Autobiographical Turns of the Freudian Scholar: Life Writing of Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”
by
Alana Sobelman
Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
29 March 2015
Beer-Sheva
Autobiographical Turns of the Freudian Scholar: Life Writing of Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”
by
Alana Sobelman
Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Approved by the advisor Approved by the Dean of the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies
29 March 2015
Beer-Sheva
This work was carried out under the supervision of Mark H. Gelber. Department: Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics Faculty: Faculty of Humanities
Research-Student's Affidavit when Submitting the Doctoral Thesis for Judgment
I, Alana Sobelman, whose signature appears below, hereby declare that (Please mark the appropriate statements):
_X__ I have written this Thesis by myself, except for the help and guidance offered by my Thesis Advisors.
_X__ The scientific materials included in this Thesis are products of my own research, culled from the period during which I was a research student.
___ This Thesis incorporates research materials produced in cooperation with others, excluding the technical help commonly received during experimental work. Therefore, I am attaching another affidavit stating the contributions made by myself and the other participants in this research, which has been approved by them and submitted with their approval.
Date: 29 March 2015 Student's name: Alana Sobelman Signature:____AS_____
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation posits that autobiographical texts written by scholars share an unexpected space with a scholar’s theoretical works. By examining the multitude of concepts and arguments contained in a scholar’s autobiography in relation to the scholar's academic writings—some which parallel, others which modify a scholar’s academic texts—new possibilities for reading autobiography emerge. The central scholar- autobiographical and theoretical works addressed in this dissertation are those of German-American cultural historian Peter Gay and French philosopher Sarah Kofman. Important for the arguments presented in my dissertation is the fact that both scholars focus on the life and work of Sigmund Freud throughout much of their writings. The major autobiographical works of these two scholars are based on recollections of their early experiences before, during, and immediately following the Holocaust, which, when tied to their critical and biographical texts related to Freud and psychoanalysis, shed new theoretical light on their autobiographical works. My point of departure in this dissertation is an exploration of the subgenres of autobiographical works written by Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman and the relationship between these subgenres and the fields of expertise of each scholar. Following in-depth, intertextual analyses of concepts such as biography, Jewishness, and the unspeakability of the Holocaust in both the critical and autobiographical works of Gay and Kofman, their autobiographies become understood as critical texts. One argument I present through my reading of Sarah Kofman’s autobiography of the Holocaust, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994), posits that, by inserting quotation marks and other Derridian “grafts” and marginal citations into autobiographical texts, Kofman effectively decontextualizes traumatic childhood events in ways that enable her (and in turn all autobiographers of traumatic experiences) to gain relief from “choking on the words,” as Kofman puts it, to describe traumatic experience, thus appeasing the “double bind” of Holocaust testimony. In a separate example, I apply Kofman’s literary-critical readings of Sigmund Freud’s work, specifically his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” and his essay on “Repression” back on to her autobiographical works Smothered Words (1985) and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994), and illustrate that the fact of the impossibility of utterance following a traumatic event contains no communicable origin, as the events to which such potential utterances would refer have already found their expression through fantasy and psychic manipulation, and thus cannot be recovered in a form which is fully representative of the original traumatic experience. Kofman asserts that the original experience is “always already” lost in its occurrence, as lived experience can be approached only through inherently disconnected memories. Rereading Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and Smothered Words through these Kofmanian constructs promotes a new understanding of the multitude of ways in which Kofman’s works communicate, cooperate, and often quarrel with one another. In another example of intertextual scholar-autobiographical interpretation presented in this dissertation, I introduce a model of interpretation which employs Kofman’s reading of the “cap scene” in Freud’s 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams (a well-known passage in which Freud recollects his father’s narrative of witnessing his own father—Freud’s grandfather—having his cap thrown off his head by a Christian during a Saturday walk) in her The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings (1985) to argue that Gay, as a Freud biographer and Freudian autobiographer, is caught up in an oedipal conflict that paradoxically disables the possibility of constructing an accurate autobiographical account. Utilizing Kofman, I show that, through Gay’s displacement of his autobiographical father in My German Question with Freud’s father depicted in Gay’s biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), Gay illustrates his identification with Freud to the point of complete self-substitution. Gay’s autobiographical and scholarly writings therefore emerge as effective examples for Sarah Kofman’s assertion that Freud’s father-son formula has no stable source or resolution, even when expressed through a highly constructed text, such as Gay’s My German Question. This dissertation proposes that Sarah Kofman’s and Peter Gay’s autobiographical formulations—from small textual fragments to whole texts—operate in a dialogue with the critical assertions found in their theoretical texts. The arguments presented in this dissertation ultimately respond to a lack of scholarship focusing on the highly critical elements found in scholar-autobiographies and directly challenge the notion that because autobiography fails in its attempt to fully and accurately depict a lived life, it has little or no theoretical significance for scholarship.
