Sarah Kofman as philosopher of the uncanny double: Sarah Kofman's appropriation of Nietzsche and Freud

Sarah Kofman, known primarily as a reader of Nietzsche and Freud, as well as for her autobiographical writings about her childhood in Paris during the German occupation in the 1940s, has written on a broad range of subjects. This study develops key themes and questions that define Kofman's thought, namely, aporia, the uncanny double, metaphoricity, transmutation and convertibility, and saving the mother. It commences by showing that Kofman situates philosophical thought within the aporia of life and death. Kofman argues that the philosopher's cunning consists in taking advantage of the indeterminacy of the aporetic space.;In Kofman, the uncanny double serves as the privileged figuration of indeterminacy. The question that concerns Kofman is how to affirm and exploit the possibilities opened up by indetermination. By turning to Nietzsche's notion of metaphoricity and the transformation of values and meanings, Kofman makes of the double a figure of the possibility for transformation.;The chapters on transmutation and convertibility bring the double to bear upon ethical questions. Convertibility calls for a recognition of the other in oneself, and because doubleness maintains difference in resemblance, doubleness also calls for the guarding of the infinite distance between oneself and another.;The notion of the double is also applicable to the question of the relationship between Kofman's life and work. Kofman's practice of autobiographical anamnesis can be conceived as a doubling of Kofman's life in her texts.;Running through this entire reading of Kofman is her double recourse to Nietzsche and Freud, whom Kofman views as affirmers of life in its finiteness. This reading interprets Kofman's emphasis on Freud's regress to the elasticity of the instincts as a means for Kofman to conceptualize indeterminacy. In the Nietzschean register, the principle of indeterminacy is elaborated in terms of the metaphorical drive.;Although Kofman employs both Freudian and Nietzschean strategies in her readings, it is to Nietzsche that Kofman turns in order to conceive of indetermination as the condition of transmutation and convertibility, of renewal and rebirth. It is to the Nietzschean l'amor fati that Kofman aspires in her constant thematization of the doubleness of life and death.