Sarah Kofman’s declensions of aporia
Abstract
In 1980, at a conference that brought together philosophers to discuss the work of Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman spoke up immediately afterwards Jean-François Lyotard’s paper to recall the death of her father, a rabbi, “for having wanted to rest on Sabbath in Auschwitz”.
This paper follows the traces that the non-reception of this word has left in Kofman’s How to get out ?(Comment s’en sortir -1983) and Smothered words (Paroles suffoquées-1987). If the most dreadful aporia from which philosophy seeks to extricate man is that of his own death, is philosophy in a position to confront the “most aporetic of situations,” the “death worse than death” that deprived her of her father? This “extreme aporetic situation”, which has actually occurred in human history, gives rise to another declension of the aporia: “how not to say it? and how to say it?
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