Keywords: Scholar Autobiography, Holocaust Autobiography, Peter Gay, Sarah Kofman Sobelman 1
This dissertation could not have been completed without the encouragement, constructive criticism, and general life advice of Professor Mark H. Gelber.
Sobelman 2
Table of Contents
Abstract (English)
Introduction Scholar Autobiography: Characteristics and Complications 3
Chapter One Peter Gay: Freud Scholar, Freudian Autobiographer 26
Chapter Two Sarah Kofman: Elusive Freudian Autobiographer 57
Chapter Three Freudian Convergences: Kofman Reading Gay 116
Conclusion Pushing the Limits of Scholar Autobiography 166
Bibliography 178
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Introduction
Scholar Autobiography: Characteristics and Complications
And here I may be allowed to break off these autobiographical notes. The public has no claim to learn any more of my personal affairs—of my struggles, my disappointments, and my successes. I have in any case been more open and frank in some of my writings (such as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) than people usually are who describe their lives for their contemporaries or for posterity. I have had small thanks for it, and from my experience I cannot recommend anyone to follow my example. (Sigmund Freud, Postscript to An Autobiographical Study, 73)
The following dissertation posits that autobiographical texts written by scholars share an unexpected space with a scholar’s theoretical works. By examining the multitude of concepts and arguments contained in a scholar’s autobiography in relation to the scholar's academic writings—some which parallel, others which modify a scholar’s academic texts—new possibilities for reading autobiography emerge. The scholar- autobiographical and theoretical works addressed here are those of German-American cultural historian Peter Gay and French philosopher Sarah Kofman. Important for the arguments presented in this dissertation is the fact that both scholars address the life and work of Sigmund Freud throughout much of their writings. The major autobiographical works of these two scholars are based on recollections of their early experiences before, during, and immediately following the Holocaust, which, when tied to their critical and biographical texts related to Freud and psychoanalysis, shed new theoretical light on their autobiographical works. The point of departure in this dissertation is an exploration of the subgenres of autobiographical works written by Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman and the relationship between these subgenres and the fields of expertise of each scholar.
Following in-depth, intertextual analyses of concepts such as biography, Jewishness, and
Sobelman 4 the unspeakability of the Holocaust in both the critical and autobiographical works of
Gay and Kofman, their Holocaust autobiographies become understood as critical texts.
Over the last decade, texts defined as scholar autobiography or academic autobiography have come to make up a fairly distinguishable category within the larger field of autobiographical literature.1 The appearance of autobiographical texts written by scholars increased in the 1990s, a decade during which, as Peter Gay writes in the preface to My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998): “[C]onfessions, the more uninhibited the better, have become a best-selling genre” (xii). This period, defined by
Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith as the “memoir boom,” was framed by the publication of thousands of texts relating the lives and life events of individuals, both prominent and ordinary:
[L]ife writing has become a prized commodity in print and online venues.
