Sarah Kofman and French-Jewish Literature: Esra Akkaya

Esra Akkaya, Sarah Kofman's literary work: France's repressed memories. Berlin: De Gruyer, 2025. 

Life and work

Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) was one of the leading French intellectuals of the 20th century—a philosopher, literary scholar, Nietzsche interpreter, and Holocaust survivor. Born in Paris into an Orthodox Jewish family, she witnessed her father's arrest by the French police during the July 1942 roundup as a child. He was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. This formative trauma—the experience of persecution, loss, and double exclusion—forms an existential foundation for her thought and writing. Kofman studied under Jean Hyppolite, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, with whom she was closely associated, and later taught philosophy herself at the University of Paris I. Her work comprises over twenty books, including profound engagements with Nietzsche (Nietzsche and the Metaphor), Freud (L'Enfance de l'art, Freud et la question de l'art) as well as cultural and literary criticism on autobiography, violence, language, gender, and power. In the 1980s, Kofman increasingly turned to a more literary style of writing—a language that does not argue but bears witness, tentatively, fragmenting. Her later texts—especially Suffocated words (1987) and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994) – mark a break with philosophical discourse and open up a different register: that of a literary ethics of memory, in which writing itself becomes an act of responsibility. Sarah Kofman took her own life in 1994.

Problem statement and research history framework

Esra Akkaya's work, based on her dissertation submitted to the Peter Szondi Institute, makes a fruitful contribution to the re-reading of the work of the French philosopher Sarah Kofman by identifying a blind spot in previous research: Kofman's literary texts have thus far received little attention as such. According to the author, the dominant reception has either used these texts anecdotally—for example, as a kind of confessional—or viewed them merely as illustrations of biographical circumstances. This work, in particular, Suffocated words, with which Kofman introduced a new, literary style of writing in 1987, has mostly been interpreted retrospectively in light of her suicide in 1994.

Akkaya counters this biographical-reductionist tendency with a precise, methodologically reflective, and historically contextualized analysis. She aims to demonstrate that Kofman's literary work constitutes a unique and distinctive body of work that must be taken seriously from both a literary-poetic and a political-ethical perspective. At the heart of this analysis lies the concept of parler sans pouvoir (Speaking without power), which Akkaya identifies as a central mode of writing. This specific form of articulation represents an ethic of witnessing that, precisely in silence, restraint, and fragmentation, articulates a counter-voice to power—be it state-controlled, discursive, or linguistic.

According to Akkaya, Kofman does not write “about” the Shoah, but from her experience – and in a language that opposes any form of meaning-making, heroization, or resolution of the trauma. Kofman's writing is not victim literature in the classical sense, but an intellectual, literary, and political engagement against the blocked memories of France, against the denial, suppression and reinterpretation of French collaboration, against the speechlessness of horror and the linguistic power of institutions.

Literary Studies, Ethics and Historical Politics

Akkaya's approach is characterized by an interdisciplinary yet consistently text-based methodology. She combines literary studies with approaches from historical theory, ethics, and discourse analysis. Her theoretical foundation draws, among other things, on Holocaust witness theory (especially Giorgio Agamben and Shoshana Felman), French literary theory (Blanchot, Barthes, Deleuze/Guattari), and historical-political debates within the French public sphere.

Of particular note is Akkaya's endeavor to precisely integrate complex discourses—such as the revisionism debate of the 1980s in France or the role of psychoanalysis in the culture of remembrance—into the analysis of Kofman's literary texts. She develops a consistently non-biographical reading program that foregrounds the aesthetic form, narrative stance, bodily semantics, and intertextual dynamics of the texts.

The recurring question is: How does Kofman manage to find a language for the unspeakable without betraying the unspeakable? Akkaya finds the answer in the conception of writing. without powerwhich explicitly distinguishes itself from the totalizing discourses of philosophy, history, or law. Sarah Kofman's true poetics unfolds in this tension between revealing and concealing, between literary autonomy and ethical obligation.

Introduction and Fundamentals – Against Biographical Appropriation

In her introduction, Akkaya lays out three basic assumptions: First, Kofman's literary work is to be brought out of the shadow of her philosophical works. Second, the concept parler sans pouvoir Thirdly, France's overt or implicit historical revisionism in the post-war period is introduced as a central social context.

Akkaya is particularly critical of the dominant reception of Suffocated words Akkaya dismantles the text, analyzing it as an exemplary case of a "biographical reading." Instead of a literary interpretation, the text was read as the written record of a childhood trauma or even as a premonition of later suicide. Akkaya resists this interpretive reflex and shows that Kofman herself objected to such a reading. Her writing, she argues, does not aim for a personal truth, but rather for a collective memory that opposes the linguistic power of repression.

