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Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Pour communiquer avec les responsables d'Érudit : info@erudit.org Article "Sarah Kofman: Effecting Self Translation" Christie McDonald TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 11, n° 2, 1998, p. 185-197. Pour citer cet article, utiliser l'information suivante : URI: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/037340ar DOI: 10.7202/037340ar Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir. Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter à l'URI https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Document téléchargé le 29 July 2016 11:12 Sarah Kofman : Effecting Self Translation Christie McDonald Among her many writings, Sarah Kofinan produced what Virginia Woolf would have called "Life writing." One of the last books published during her lifetime Rue Ordener, rue Labat, in particular, was a searing, magnificent account of her childhood. Yet the slippage within her works from philosophy and psychoanalysis to esthetics and literature, to a writing of the self, emerges throughout her work. She did not set about to write about the truth of her self or her family history. Autobiographies, she announced, were false, written for the purpose of idealization of an illusory past : "Toute autobiographie est mensongère, écrite qu'elle est dans V illusion rétroactive et à des fins d'idéalisation" (Kofman, 1984, p. 99). In so saying, she took her cue, in a note to Autobiogriffures, first from Freud in his letter to Edward L. Bernays, August 10th, 1929 : "What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity." (Freud, 1960, p. 391); and in another letter to Arnold Zweig, May 31th, 1936: "anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had..." (Freud, 1960, p. 430). What tangles biography with autobiography for Freud is that both lie. Yet Sarah Kofman often deconstructed the sense of the strict opposition between truth and lies. In her two volume study of Nietzsche's autobiography, Ecce Homo, Explosion IandII, she analyzes the story of the death of the autos as stable subject. Ecce Homo is no ordinary autobiography : "Ecce Homo est l'autobiographie la plus 'dépersonnalisée ' qui soif (Kofinan, 185 1992, p. 29); it spells the death of the bios as well if the life of the living finds its source in two parents to whom one is attached by blood. At the conclusion of the extensive analysis in Explosion I and II, Sarah Kofman asks two questions : will Nietzsche have been understood? And will she, in writing about Nietzsche and his book-offspring have resisted becoming his "child"? The family metaphorics dominates here. Sarah Kofman goes on to speak about Nietzsche as mother referring to herself in the third person : uUn enfant qui, après tant d'heures passées durant sa 'vie ' auprès de sa ' mère ', se trouve contraint, enfin de compte, à couper le cordon ombilical pour devenir ce qu'il est.//Et à faire peut-être lui aussi son 'autobiographie' " (Kofman, 1993, p. 371; my emphasis). To become what one is in Nietzsche's wake, to write one's own books, for Sarah Kofman, meant granting to Freud and Nietzsche roles analogous to those played by Wagner and Schopenhauer for Nietzsche. These are the two "rival" geniuses whom she held clasped together, reading one against the other, one through the other such that neither could totally take her over, nor become totally other : "[...] lisant Freud, je le lis avec la troisième oreille nietzschéenne, lisant Nietzsche, je Ventends de ma quatrième oreille freudienne" (Kofman, 1993, p. 372). While Sarah Kofman found what it was that separated and linked these thinkers in her work, she did not, perhaps could not have traced theoretically how the subtle shift in emphasis from philosopher/reader/writer to biographer/ "life writer'Vstory teller brings with it a translation that psychoanalysis could not contain. Translation operates at several levels in Sarah Kofman's work, from a questioning of the project of philosophy as the translatability of truth, going back to Plato, to psychoanalytic and linguistic models for meaning1. It is a process through which choices, both conscious and unconscious, constitute a pained relation to any original be it in philosophy, psychoanalysis, or literature. The story of her "maternal tongue," in the broad sense of an identity shaped in language, is forked as 1 For translation, see Christie McDonald, "Lectures," Les fins de l'homme : autour de la pensée de Jacques Derrida, Paris, Galilée, 1981; and for discussions of autobiography and translation, see The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, Lincoln, Nebraska University Press, 1982. 186 she lives out the adage traduttore traditore with respect to her maternal line. As Sarah Kofman's work weaves together philosophy and psychoanalysis, memory and history, a form of writing emerges close to literature that can be characterized as effecting self translation. The reference to herself in the third person ("'devenir ce qu 'il esU/Et à faire peut-être lui aussi son 'autobiographie' "), as protective closure to the analysis of Nietzsche's autobiography, the potential of the writer herself to pass to autobiography, demands both a cutting of the cord and distancing. Sarah Kofman teases out Nietzsche's insistence on the coincidence of his father's birthday with the day Napoleon entered their town of Eilenburg, and his own birthday with the anniversary of King Frédéric Guillaume IV; he superimposes his father's body on Napoleon (a great man) and his own on nobility. In this "phantasmatic genealogy" (Kofman, 1992, p. \9\ss.\ Nietzsche conforms here to Freud's description of the family romance : the child raises up the father and puts down the mother once he learns that pater semper incertus est and that the mother is certissima (Kofman, 1992, pp. 194-195). But in venerating the father, he also kills him with this fictive genealogy (Burgard, 1994). Nietzsche cannot deny his physiological relationship to the mother, and he associates her with the lowliness of instincts. Kinship is not in this sense physiological; it rests on the will to be close to or distant from those from whom one descends (Kofman, 1992, p. 191). Here the Nietzschean parody of autobiography explains what a man is from his history, his experience, his origins. Sarah Kofman adds another leitmotif : what it means to be woman. In L'Énigme de la femme, she analyzes a transference (transfert), passing from love for the mother to love for the father (Kofman, 1980, p. 173). In modeling the development of the girl child on the boy, there is conjecture about the status of the girl's experience. Sarah Kofman points out that Freud speculates here that the girl's first love object is also the mother, or a mother substitute, but she remarks that the French translation omits the word muss in translating "Auch für Mädchen muss die Mutter... das erste Objekt sein. "That is, the translation eliminates the conjectural status of the affirmation. Freud's thought has not been confirmed by observation but by a process of reasoning whose conclusion is that both boy and girl start sexually from the same point of departure. Development differs thereafter as the girl passes from love of mother to father and then 187 to other paternal objects (Kofman, 1980, pp. 174-175). As Sarah Kofman guides the discussion toward the question of what is considered normal, the norm (why the child must choose the parent of the opposite sex in Les trois essais sur la théorie de la sexualité), she further notes how Freud calls on the poets to complete his discourse only to reveal their incompetence. It is at this point that she assumes Freud's voice as "her own," without quoting, and creates a narrative tongue which is neither hers nor Freud's, but somewhere between the two, one that speaks to another, " vous" : "Si, au lieu de spéculer (je l'ai fait longtemps moi-même, séduit par le 'génie' des poètes), vous [...]" (Kofman, 1980, pp. 175-176). She phantasizes how observation might put into question "tous vos échafaudages spéculatifs" doubting the primacy of Œdipus, because it is possible that both Sophocles with Œdipus, as well as Freud's hypothetical evolution of woman, have misled the " I. " Sarah Kofman then turns to Freud's notion of the impossibility of comprehending woman if one neglects the preœdipal attachment to the mother (Kofman, 1980, p. 176), citing Sur la sexualité féminine. And, only several pages further, she identifies her voice even more strongly with that of Freud : Moi Freud, je ne spécule pas : je n 'ai pas de parti pris puisque je suis le premier surpris par mes découvertes et queje rectifie sans cesse mes erreurs passées. Ainsi, je peux vous donner comme exemple supplémentaire d'une relation libidinale uploads/Litterature/ article-quot-sarah-kofman-effecting-self-translation-quot-christie-mcdonald.pdf