Publishers seek the next hot topic and market particular kinds of memoirs
to niche audiences… Bookstores in airports and online companies such as
Amazon.com bring these stories of other people’s lives to customers
whose responses may range from feel-good benevolence to titillation to
compassion fatigue… While these categories overlap and their number is
arbitrary (because narratives usually combine several genres, as in
confession and apology), they project the copious range of rhetorical acts,
1 Although a number of critical essays concerning texts categorized as scholar autobiography are mentioned in this dissertation, the following is a basic list of critics who have defined the genre in their work: Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians and Autobiography (2005); "Coordinated Autobiography" in Biography (2002); "Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier" in American Historical Review (1999); "Autobiography vs. Postmodernism: Alice Kaplan and Elisabeth Roudnesco” in A/B: Autobiography Studies (1997); "Ego-histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers” in French Historical Studies (1996); Paul John Eakin, "Selfhood, Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary Inquiry: A Reply to George Butte" in Narrative 13 (2005), 307-11; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001).
Sobelman 5
emplotments, and styles of self-representation that mobilize
autobiographical discourse to various effects. (Reading Autobiography
127)
The rapid increase in the publication of autobiographical texts includes a number of works written by living scholars in fields across the humanities, such as historians, literary critics, and philosophers. The following introductory chapter provides varying critical perspectives on autobiography as a genre, which together inform a cohesive definition of scholar autobiography. Also presented in the following pages are the subcategories of autobiography to which Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman will be assigned, including “psycho-historian autobiography,” “philosopher autobiography,” and “Freudian autobiography.”
The complex terms “genre” and “subgenre” are understood in this dissertation according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s assertion that “autobiography” is “an umbrella concept rather than a single genre” (Reading Autobiography 218).2 Furthermore, following Smith and Watson’s claim that “identifying the diversity of autobiographical acts, both at this contemporary moment and historically, is essential to a nuanced reading of texts,” (218) the analyses presented throughout this dissertation assume that the concept of autobiography allows for the construction of a dynamic amalgam of subgenres, some of which will be introduced here for the first time. The general problem of genre in autobiography studies—although not a new one—deserves some elaboration. By identifying some key claims related to the difficulty of categorizing autobiographical
2 The term genre, while employed here for the sake of clarity through a fairly strict delineation of categories, has been complicated by several scholars, particularly from the fields of poststructuralism and feminism. Jacques Derrida, for instance, expresses such complications in “The Law of Genre” (Critical Inquiry, 1980).
Sobelman 6 texts, the necessity for an intertextual analysis of the texts of Gay and Kofman will be further understood.
James Olney, in his chapter, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A
Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction” in Autobiography: Essays
Theoretical and Critical (1980), accurately describes the problem of genre for life writing: “One never knows where or how to take hold of autobiography: there are simply no general rules available to the critic… In talking about autobiography, one always feels that there is a great and present danger that the subject will slip away altogether, that it will vanish into thinnest air, leaving behind the perception that there is no such creature as autobiography and that there never has been—that there is no way to bring autobiography to a heel as a literary genre with its own proper form, terminology, and observances” (Olney 3-4). Olney’s concerns have been taken up by several critics since, some of which have agreed with the impossibility of defining autobiography as a genre, such as Timothy Dow Adams, who states: “No matter how complicated or complete our attempt, creating an outright definition of autobiography is virtually impossible” (Adams
Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography 2). Conversely, critics such as Sidonie
Smith and Julia Watson not only define autobiography as a genre (what they call “life narrative”), but they also delineate dozens of subgenres of autobiographical texts (Smith and Watson, Appendix A: Sixty Genres of Life Narrative 253-286), including jockography (life writing of an athlete), captivity narrative (life writing of someone held in political, religious, or sexual captivity), and autie-biography (life writing of someone with Autism). Smith and Watson’s overview of these subgenres is a helpful tool for recognizing the vastness of the term “autobiography,” which allows scholars and students of life writing to cope with the long list of writings that attest to one’s life experience.
