Paris 1992/93 (La philosophie en effet).
  • De l'Ecce homo de Nietzsche. 1992, ISBN 2-7186-0397-6 .
  • Les enfants de Nietzsche. 2nd Edition. 1993, ISBN 2-7186-0418-2 .
  • Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher. , engl. Translated by Catherine Porter, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1998.
  • The Economy of Respect: Kant and Respect for Women. In: Robin May Schott (Ed.): Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 1997.
  • Socrates and his Twins (The Socrates (es) of Plato's Symposium). In: Genevieve Lloyd (Ed.): Feminism and History of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, New York 2002, pp. 41-67.
  • Rousseau's Phallocentric Ends. In: Lynda Lange (Ed.): Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 2002, pp. 229-244.
  • Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism. In: Kelly Oliver, Marilyn Pearsall (eds.): Feminist Interpretations of Nietzsche. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 1998, pp. 21-49.

literature

  • Thomas Albrecht, Georgio Albert (Ed.): The Sarah Kofman Reader. Stanford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8047-3297-0 .
  • Tina Chanter, Pleshette DeArmitt (eds.): Sarah Kofman's corpus (= SUNY series in gender theory ). University Press, Albany, NY 2007, ISBN 978-0-7914-7268-2 .
  • Jacques Derrida: Les Cahiers du GRIF . tape 3 , 1997, p. 131-166 ( persee.fr ).
    • In English translation by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas: In: A Sarah Kofman Reader
    • In excerpts with an introduction edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in: The Work of Mourning. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 2001, ISBN 0-226-14316-3 , pp. 165-188.
  • Penelope Deutscher (Ed.): Enigmas. Essays by Sarah Kofman. University Press, Ithaca, NY 1999, ISBN 0-8014-2912-9 .
  • Karoline Feyertag: Sarah Kofman. A biography . Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-85132-727-4 ( FWF-E-Book Library ).
  • Duncan Large: Double Whaam! Sarah Kofman on "Ecce homo". In: German life and letters / NF Volume 48 (1995), Heft 4, pp. 441-462, ISSN  0016-8777 .
  • François Laruelle: Suivi d'entretiens avec Jean-Luc Nancy, Sarah Kofman, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. In: Ders .: Le déclin de l'écriture Abier-Flammarion, Paris 1977.
  • Alan D. Font: Twentieth Century French Philosophy . Key Themes and Thinkers. Blackwell, 2006, ISBN 1-4051-3218-3 , Sarah Kofman ( books.google.de ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning. University Of Chicago Press, 2003, ISBN 0-226-14281-7 , p. 165.
  2. ↑ a b Pleshette DeArmitt: Sarah Kofman. In: Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. March 1, 2009. Jewish Women's Archive . (Accessed September 12, 2014).
  3. ↑ Quoted by Karoline Feyertag. (PDF) In: Transcriptions of the Self. A polyphonic biography of Sarah Kofman. Vienna 2011, p. 67.
  4. ^ Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning. P. 166.
  5. ^ Scripture 2006, books.google.de , p. 144.
  6. ↑ Iris Radisch: Death is worse than death. In: The time. 08/1995. zeit.de (review).
  7. ↑ Jonas Engelmann: Writing about the void . How the descendants of the Holocaust victims try to break the silence. In: concrete . June 2014.
  8. ^ The Work of Mourning. P. 167.
personal data
SURNAME Kofman, Sarah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1994
Place of death Paris