Sarah Kofman. A Biography

This publication project represents the first biography of the French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman (1934-1994). Further, it also deals with the French postmodernist critique and deconstruction of the metaphysical subject what leads to question the presuppositions of biography itself. By means of an interdisciplinary methodological approach this thesis combines philosophy, history, Holocaust studies and gender studies with archival material and Oral History. As one of the most important representatives of French Deconstruction, Sarah Kofman sought to challenge the conventional concepts of biography, autobiography, subject, and identity. To this end, she developed, drawing on Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, her own method of close reading, which she called symptomatic reading. In this thesis, Kofmans own method is applied to her own texts as well as to texts that have been explicitly or implicitly important to her work. In contrast to previous and mostly Anglo- American interpretations of Kofmans texts, I draw connections between Kofmans concepts of the uncanny, the double, and her concept of auto/biography as parody of the bourgeois subject and selected texts by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka, and Hannah Arendt. The integration of interviews with former students and with friends of the philosopher Sarah Kofman is constitutive for this biography. Furthermore, the interview sequences serve to establish a critical distance towards Kofmans texts as well as towards my own readings. In a broader sense, this project attempts to confront certain mystifying interpretations of French Deconstruction with a prosaic inventory of concepts such as anti-semitism, assimilation, and discrimination. This does not only involve the recognition of the human being and of philosophy itself as socio-historically situated but also the politicization of purely esthetic concepts. Finally, I propose the concept of a polyphonic authorship in order to get beyond the postmodernist deconstruction of the subject.