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Despite the useful explanations of autobiography suggested by Smith and Watson, and others before them, defining autobiography and/or its possibility of definition continues to plague critics today. In general, however, this dissertation follows Catherine
Savage Brosman’s claim in her 2005 article, “Autobiography and the Complications of
Postmodernism and Feminism,” that autobiography “is not, of course, a fixed genre; nor is it especially stable, and its manifestations and forms are numerous; but autobiographical works are generally recognizable, whether they present themselves explicitly as such or are clothed in other forms” (Brosman 97). The use of names to demarcate “types” of autobiographical narrative helps, particularly in comparative critical-autobiographical analyses, to elucidate the connections between criticism and autobiography.
Scholar autobiography or academic autobiography is defined by Jeremy D.
Popkin as:
[A] published text presented as a truthful account of the author’s own life,
written by someone who has spent a significant part of that life as a
professional member of an academic discipline, and in which the role of
that academic discipline in the author’s life is evident either in the content
or in the construction of the narrative, or both. (“Coordinated Lives:
Between Autobiography and Scholarship” 782)
Popkin’s use of the term “truthful” of course carries its own dilemmas in a discussion of any autobiographical text. The examination of Gay’s and Kofman’s texts provided in this dissertation are read according to their content alone, and thus questions of either historical or subjective truth are not relevant, since, as Timothy Dow Adams aptly puts it
Sobelman 8 in Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1991): “[A]utobiography is the story of an attempt to reconcile one’s life with one’s self and is not, therefore, meant to be taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic” (ix). Popkin’s emphasis on the “role” of the scholar in this definition also deserves revision, for what is important in understanding a scholar’s life writings is to comprehend not only the place of the scholar’s “academic discipline” in his or her life, but, perhaps more importantly, the scholar’s life writing as an aid to understanding his or her critical work. Thus a dialectical movement between the two forms of writing is promoted. The remaining element of
Popkin’s definition—the “significant part” of a scholar’s life spent as “a member of an academic discipline”—is, however, a fundamental prerequisite for the definition of scholar autobiography set forth here.
Cynthia G. Franklin and Pierre Nora offer definitions of the subgenre that add to the general definition of scholar autobiography utilized in this dissertation. Franklin defines scholar autobiography as a “movement affording insights into how the academy functions” (Watson and Smith 253) and Nora argues that a scholar can utilize autobiography as a “device to claim more authentic and relevant styles of knowledge and scholarship” (cited in Whitlock, “Disciplining the Child” 47).3 Nora is interested in the bridging of intellectual claims and life experience in a scholar’s autobiographical text.
Hugh Sockett calls scholar autobiography intellectual autobiography, and claims that many of these texts are not simply “stories of individual growth,” for they often give description to the development of a particular academic field, or “movement” (“Self-
3 According to Watson and Smith, Franklin also “expands the field of academic memoir to include many kinds of memoir writing that intersect with such theoretical fields as postcolonial and disability studies” (Reading Autobiography 254). Although this dissertation presupposes the intersections between disciplines noted by Franklin, the emphasis of the analysis presented here does not focus on Peter Gay’s crossover into various disciplines, which includes work in history, literature, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology, but rather on Gay’s specific works, the culmination of which shed light on the interdisciplinarity of his scholarly work.
Sobelman 9
Portraiture: The Uses of Academic Autobiography” 171-72). For its use in this dissertation, I define scholar autobiography as such: Scholar autobiography is an autobiographical text detailing all or some point of a scholar’s life, leading up to the time of autobiographical writing. All such texts may contain traces of scholar- autobiographer’s intellectual work, whether overtly or subtly exposed, opening for the reader an opportunity to reenter the author’s intellectual corpus from various perspectives.
