What do you think?
Rate this book
Explosion T1
French
392 pages, Paperback
Published October 2, 1992
1 person is currently reading
9 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Kofman
43 books12 followersSarah Kofmans philosophical works currently available in English are: The Childhood of Art (1988), The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings (1985), Freud and Fiction (1991), and Nietzsche and Metaphor (Stanford, 1994).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 14, 2022
Whereas Heidegger, in approaching Nietzsche, will claim that it is not the man, the life, neither the autos nor the bios of the graphē, which is of import in the work (all that matters is the thought, which transcends all of these elements), Kofman responds by an absolute inversion - the thought is nothing but what is marked in and by the writing or inscription of the life and the self; the figuration or fictioning of these figures are indelibly marked upon the thought. Therefore, where Heidegger refuses to read Nietzsche's ultimate text, the text most intrinsically bound to his life, binding his life to his writing(s) - Ecce Homo - Kofman is determined not only to read, but to plumb to the depths of, the abyss of this maddening text, this text of madness, which holds within its abyss, withholds, the "truth" of Nietzsche's thought and his life.
Where so many commentators find only madness and obscurity, and thus a loss, a decadence, and a descent, Kofman endeavors to reveal that it is therein that one may discover the light, the rationale, the reasoning undergirding Nietzsche's life and his writing. As a work of autobiography, Nietzsche thus looks back, après-coup, in order to create himself, to fictively fashion his life as it would never yet have been. What is to be presented, rendered present, can only become such by being brought to this after the fact, binding the past and the future in the mark(ing) of repetition and return, marked in and by the act of writing, in (re)presentation.
This work of Kofman's is an ultimate work, then, resonating on multiple registers. The ultimate work on Ecce Homo, that ultimate work, not to mention (and how could this not but be planned, intended, in the après-coup perspective which is granted us) Kofman's own ultimate work, that which marks the end of a life which ends in binding itself, rebinding itself, returning to Nietzsche once more. This work of writing, writing on writing (on writing, en abyme), thus marks the vision of coming to oneself, if only at the end (which remains suspended, never the end), where birth and death coalesce - where vision and blindness entwine and dispense with one another, and the fire of vision madly burns itself in the sacrificial holocaust which might leave, after the fact, the ashes which are not of the life, but which mark the remainder allowing for the reading of life which only ever was in and as ashes, memory, forgotten and yet never lost, ashes scattered in the wind. This vision needs madness in order to clarify its explosion, to see in the blinding explosion of vision, to finally live only in the self-immolation by which it "itself" would finally come to be...
"And if seeing was fire, I demanded the plenitude of fire, and if seeing was the contagion of madness, I madly desired that madness."
Where so many commentators find only madness and obscurity, and thus a loss, a decadence, and a descent, Kofman endeavors to reveal that it is therein that one may discover the light, the rationale, the reasoning undergirding Nietzsche's life and his writing. As a work of autobiography, Nietzsche thus looks back, après-coup, in order to create himself, to fictively fashion his life as it would never yet have been. What is to be presented, rendered present, can only become such by being brought to this after the fact, binding the past and the future in the mark(ing) of repetition and return, marked in and by the act of writing, in (re)presentation.
This work of Kofman's is an ultimate work, then, resonating on multiple registers. The ultimate work on Ecce Homo, that ultimate work, not to mention (and how could this not but be planned, intended, in the après-coup perspective which is granted us) Kofman's own ultimate work, that which marks the end of a life which ends in binding itself, rebinding itself, returning to Nietzsche once more. This work of writing, writing on writing (on writing, en abyme), thus marks the vision of coming to oneself, if only at the end (which remains suspended, never the end), where birth and death coalesce - where vision and blindness entwine and dispense with one another, and the fire of vision madly burns itself in the sacrificial holocaust which might leave, after the fact, the ashes which are not of the life, but which mark the remainder allowing for the reading of life which only ever was in and as ashes, memory, forgotten and yet never lost, ashes scattered in the wind. This vision needs madness in order to clarify its explosion, to see in the blinding explosion of vision, to finally live only in the self-immolation by which it "itself" would finally come to be...
"And if seeing was fire, I demanded the plenitude of fire, and if seeing was the contagion of madness, I madly desired that madness."
Displaying 1 of 1 review