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Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman

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I had been curious about this book for a long time because one of the editors is Kelly Oliver, who wrote the book WOMANIZING NIETZSCHE, which was published in 1995. The Introduction (pp. 1-22) of ENIGMAS is jointly written by Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver, but Chapter 10, Sarah Kofman's Queasy Stomach and the Riddle of the Paternal Law, is attributed solely to Kelly Oliver. Chapter 1 is a translation by Duncan Large of the first chapter of a book (1995) by Sarah Kofman:

The Imposture of Beauty: The Uncanniness of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. (pp. 25-48).

I was tremndously impressed by Chapter 2 by Ann Smock:

Don Giovanni, or the Art of Disappointing One's Admirers. (pp. 49-66).

It is so complicated: Sarah Kofman wrote an essay on Molière's `Dom Juan' in which the protagonist, Frédéric Molieri, singing the title role in Mozart's famous opera, is "breathtakingly irreverent where obligations and accountability are concerned. He won't, as Sarah Kofman emphasizes, consider himself bound by any engagement at all, and this is because he is in permanent rebellion against the derisory conception, constantly pressed upon him, of life as a loan and of God as the supreme banker, who prudently keeps track of everything he gives lest he forget to collect all that's due him in the end. Such a calculating God could only be taken seriously by people who are equally vulgar. Sarah Kofman stresses this with relish." (pp. 49-50).

Chapter 3, by Duncan Large, quotes Sarah Kofman on the intellectual triangulation which her philosophy thrived on:

Freud and Nietzsche, these two rival "geniuses" whom I have always needed to keep together so that neither of them could ultimately win out over the other or over "me": continually playing with the one and the other, and playing the one off against the other, within "myself," I prevent each from gaining mastery (reading Freud, I read him with a third, Nietzschean ear; reading Nietzsche, I understand him ["je l'entends"] with my fourth, Freudian ear). (p. 68).