The first scholar to set down in writing an autobiographical account, according to
Jeremy D. Popkin, was the American academic Henry Adams (“The Historian
Autobiographers” 26). Adams’s third-person account of his childhood and education in
The Education of Henry Adams, originally published in 1918, preceded attempts by a number of scholars from various disciplines to depict their intellectual development via written recollections from early childhood onwards. Scholars such as Geoffrey Hartman,
Ruth Klüger, Richard Pipes, Jacob Katz, Peter Gay, Saul Friedländer, Edward Said, and
Sarah Kofman are among such scholar-autobiographers.4
4 The ideas and claims presented in this dissertation focus on scholar-autobiographers in the fields of literature, philosophy, and history. There are a multitude of scholar autobiographers from other disciplines, however, including: Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882 (1887); Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography (1949); Hans Selye, The Stress of My Life: A Scientist’s Memoirs (1956); Yi-Fu Tuan, Who am I?: An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit (1999); and James Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968). The following is a partial list of autobiographical works written by scholars of the humanities: Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage (1999); William Barclay, A Spiritual Autobiography (1977); Jill K. Conway, The Road from Coorain (1990) and True North: A Memoir (1994); Louis A. DeSalvo, Vertigo: A Memoir (1996); Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes (1989); Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998); Geoffrey Hartman, A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (2007); Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (2002); Jacob Katz, With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian (1995); Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001) and unterwegs verloren (2008); Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words (1987) and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994); Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (2003); and Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999).
Sobelman 10
While the number of these academic life-writing texts continues to increase into the twenty-first century, few critics have made a substantial effort towards examining scholar-autobiographies intertextually, that is, specifically, the autobiographical text as bearing some footprint of a scholar’s previously-argued critical claims.5 In studies that do address a scholar’s theoretical claims in relation to his or her autobiographical texts, the focus of study is generally based on a particular event in a scholar’s life—for instance, the Holocaust—where the scholarly works and intellectual development are only second in importance to other, usually traumatic, life events. For example, in James E. Young’s analysis of Saul Friedländer's When Memory Comes (1989), Young emphasizes
Friedländer’s dual position as a historian and Holocaust survivor, yet he neglects to mention Friedländer's vast body of scholarship, some of which focuses precisely on the subject of Holocaust memory, in his reading of When Memory Comes. Friedländer, a well-known historian and professor emeritus of modern European and Jewish history, has authored or edited over thirty books and written dozens of scholarly articles. Yet Young claims only that Friedländer fills the "unique role of the historian whose personal memory was forged in the historical events he now writes” (“Between History and
Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor” 276) and cites just one of
5 Graham Allen argues that the term intertextuality, as “one of the central ideas in contemporary literary theory, is not a transparent term and so, despite its confident utilization by many theorists and critics, cannot be evoked in an uncomplicated manner” (Intertextuality 2). Taking Allen’s hesitation into account, I fully support the view that the term’s first appearance in literary theory, which dates back to Julia Kristeva’s “The Bounded Text” and “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980), defines the term as it is used in this dissertation. In “The Bounded Text,” Kristeva declares that “any text is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (37). That is, all written texts, and all linguistic elements within them, contain the potential to be linked to all other texts, regardless of genre, style, or form. The intertextual readings presented throughout this dissertation generally emphasize the presence of pre-autobiographical theoretical claims within the autobiographical texts of Gay and Kofman.
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Friedländer’s intellectual texts, his most accessible two-volume encyclopedic work, Nazi
Germany and the Jews (1998).
Other examples of such lacking analyses are easily identifiable. Referring to
Jacob Katz’s With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian (1995), Mitchell B.
