11 - Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory

Summary

Sarah Kofman's father was arrested in Paris on 16 July 1942, when she was seven. He had emigrated to France from Poland in 1929, and all his six children were French-born. His family never saw him again. After his arrest, he was deported to Auschwitz where, a year later, a Kapo beat him to death because he refused to work on the Sabbath. Kofman survived the war thanks to the protection of a non-Jewish woman, to whom she refers as mémé, and who became a kind of surrogate parent and a sometimes bitter rival with her real mother. As an adult Kofman became a noted philosopher; her thesis was supervised by Gilles Deleuze and she became a close associate of Jacques Derrida. She published over 20 books covering a vast range of philosophical issues and authors, with a particular interest in the work of Nietzsche and Freud. Derrida said that no one in the century had read all the folds of the work of Nietzsche and Freud with such pitiless, implacable love (Chaque fois unique, p. 214). In 1994, she published Rue Ordener, rue Labat, a short memoir describing the arrest of her father and her subsequent wartime experiences. On 15 October 1994, she took her own life.

Is there a connection between what happened to Kofman and her family during the war, the publication of her memoir and her suicide? Some readers have suspected that there is a direct link between these events. Kofman's biographer, Karoline Feyertag, reports comments by Kofman's colleague Jean-Luc Nancy, who lists the publication of Rue Ordener, rue Labat as one of the factors which led to her death (Sarah Kofman, p. 29). It has been suggested that Kofman's memoir made her traumatic experiences all too present to her again. As Françoise Duroux puts it, ‘The autobiographical plunge, practiced in vivo, undoubtedly induces an earthquake. Philosophy protects. The plunge causes the philosophical position to explode: Sarah Kofman's suicidal plunge into her own melancholy’ (‘How a Woman Philosophizes’, p. 138; quoted in Robson, ‘Bodily Detours’, p. 616).