Sarah Kofman and Ancient Thought

Abstract This is four books in one: a monograph on Sarah Kofman; an exploration of the ‘philosophy in-deed’ group she formed with Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; a study of ancient thought’s reception in twentieth-century France; and an exploration of the concept of life. It provides readings ranging across Kofman’s work, including major works Nietzsche and the Philosophical Stage and Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher. Much of this work is little-known in the Anglophone world. The book draws on a wealth of archival resources including correspondence running to hundreds of unpublished pages, as well as on Kofman’s recorded interviews and the author’s interviews with her contemporaries. The picture that emerges is of Kofman as an erudite, provocative thinker. The forcefulness of her work carries us across unhelpful boundaries, starting with that between theory and philosophy. Kofman’s thinking sees her engaging in myriad ways with questions of institutionality, worldhood, middleness, and life. Thus we see her vivid and thought-provoking work returning repeatedly to a learning to live at last, in ways that given her post-Holocaust trauma and death by suicide are unexpected—yet still fully capable of speaking to us today.