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Socrate
This volume charts the pluralization and conflict of interpretation that has attended the analysis of Socrates through the centuries. It focuses principally on the interpretations by Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and, in the 20th century, Derrida and Lacan.
244 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1998
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About the author
Sarah Kofman
43 books13 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).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 18, 2018
Sarah Kofman was a friend of Jacques Derrida’s and a colleague of Giles Deleuze’ (who supervised her unfinished doctoral thesis, later published as Nietzsche and Metaphor). According to Pleshette DeArmitt, what influenced her work were the Holocaust (her father died at Auschwitz), the study of philosophy and her undergoing psychoanalysis. I’ve read another book of hers, Smothered Words, which is inspired by the Holocaust and most likely her father’s fate.
Kofman’s books are not to be read in one go, at least that’s not the way I like to read them. I prefer to read them in fits, a few paragraphs here, a few pages there. That is not because her writing in difficult, on the contrary it is probably more accessible than that of many of her generation. But there is something about the themes that she chooses, and how she chooses to write about them, that makes me want to close the book to allow what I’ve read to sink in, do its job on the inside. In Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher she says at some point that Socrates’ position is unique even compared to the ‘pre-Socratics’ ‘whose fragmentary leavings have facilitated all sorts of reappropriations and misinterpretations’ (p. 1). I’d never thought of that particular comparison, and indeed it seems that Socrates is even more difficult to appropriate than the pre-Socratics because there is no ‘sacred’ text to which one can return to as if to a kind of bible that would remain forever inappropriable and endlessly interpreted. I also enjoyed her presentation of Socrates as a comic hero. Enough with tragedy, I think! Time to re-read Plato (whose representation of Socrates is the first in the book alongside portrayals by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard) and his dialogues as comedy!
Kofman’s books are not to be read in one go, at least that’s not the way I like to read them. I prefer to read them in fits, a few paragraphs here, a few pages there. That is not because her writing in difficult, on the contrary it is probably more accessible than that of many of her generation. But there is something about the themes that she chooses, and how she chooses to write about them, that makes me want to close the book to allow what I’ve read to sink in, do its job on the inside. In Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher she says at some point that Socrates’ position is unique even compared to the ‘pre-Socratics’ ‘whose fragmentary leavings have facilitated all sorts of reappropriations and misinterpretations’ (p. 1). I’d never thought of that particular comparison, and indeed it seems that Socrates is even more difficult to appropriate than the pre-Socratics because there is no ‘sacred’ text to which one can return to as if to a kind of bible that would remain forever inappropriable and endlessly interpreted. I also enjoyed her presentation of Socrates as a comic hero. Enough with tragedy, I think! Time to re-read Plato (whose representation of Socrates is the first in the book alongside portrayals by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard) and his dialogues as comedy!
June 7, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews