Sarah Kofman I

Abstract

This chapter explores Kofman’s biography, both setting out its main events and looking at the way she recounted them both in the memoir Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994), and in other settings. We examine how the names ‘Sarah’ and ‘Kofman’ were both subject to pressure and distortion as her family of poor immigrant Jews negotiated first a hostile environment, then outright State persecution, resulting in the deportation and death at Auschwitz of her rabbi father. This leads to discussion of the difficult and traumatizing conditions experienced by Kofman both during and after WWII, of Kofman’s Jewish identity, as well as of her relationship to education, including ancient languages. Along the way, there is treatment of the role played by psychoanalysis, of questions of narrative framing, of Kofman’s incipient collaborations with like-minded thinkers, and of her concept of ‘the intolerable’.