Selected Writings (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) [Paperback]

Sarah Kofman (Author), Georgia Albert (Author), Elizabeth Rottenberg (Author), Thomas Albrecht (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0804732973 | ISBN-13: 978-0804732970 | Edition: 1

Sarah Kofman (1934-1994), Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and the author of over twenty books, was one of the most significant postwar thinkers in France. Kofman's scholarship was wide-ranging and included work on Freud and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, feminism and the role of women in Western philosophy, visual art, and literature. The child of Polish Jewish immigrants who lost her father in the Holocaust, she also was interested in Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially as reflected in works of literature and philosophy. This book is an anthology of some of Kofman's most significant writings on these and other topics. Its purpose is to provide a general introduction to Kofman's thought, which has been highly influential in both Europe and America. Although some of the selections have been published previously, the majority of the books contents appear in English translation for the first time.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Kofman had something to say, and her writings still command attention for their insight, their adventurousness,and their attentiveness to the philosophical traditions with which she so productively wrestled. She was one of the great readers of Freud in the twentieth century, and she brought the same caring intelligence to her interpretations of Nietzsche."—BookForum

About the Author

Sarah Kofmans philosophical works currently available in English are: The Childhood of Art (1988), The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings (1985), Freud and Fiction (1991), and Nietzsche and Metaphor (Stanford, 1994). Thomas Albrecht is Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (September 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804732973
• ISBN-13: 978-0804732970
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,397,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars good for me in these times, September 5, 2008

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Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Selected Writings (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (Paperback)

I have had this book for a few weeks. I was aware that Sarah Kofman had written about respect for women in Kant, but I did not try to convince myself that I understood that until today. Shock is not something that is easy to comprehend, and I did my best to grip those ideas that I found most shocking. I am used to reading about Nietzsche and Freud, as much of this book offers. Conjuring death is analyzed by Jacques Derrida in the eulogy that is used for an Introduction. He praises her gift and her laughter, even laughing through her tears. Her death came before I knew much about her. She was French, possibly representative of a civilized state of mind that few Americans try to comprehend.

Kant considered the law a holy, solemn majesty. Respect for the law is frightening because men are so unworthy, "from fear of feeling themselves disarmed, confounded, crushed, humiliated." (p. 195). Sublimity is supposed to raise men when they contemplate holy law. Law merely inherits this power and majesty from man's original feelings aroused by the maternal breast. "Freud could no doubt effect such a reading" (p. 196) of the "grandiose sublimation of the figure of the mother." (p. 196). The incest taboo makes of mother "the sublime and eminently respectable figure, raised on a pedestal of holiness, the immaculate and untouchable Virgin." (p. 196).

As if I had never seen any war movies that contain the German army, Sarah Kofman suddenly reveals that the word Achtung is what she is taking from Kant as the word for respect. I would give this far more attention, but it is sprung in the midst of some philosophers having a basic disagreement. Things could be worse, with "the agony of castration, communicated with a gesture of fetishism." (p. 201). I would rather leave you with an attempt to sort things out from a paragraph limited to things that spring from the mother:

Kant himself insists on the fact that the word respect (Achtung) given to the specific sentiment that determines the a priori relation of man to the moral law envisaged as motivator is certainly the word that fits, that it corresponds to the common experience of respect and the usage of language that is criticized by Schopenhauer, according to whom the Kantian conception of respect essentially depends on a "Judaic" relation of submission to the law. The word respect would have as its object the dissimulation of the theological origin of Kantian morality and the "Jewish stench" that issues from it. The common experience of respect, of which the representation of the law as the figure of a "solemn majesty," fascinating and frightening, is the witness. More generally, the personification of the law, or even its aestheticization, sends one back, incontestably, to the common experience of respect, and notably to "preliminary" respect for women, for the mother. (pp. 196-197).