Hart claims that “the biographical and the intellectual never satisfactorily meet here”
(“The Historian’s Past in Three Recent Jewish Autobiographies” 143). Hart is “unmoved” by Katz's autobiographical style, and rather than examining the historian's intellectual repertoire for details and perspectives that would shed new light on his life writing, Hart is content to claim that “[n]o doubt it is because Katz is such a meticulous and keen social historian that I expected and wanted more from his narrative” (141). Ruth Klüger's
Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001) is another example of a scholar autobiography. Its reviewers have often focused on her literary style rather than the relationship between her intellectual development, on the one hand, and her life writing on the other. Susan Rubin Suleiman places Klüger in the category of Holocaust literature with writers such as Elie Wiesel and Aharon Appelfeld, all of whom, she claims, "have given powerful accounts of what it felt like to be a child or adolescent during the
Holocaust, encountering loss, terror, chaos" (“The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child
Survivors and the Holocaust” 292). Suleiman pays minimal, if any, attention to the intellectual elements derived from her scholarship at work in Klüger’s life writings.
Much like Suleiman, in “Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs: First-person
Narrative and the Memory of the Holocaust,” Jeremy D. Popkin also minimizes the intellectual work—including Klüger’s work on memory6—that clearly thematizes much of the content of Klüger’s Still Alive. He states that
6 The following scholarly texts by Ruth Klüger address issues of memory and literature: Wirklichkeit. Fakten und Fiktionen in der Literatur (2006); “Forgiving and Remembering” (2002).
Sobelman 12
because survivor memoirs—Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben is a notable exception—are
frequently silent about their author’s post-Holocaust lives, readers are usually left
with little or no clue as to their authors’ relationship to their Jewish identity after
the Holocaust, and it is clear that most readers have filled this blank by assuming
that the authors strongly identified themselves as Jewish. (60)
Although Popkin may lend credit to Klüger’s particularly high level of self-understanding in the text, in doing so he simultaneously rejects Klüger’s self-awareness as the consequence of her relevant academic work. Indeed, Popkin only identifies Klüger’s work as “different,” and only because she discusses issues not found in other Holocaust memoirs.
The life writings of scholars Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman are positioned in this dissertation within the broader framework of scholar autobiography as a category of autobiographical literature, connected to one another in various ways by each scholar’s theoretical scholarship on the writings, assertions, and biography of Sigmund Freud.
Examining Gay and Kofman as scholar autobiographers aids in the promotion of new readings of scholar autobiographical works, wherein a scholar’s life writing bears critical traces of his or her intellectual ideas and conclusions, changing—in some cases overturning—prevailing readings of such works. I further follow the argument that knowledge extracted from the field of autobiography as contained within a sphere separate from that of scholarship limits the scope of interaction, both with autobiographical and intellectual works independent of one another, as well as in the combination of both forms as representative of a scholar’s repertoire.
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Furthermore, just as the critical literature related to Ruth Klüger’s, Saul
Friedländer’s, and Jakob Katz’s autobiographical and scholarly texts fails to address important interplays between the academic and the autobiographical, so too are the critical evaluations of Sarah Kofman’s and Peter Gay’s scholarly texts and life writing limited in this way. I propose that categorizing each writer’s works not only into separate forms of autobiography, but also into specific categories under the heading of “scholar autobiography” is a necessary first step in judging the importance of reading such autobiographical texts in light of these authors’ critical work.
Peter Gay as Historian Autobiographer
Much of Peter Gay’s critical work is highly relevant—perhaps crucial—to serious literary readings of My German Question. Lack of scholarly interest in examining the work is perhaps due to its relatively late publication in his repertoire. The importance of the text for a critical understanding of both his earlier and later works, however, should perhaps not be underestimated. In order to begin an analysis of the scholarly elements at play in My German Question, Gay’s categorization as a “historian autobiographer” is helpful when engaging with his work. Some of his most seemingly theoretical texts indeed contain several autobiographical anecdotes which may provide critics with unknown opportunities to enhance or create new links between his scholarship and life writing.
