Sarah Kofman

Analyzes Sigmund Freud's view of the psychology of women and argues that Freud developed a belief in women's inferiority

Woman in Freud's Writings

The Enigma of Woman

Socrates is an flusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. Kofman suggests that Socrates' avowal of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later philosophers who interpreted his text invariably resisted the profoundly ironic character of his way of life and diverged widely in their interpretations of him. Kofman focuses especially on the views of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

Fictions of a Philosopher

Socrates

Georgia Albert

Elizabeth Rottenberg

The Sarah Kofman Reader is a comprehensive anthology of significant essays and book excerpts by the postwar French philosopher and theorist Sarah Kofman (1934-1994).

Selected Writings

Kofman contrasts the mechanical function of the camera obscura as a kind of copy-machine, rendering a mirror-image of the work, with its metaphorical use in the work of Marx, Nietzche and Freud.

Of Ideology

Camera Obscura

The internationally recognized philosopher, who committed suicide in 1995, presents a profound, deeply personal meditation on the thought of Maurice Blanchot, her father's death in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the ethics of writing about the Holocaust. UP.

Smothered Words

In her opening chapter on Marx, Kofman provides a reading of inversion as necessary to the ideological process. She then explores the metaphor of the camera obscura in Freud's description of the unconscious. For Nietzsche the camera obscura in a "metaphor for forgetting," and it is neither the photographic nor the eye but the mind that constructs a preeminence of the perspectival. Kofman asks here whether the "magical apparatus" of the camera obscura, rather than bringing about clarity, serves some thinkers as fetish. She turns to Descartes for a final counter-example, that of the Cartesian camera obscura as a model of vision which neither disqualifies the eye as a model of knowledge nor sets up a perspectivist notion of perception.

This long-overdue translation brings to the English-speaking world the work that set the tone for the Post-structuralist reading of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche and Metaphor

De lui, il me reste seulement le stylo. Je l'ai pris un jour dans le sac de ma mère où elle le gardait avec d'autres souvenirs de mon père. Un stylo comme l'on n'en fait plus, et qu'il fallait remplir avec de l'encre. Je m'en suis servie pendant toute ma scolarité. Il m'a " lâchée " avant que je puisse me décider à l'abandonner. Je le possède toujours, rafistolé avec du scotch, il est devant mes yeux sur ma table de travail et il me contraint à écrire, écrire...

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat

Socrates is an elusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. Kofman suggests that Socrates' avowal of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later philosophers who interpreted his text invariably resisted the profoundly ironic character of his way of life and diverged widely in their interpretations of him. Kofman focuses especially on the views of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

The author, a prominent French philosopher, writes of life under the German occupation

Sarah Kofman

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