Nightbirds, Nightmares and the Mothers' Smile: Art and Psychoanalysis in Sarah Kofman's Life-Writing

This article explores Sarah Kofman's last text, her Holocaust memoir Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994). While Kofman's career was famously devoted to deciphering the legacy of the "Great Fathers" of Western culture and to an incessant dialogue with Sigmund Freud, her memoir centers exclusively on the legacy of mothers: it is Kofman's study of herself as a child in the grip of terror, the threat of death, and the s/mothering love of two women—her Jewish mother and the French woman who saved them both. This article examines how the exceptionality of the Holocaust exploded the Familienroman (the psychic family drama) in ways that Freud could have not anticipated. I demonstrate how the same way in which Freud had used Leonardo da Vinci's painting of a double motherhood to prove his point about a son's Oedipal crisis and the origin of his art, Kofman used the same image to interpret her story of double motherhood, victimhood and the origin of her art and creativity.