Fembio Special: European Jewish Women
Sarah Kofman
born on September 14, 1934 in Paris, France
died on October 15, 1994 in Paris, France
French philosopher
90th birthday on September 14, 2024
30th anniversary of her death on October 15, 2024
Biography
The philosopher Sarah Kofman’s first years of childhood were happy ones. She was born in Paris in 1934 into a Jewish family, where the food was kosher and the Jewish holidays were strictly observed. She loved listening to her father, Rabbi Bereck Kofman, blowing the shofar in the synagogue.
Everything suddenly changed when Sarah was eight years old: her father was picked up by Nazi henchmen, taken to Auschwitz and murdered there. To escape this fate, Sarah and her five siblings were taken into hiding on a farm in Normandy. Sarah could not bear to be separated from her mother; she refused to eat, screamed and cried for hours until her mother came for her. Back in Paris, Sarah was taken in by a former neighbor who took care of her and supported her. She gave Sarah the name Suzanne, had her eat pork and treated her with tenderness and love. The girl admired the blonde woman with the soft blue eyes and soon grew to love her. She lost her Jewish identity and became increasingly estranged from her mother, who reacted with intense jealousy and eventually took Sarah back, forbidding any further contact between her daughter and the woman Sarah called Mémé (Granny). Sarah suffered terribly from being torn between the two women; after the war she tried numerous times to contact her Mémé and developed a hatred of her mother.
Sarah was a very talented, inquisitive child. After finishing school, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she became an assistant to the French philosopher Derrida until she was awarded her own chair in philosophy. In over 20 books, she dealt with Freud, Nietzsche, Comte, E.T.A. Hoffman, Nerval, Derrida and Rousseau. In the 1970s, she turned her attention to feminist issues, examining, among other things, the enigma of the woman in Freud's texts (L'énigme de la femme: La femme dans les textes de Freud; trans. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings). She herself explained that these highly theoretical, philosophical works were diversions; her most pressing literary concern remained the autobiography she planned. “I put off the decision (for the autobiography) as if I were postponing the date of my death. ... I have the impression that once it's said, I won't be able to write anything else.”
For years, Kofman had tormented herself with the question of whether it was still possible to write after Auschwitz. Like Adorno, she had actually answered this question in the negative. Yet she found herself unable to break away; her first attempt, Paroles suffoquées (Suffocated Words, published in 1987), was dedicated to her father and dealt with his death. Six years later, she wrote Rue Ordener, Rue Labat - which remained a fragment - in the hope that it would help her to overcome the trauma of her childhood. It didn't; in 1994, shortly after the book was published, Sarah Kofman took her own life.
(Text from 2008; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
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