Selected Writings (review)

The range and variety of Sarah Kofman’s thought are suggested by the five-part division in Thomas Albrecht’s excellent new edition of the Selected Writings: papers on Freud, on Nietzsche, on women in philosophy, on painting, and on Judaism and anti-Semitism. For some time I have been struck by Kofman’s wonderful facility as a critical reader, which she describes—in this case apropos of her reading of Freud—as “a symptomal reading of his text, making it say something more or other than what it says literally, yet basing the reading on the literal sense alone” (Kofman 2007, 37). Although those words aren’t explicitly offered as a universal or philosophical method of reading, they do have a resonance, it seems to me, beyond their immediate context of reading Freud. Making a text say something more or other than what it says literally while at the same time basing that reading on the literal sense alone is what Kofman does repeatedly and brilliantly. Although her principal writing about Socrates isn’t included in the Selected Writings, we can profitably approach her book on Socrates with those words in mind.

Sarah Kofman’s Socrate(s), which is a fascinating but somewhat neglected text, was published in 1989, followed by an English translation by Catherine Porter under the title Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher (Kofman 1998). Following a brief introductory section where Kofman discusses Plato’s Symposium, which already registers some of the themes that appear later in her book, she goes on to explore the fictions of Socrates produced by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. In her final section, which she calls “Three Socratic Novels,” she argues that each of these later philosophers “is trying as best he can to ‘settle’ his own ‘case’, to carry out his reading in such a way that all of his own certitudes will not collapse with Socrates, that his own equilibrium and that of his ‘system’ . . . will not be too seriously threatened” (1998, 248). In other words their Socrates (es) are projections of the novelistic mediators themselves and tell us more about them than about him. Throughout her book, Kofman puts the reader in the position of wanting to ask—needing to ask—“But is there any truth about Socrates that we are able to salvage?” Although this book might at first look as though it is part of her sequence of redemptive readings (of Freud and Nietzsche, for example)— indeed, in some ways it does set out to redeem Kierkegaard on Socratic irony—Kofman leaves us wondering if there is anything of Socrates himself that can be redeemed after a careful critical reading of his novelistic mediators. (Her use of the terms “novel,” “novelistic,” and “fiction” to refer to texts in which Socrates is represented seems to be strategically provocative.)

Two of the critical wedges Kofman uses to open up the texts of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are, first, irony (which extends from Socrates’ practice on his interlocutors in the dialogues, to the methods of his three novelists, to the role of the reader of these texts); and, second, what I’m calling “feminist critique.” By that I mean simply Kofman’s persistent ability to uncover problematic issues concerning the gender of Socrates—and of philosophy—in the texts she is examining. Feminism is, of course, a politics in that its effort is to combat patriarchy in all of its forms. I am ready to admit from the start that there isn’t much in this book that looks like feminism either as an effort to establish equity for women or as a separatist project to promote women’s unique cultural contributions, in this case, to philosophy (except perhaps for Kofman’s comments on Diotima, Socrates’ teacher). Nevertheless, I am encouraged by Julia Kristeva’s famous essay “Women’s Time” and by Toril Moi’s elaboration of it in Sexual/Textual Politics to argue that there is some important work going on in this book that might be called third-phase feminism, which amounts to a continuing effort...