Writing against the silence – revisionism, Antelme, Shoah

In the second chapter, “Writing in the Face of Historical Revisionism in Fifth Republic France,” Akkaya analyzes three texts by Kofman from 1991: the interview Writing without power, the poem Shoah (ou la Dis-Grâce) and the text Dead, immortal, an imaginary letter to Robert Antelme. These texts are placed in the context of the French debates on Holocaust revisionism, which gained momentum in the 1980s – particularly through the denials of Robert Faurisson and the intellectual complicity of Noam Chomsky.

Akkaya presents Kofman's writing as a deliberate counter-voice (contre-discours) to the French public, which downplayed or even denied the role of the Vichy regime. In this situation, Akkaya argues, literature can assume a function that philosophy is denied: it can – without claiming to truth – open up space for testimony and emotional expression.

In the interview Writing without power Kofman formulates her literary stance as a radical break with speculative philosophy, which "in truth" destroys precisely the unspeakable. The poem Shoah Akkaya interprets it as a form of poetic contradiction—a linguistically charged, rhythmically fractured response to the denial of crimes. The fictional letter to Antelme pays tribute to his work. L'espèce humaine as a model for a form of testimony that gives voice to horror without relativizing it.

The value of this chapter lies in the well-founded historical contextualization of the texts and the elaboration of a “writing without power” as an ethical and poetic basic attitude: It is a writing that opposes historical revisionism, not through refutation, but through subversion of the linguistic logic of power.

Miniatures of Memory – Microtexts as a Poetics of Resistance

Another section focuses on Kofman's shorter, often neglected texts, written between 1976 and 1983. Akkaya presents these texts as "microtexts"—miniatures that, in condensed form, address memory rupture, loss of language, and the consequences of trauma. The analyzed texts include... Tombeau pour un nom propre, My Life, Sacrée Nourriture and Nightmare.

These texts are united by a twofold break: with the coherent subjectivity of autobiographical narrative and with the conventions of philosophical argument. They articulate violence not through argumentation, but through fragment, affect, and physical reaction. Akkaya refers here to Böschenstein's concept of the "explosive power of the miniature" and to Deleuze/Guattari's concept of "small literature."

In Tombeau pour un nom propre Kofman connects the antisemitic connotation of her name with the bureaucratic vocabulary of deportation. In Sacrée Nourriture The assimilation to an anti-Semitic savior is portrayed as a forced denial of identity, whose resistance lies in physical vomiting. My Life reflects the impossibility of expressing experiences that cannot be translated into the language of psychoanalysis. Nightmare It works with etymological traces of Old French to conjure up the recurring historical nightmare.

Akkaya demonstrates that these texts pursue a radical literary practice of rejecting coherence, linearity, and resolution—precisely to avoid confronting historical violence with aesthetic harmony. Writing becomes a form of dissent, a poetic undermining of "grand language" through "small form."

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat – Autofiction as a political space

The fourth and most extensive chapter is dedicated to the novel Rue Ordener, Rue Labat Dedicated. Akkaya reads this text as an autofictional, but not autobiographical, narrative that describes the Holocaust not from a post-traumatic standpoint, but in its immediate reality. The topography of northern Paris becomes a map of collaboration, a stage for everyday life in which violence, fear, betrayal, and love intertwine.

The figure of "Mémé," the rescuer, is particularly revealing in Akkaya's analysis: ambivalent, antisemitic, and at the same time caring. The child Sarah becomes a projection screen for contradictory forces—assimilation, discipline, closeness, and rejection. The violence here manifests not only in the murder of Kofman's father, but also in the enforced silence, obedience, and denial of identity.

Akkaya analyzes how writing itself becomes a site of freedom for the textual subject—not as a narrative of liberation, but as a silent gesture of resistance against the symbolic orders that govern their lives. Education, reading, and literature open up spaces of self-empowerment—albeit without a triumphant tone.

Balance sheet, relevance and outlook

In the concluding chapter, Akkaya compares her findings with the original objective. She argues that she has revealed Kofman's literary work as an independent, ethically grounded, and historically situated form of writing. This undermines the biographical approach and rehabilitates the literary work—as political literature.

Akkaya's work is highly relevant to French literary studies, particularly postcolonial and Jewish literary research. She demonstrates that Kofman's texts articulate a different kind of memory—one that neither reconciles nor accuses, but rather lays bare the fragments of history in order to keep them legible.

According to Akkaya, one problem remains the difficult accessibility of many of Kofman's texts today. The author emphasizes that these works have hardly been edited or translated (although much has already been published in German by Diaphanes or Edition Diskord). Her monograph suggests the need for further editorial engagement with Kofman's literary legacy.