Sarah Kofman at her home in Paris in November 1985.Bruno de Monès (Roger-Viollet/CORDON PRESS)
The work of Sarah Kofman, a contemporary of Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who was a daughter of the Holocaust, whose father was murdered in Auschwitz, has aroused the interest of researchers and thinkers in recent years.
In 2019, an international conference took place in Paris under the title
Sarah Kofman: philosophizing differently,
the proceedings of which were published in 2021 in French (Hermann publishing house).
This meeting led to a fertile exchange between academics and people from Kofman's closest circle, such as Avital Ronell or Jean-Luc Nancy.
“In the field of philosophical research, the magazine
Pensamiento
of the University of Comillas is preparing a monograph on this author under the direction of the philosopher Ricardo Espinoza Lolas.
To understand Sarah Kofman you have to know her biography.
Kofman read a lot and in depth, getting lost in the texts of her favorite authors, basically Nietzsche and Freud.
Her task is concentric and complex, in circles or a whirlwind of words.
Why does this author philosophize like this?
And, above all, how does she begin to philosophize, almost dismantling a text, delving into the materiality that organizes it, in short, taking a bite out of the page?
We would have to ask, in the case of Sarah Kofman, what was her initial impulse that moved her to read in such a unique way.
Surely maternal figures have a relevant role in this matter.
Kofman published his autobiography in 1994, titled
Calle Ordener, Calle Labat
.
Shortly afterward he committed suicide.
The book is the story of the father's deportation and the consequences of it.
After the gendarmes detained Berek Kofman, little Sarah suffered deep separation anxiety.
She would vomit if she was separated from her mother, to the point that he couldn't hide her with other people and had to stay with her.
Both moved from Ordener Street, where the family lived until the father's arrest, to Labat Street, to the home where a French lady
(mémé,
as Sarah Kofman would later call her) took them in, putting her own life at risk. life.
Over the course of the days in hiding at the Labat Street home, Sarah found herself between two mothers.
The
Yiddish
mother cooked
kosher
food for Sarah, while the French mother said that such a diet was not suitable for the girl and she bought her saignant steak
.
The late Belgian feminist Françoise Collin says that food constitutes the core of her autobiographical story: “Everything is woven in terms of eating, from eating too much to eating too little, between hunger and vomiting, in what is difficult to digest.
Everything is woven between two dietary regimes in which one searches without finding the saving diet, that of eating well.”
Little by little, the girl began to gravitate toward
mémé,
who took her out for walks, boasting about how pretty and blonde the girl was, and taking her to concerts and museums.
The world of culture opened before her like a chocolate that melted in her mouth.
Abandoning the dietary restrictions of maternal tradition, Sarah Kofman entered the symbolic dimension of the French mother.
The girl's survival was at stake between two mothers.
The traumatic loss of the father constitutes the beginning of the story.
His absence, the difficulty that surrounds the little girl.
As Sarah studies, and later when she begins to write philosophy, she looks for a way out.
The shortcut serves to understand how this author philosophises and what her relationship is with Nietzsche's work.
Nietzsche also loses his father very young, like Kofman.
In his wonderful biography of the philosopher, Daniel Halévy describes the boy's helplessness in the face of this early disappearance of his father, of whom he would later say, in
Ecce homo
(1889): “I am my dead father.”
“Federico was four years old then.
The tragic days moved his spirit: the awakening, the cries in the house, the horror of the closed room, the silence and the abandonment;
the bells, the songs, the funeral speeches;
the coffin buried under the flagstones of the church... For a long time he remained moved by having understood too soon.
Understanding too soon is also a way of crossing the threshold of philosophical activity.
The death of his father meant that Nietzsche was at the mercy of his mother and sister, of whom he would later say, in a letter to Franz Overbeck in 1883: “The treatment that my mother and sister give me, up to this moment, It inspires me with unspeakable horror: a perfect infernal machine works here, which knows with infallible certainty the moment in which I can be bloodily wounded in my supreme moments... because then all strength is lacking to defend itself against poisonous worms... (...) I confess that the objection deeper against the 'eternal return' that is my truly abysmal thought, they are always my mother and my sister."
In the same way that, in the case of Nietzsche,
Ecce homo
is a recapitulation of his work,
Calle Ordener, Calle Labat
represents for Sarah Kofman the moment of saying what twenty books of philosophy previously failed to express.
Both texts constitute the moment of the end for the two philosophers, whose
biographemes
(in the terms of the French philosopher Danielle Cohen-Levinas) allow us to understand what the traumatic impulse of philosophy can sometimes be.
These two stories illustrate a way of reaching philosophy from the question, what am I to my mother?
So you look for a shortcut to get out of the quagmire.
This is how Sarah Kofman expressed it in the first sentences of
Calle Ordener, Calle Labat:
“My numerous books have perhaps been a series of obligatory shortcuts to write
this.”
Sometimes philosophy is a real rarity.
Even if we try to philosophize with the cognitive self, the compass of the unconscious points north, until a possible way out is found.
It doesn't always work well: Sarah Kofman committed suicide on October 15, Nietzsche's birthday.
Aristotle stated that the capacity for wonder motivates people to philosophize.
Perhaps Kofman's case, echoing in Nietzsche's texts, points to other possibilities.
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