Text: English, French (translation)

The Childhood of Art

Kofman, Sarah

Arts & Photography

Columbia University Press

Camera Obscura: Of Ideology

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Athlone Press

Nietzsche and Metaphor

This book addresses the question of metaphor in Nietzsche. It provides an unusual reading of Nietzsche's ideas (particularly of the central concept of "will to power") and an incisive method for investigating his style. Developing work on Nietzsche undertaken by Derrida and the post-structuralists, Kofman shows how Nietzsche's style influences his ideas and how these ideas are to be understood. Since its first publication in France in 1972, this work has been a major influence on readings of Nietzsche and this English-language translation should be widely welcomed.

The Athlone Press

The first complete translation into English of Sarah Kofman's only book-length study of her former teacher demonstrates the essentially affirmative and open-ended nature of Derridean deconstruction. It also shows the ways in which Kofman's thinking shaped Derrida's work, especially around the topic of sexual difference. This volume will help English readers to reconsider the relation of deconstruction to current political theory as well as to research into the post-human, biopolitics, globalised political theory, and the on-going transformation and displacement of philosophy by the methods of cultural studies. Readings of Derrida will help redress a gap in Derrida scholarship, as well as highlight Kofman's contribution to 20th-century French feminism.

Readings of Derrida (The Frontiers of Theory EUP)

Literature & Fiction

Moll, Patience

History & Criticism

Edinburgh University Press

Socrates is an elusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. "With Socrates," she writes in her introduction, "we will never leave fiction behind." Kofman suggests that Socrates's avowal of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later philosophers who interpreted his text invariably resisted the profoundly ironic character of his way of life and diverged widely in their interpretations of him. Kofman focuses especially on the views of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. 
The information that is available about Socrates's life is paradoxical. He was famously ugly, but he was also a notorious seducer of youth. His sexuality is ambiguous, according to Kofman, for his allure is stereotypically feminine. His death is also subject to varied interpretation. Some commentators regard him as a redemptive, proto-Christ figure, more Jewish than Greek, and others see him as an archetypal Stoic hero. 
Despite radically different interpretations, Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all found Socrates to be a dominant figure of immense importance in the history of philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche try to retain the idea of irony as essential to the Socratic way of life. Hegel, in contrast, insists that Socrates be assigned one particular place in the historical development of Absolute Spirit. While Kierkegaard considered Socratic irony as an intellectual position, Nietzsche recognized and resisted Socrates's irony as a predisposition. In examining each philospher's response to Socratic irony, Kofman draws specifically on the history of philosophy and psychoanalytic theory.

Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Cornell University Press

Marx, Freud, Nietzsche―in vastly different ways all three employed the metaphor of the camera obscura in their work. In this classic book―at last available in an English translation―the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman offers an extended reflection on this metaphor. She contrasts the mechanical function of the camera obscura as a kind of copy machine, rendering a mirror-image of the work, with its use in the writings of master thinkers. 
In her opening chapter on Marx, Kofman provides a reading of inversion as necessary to the ideological process. She then explores the metaphor of the camera obscura in Freud's description of the unconscious. For Nietzsche the camera obscura is a "metaphor for forgetting." Kofman asks here whether the "magical apparatus" of the camera obscura, rather than bringing about clarity, serves some thinkers as fetish. Camera Obscura is a powerful discussion of a metaphor that dominates contemporary theory from philosophy to film.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Analyzes Sigmund Freud's view of the psychology of women and argues that Freud developed a belief in women's inferiority

The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings (Cornell Paperbacks) (English and French Edition)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Stages)

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a moving memoir by the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman. It opens with the horrifying moment in July 1942 when the author’s father, the rabbi of a small synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue Ordener in Paris, then transported to Auschwitz—“the place,” writes Kofman, “where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted.” It ends in the mid-1950s, when Kofman enrolled at the Sorbonne. The book is as eloquent as it is forthright. Kofman recalls her father and family in the years before the war, then turns to the terrors and confusions of her own childhood in Paris during the German occupation. Not long after her father’s disappearance, Kofman and her mother took refuge in the apartment of a Christian woman on Rue Labat, where they remained until the Liberation. This bold woman, whom Kofman called Mémé, undoubtedly saved the young girl and her mother from the death camps. But Kofman’s close attachment to Mémé also resulted in a rupture between mother and child that was never to be fully healed.This slender volume is distinguished by the author’s clear prose, the carefully recounted horrors of her childhood, and the uncommon poise that came to her only with the passage of many years.

University Of Nebraska Press

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a moving memoir by the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman. It opens with the horrifying moment in July 1942 when the author’s father, the rabbi of a small synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue Ordener in Paris, then transported to Auschwitz—“the place,” writes Kofman, “where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted.” It ends in the mid-1950s, when Kofman enrolled at the Sorbonne.The book is as eloquent as it is forthright. Kofman recalls her father and family in the years before the war, then turns to the terrors and confusions of her own childhood in Paris during the German occupation. Not long after her father’s disappearance, Kofman and her mother took refuge in the apartment of a Christian woman on Rue Labat, where they remained until the Liberation. This bold woman, whom Kofman called Mémé, undoubtedly saved the young girl and her mother from the death camps. But Kofman’s close attachment to Mémé also resulted in a rupture between mother and child that was never to be fully healed.This slender volume is distinguished by the author’s clear prose, the carefully recounted horrors of her childhood, and the uncommon poise that came to her only with the passage of many years.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kofman, Sarah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kofman, Sarah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kofman, Sarah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Childhood of Art

Camera Obscura: Of Ideology

Nietzsche and Metaphor

Readings of Derrida (The Frontiers of Theory EUP)

Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher

Camera Obscura: Of Ideology

Camera Obscura: Of Ideology

The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings (Cornell Paperbacks) (English and French Edition)

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Stages)

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Stages)