Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman (review)

Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman. Edited by Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

What does it mean to be a philosopher? What does it mean to be a woman philosopher? What does it mean to be a post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher? These questions of particular and personal situatedness strike me as being at the heart of Sarah Kofman's work, and are displayed throughout this collection of essays that serves as a critical tribute to her work. The editors of this volume remain faithful to Kofman's own insistence on the relationship between life and text, between living and writing. Since her death by suicide in 1994, Kofman's work has slowly been gaining its deserved recognition on the global scene, and this vitally interesting and diverse volume will certainly help that end.

For anglophone readers of French feminism, Kofman has so far been a figure overshadowed by such thinkers as Luce Irigary and Julia Kristeva. The reason for this is that she is not clearly a feminist thinker by her own admission. Deutscher and Oliver claim that "Kofman suggested that her feminism was evident in her interest in demonstrating how the great masculine masters were governed by the irrational domain of their sexual economy" (4). For good reasons, Kofman has been primarily remembered as a scholar of Freud and Nietzsche. Yet, her persistent themes of the hidden maternal and the repression of woman throughout the history of philosophy have remained at the margins. It is clear that Kofman sees her role as a subversive woman philosopher, particularly in her reading of Freud. She writes, taunting Freud: "[f]or 'truth,' that metaphysical lure of depth, of a phallus concealed behind the veils, that lure is a fetishist illusion of man: a woman who gets involved with truth, with solving riddles, is a 'degenerate' woman, reactive and hysterical" (1985, 105). Deutscher and Oliver's collection aims to delve into Kofman's complete corpus as well as to show her important contributions to feminist theory. For those of us newer to Kofman's work, the editors have included both a complete bibliography and a useful index to help us identify the various themes and figures included in Kofman's considerable body of work.

Enigmas begins with a personal and reflective forward written by Jean-Luc Nancy, a close friend and colleague of Kofman's (along with Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe). Nancy emphasizes that just as Kofman insisted that a philosopher's work cannot be read outside his or her lived context, we cannot read her work outside of Sarah Kofman's lived context. He writes, "Sarah wrote for her living, as we say of those who make it their profession, but in her case, over and above the profession, it was not just a question of ensuring a subsistence but of attesting to an existence" (viii). Nancy describes Kofman's Nietzschean fashion of laying claim to life as truth, but truth in the sense of fidelity to the lifeworld, not a truth that is fixed or final.

This forward is followed by the comprehensive and well-written introduction provided by the editors, Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, "Sarah Kofman's Skirts." Here, they briefly reflect on Kofman's life, her works on Freud, her relationship to feminist philosophy, her psychoanalytic analyses of various philosophers, and her methodology, as well as informing the reader about the thirteen essays that appear in the four sections of the compilation. This not only serves as a handy introduction to this volume, but also to Kofman's work more generally.

Part I, "Literature and Aesthetics," contains three essays, the first of which is a new translation of a posthumously published essay by Kofman herself, "The Imposture of Beauty: The Uncanniness of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray," translated by Duncan Large. Both a psychoanalytic and a Nietzschean reading of this novel, Kofman's interpretation reveals an alternate moral learned from Dorian's quest for youth. She writes, "[t]he...