January 05, 2005

Sarah Kofman, Klossowski, and Nietzsche

KOFMAN.jpg Hi Gary. Lee Bul's work looks interesting, and it touches upon Sarah Kofman's writings on Nietzsche, which I'm working on at the moment. Like Klossowksi, Kofman emphasises the movement of disintegration in Nietzsche's writings. Klossowski argued that Nietzsche had constructed himself by fashioning 'masks' of the great figures of history, philosophy, and mythology (Napoleon, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Dionysus, Christ... ), and that his breakdown involved his literally breaking down into these constitutive parts (when he signs his letters off under these names, for instance). Kofman treads a similar path in her 700 page (2 volume) study of Ecce Homo, Explosions, where she argues that Nietzsche constructs his own "fantastic genealogy" from these great figures, also replacing what he sees as his base German origins with Polish nobility. In the works that precede Ecce Homo, according to Kofman, Nietzsche confuses himself with these figures, but only so that, in Ecce Homo, he can then birth himself through them: he appropriates his mother's fertility, and fantasises a noble Polish genealogy on his father's side; his father "gets him pregnant," but it is Nietzsche who impregnates the philosophers whom he reads (investing himself within them), so that he can then reappropriate a better, stronger self (as the Uber-philosopher). Referring to the passage from the preface of Ecce Homo, "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else," Kofman writes:

now if he is so afraid of being taken for someone else, it is because he "himself" took himself for "others" at first, went via many "others." Before reaching his height, he had to take numerous byroads and make many aberrant deviations, conceal himself in multiple hiding places and under multiple masks: for example, that of a philologist.

What is interesting about Kofman's work is that she also confuses herself with the figures she reads, taking on their mode of writing--their metaphors, turns of phrase, argumental structure--to the extent that it is difficult to find "Sarah" within the text. Reading other of her texts, such as her autobiography, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, one finds that she had endured terrible hardship during WWII, having lost her father to Auschwitz at seven, and then having to hide out in a house in Paris with her mother and a gentile woman, with whom she effectively replaced her mother (there was a very accrimonious custody battle after the war--the gentile woman won her, but then her mother sent some men to kidnap her).

She had a very confused upbringing, with respect to those parental relations that help us form that thing called 'identity,' and there are so many similarities between Kofman's autobiographical narrative and the narrative she gives to Nietzsche's identifications, that you start to wonder 'who' it is that she is writing about.

To return to the connection to Lee Bul, I also wonder if perhaps it is not easier for Klossowski and Bataille to talk about identity confusion than it is for Kofman, a Jewish woman, already at a disadvantage when it comes to doing philosophy (which admittedly is a very masculine discipline). Perhaps... so as not to leave all the provoking to Gary.

Posted by Jo Faulkner at January 5, 2005 07:50 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Jo,
I haven't read any texts by Kofman, worse luck. But she looks to be a lot more interesting than some of the stuff coming out of the American academy.

I do agree that the issue of style, of why Nietzsche wrote as he did, is fundamental, on any level, to reading his texts. It is right there in your face.

I have basically interpreted it as a different way of writing philosophy to the systematic one written as a scientific paper or treatise in an impersonal academic style. My guide here has been Adorno's 'Essay as Form.'

It certainly ruptures the classical (Platonic?)distinction in philosophical discourse between a univocal truth and metaphor as ornament that was reaffirmed by Habermas in his Philosophical Discourses of Modernity.

Shift away from that and interpretations and metaphor comes to the fore.

I recoil from the literary institutions take on this- that all there is metaphor (eg., an economy of forces) and so our understanding of ideas or categories like the Will to Power and the Eternal Return must be reinterpreted as metaphoric, by which is meant fictions.

That metaphoric reading of Nietzsche?s texts turns philosophy into literature and then dumps metaphysics. It represents literature's revenge on (Platonic) philosophy.

Nietzsche fashioned and wore many masks in his texts, including that of metaphysician (the process metaphysics of becoming and the fluctuation of forces), as well as ethicist(modes of valuation), philosopher and prophet. So I see no need to follow the litterati and dump the philosophical & metaphysical mask in favour of Nietzsche's literary mask.

So I will keep an eye out for Koman's texts.

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on January 14, 2005 01:26 PM
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