Jeremy D. Popkin describes the historian autobiographer’s task as a complex negotiation between “micro-historical”—or personal—experience and professional or discipline-related activity (“Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier” 11). The role of the autobiographer and that of the professional historian, he claims, are linked in a number of unforeseen ways, as autobiographers and historians not only “both claim to
Sobelman 14 give factually accurate reconstructions of the past” but “they also share the retrospective double vision that comes from knowing what the actors in the past thought they were doing and what actually happened as a result of their actions” (Popkin 2). Like historians, autobiographers “implicitly or explicitly suggest causal connections, underline discrepancies between intentions and results, and point out ironies that are only recognizable with the benefit of hindsight” (2). These parallel processes, along with the argument that “authors of both [historical and autobiographical texts] have made a deliberate decision to share their stories with readers they don’t know,” frames Popkin’s definition of the historian-autobiographer, where the historian is often “uneasy” about the autobiographical act because of his professional tendency to attempt to maintain
“scholarly objectivity” (4). This concern, Popkin argues, is warranted: “If an autobiography shows a close connection between a scholar’s personal passions and his or her academic work, it risks functioning as a subversive ‘supplement’ to its author’s historical scholarship, suggesting that some essential element was left out or concealed in the original scholarly project” (5). Popkin’s claim assumes that a historian’s various texts—both academic and autobiographical—are distinct from one another on the basis of authorial motivation, that is, that these works differ from one another insofar as the writing historian has determined to keep himself outside of the text or within it.
Popkin compares historical and autobiographical writing predominantly via a comparison of expressions of time in each writing form.7 Autobiographies, he claims, are
7 It should be noted that although Popkin employs the term “autobiography” in an exceedingly generalized fashion throughout his work, as illustrated here, the differences between sub-genres within the larger genre of autobiographical literature should of course not be overlooked. See bibliography for a complete list of Popkin’s articles on the subject.
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a challenge to history because they privilege a temporal framework based on the
individual author’s lifespan, whereas historical narrative takes place in collective
time. The time of individual experience in autobiography is both arbitrary and
concrete, determined by the accident of the narrator’s birth: it is unrelated to the
larger watersheds of shared experience. The emphasis on personal time in
historians’ autobiographies sometimes seems to subvert the meanings assigned to
events in historical narratives. (“Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier” 7)
Historical writing is thus for Popkin “derived from generalization,” while historian- autobiographical writing is “based on individual experience” over a particular span of time (9). The consequence of understanding the distinction between the two forms of narrative, Popkin asserts, prompts historians to publish their autobiographical writings, which is clear evidence of “a sea change in the practices of [the historical] discipline itself…” (9). As Popkin suggests, historians have shied away from “the public manifestations of collective life,” shifting their interests towards microhistorical narratives, “the history of everyday life,” and the “history of memory” (10). This move, he claims, indicates an increasing interest in individual pasts, frequently “dominated by case studies” and “built around first-person narratives” (10). I propose that the shift in interest from a general or collective historical experience to a microhistorical one may explain Peter Gay’s move towards writing My German Question.8
8 An additionally important scholar who has probed questions of autobiographical representations the critical work of historians is Dominick LaCapra. While his studies illuminate important points related to the historian’s relationship to his or her subject—and in particular LaCapra deals with the historian who is also a survivor of the Holocaust—his points are less relevant to a study of Gay’s work, precisely because his primary subject in the context of this dissertation is Sigmund Freud, and not the Holocaust. Nevertheless, LaCapra is certainly useful in an expansion of some of the ideas presented here. See his Representing the Holocaust:
Sobelman 16
Popkin’s examination of academic autobiographers includes some important points which aid in a deeper understanding of the complex authorial position of professional historian-autobiographers like Peter Gay. In “Holocaust Memories,
Historians’ Memoirs” Popkin attributes specific characteristics of autobiographical texts to scholars who have not only devoted their intellectual lives to the study of historical events, but who are also survivors of the Holocaust. Relating historian-memoirists’ writing to their experiences between 1933 and 1945, Popkin claims the following:
In contrast to familiar survivors’ memoirs, these historians’ personal narratives
normally have a long historical prologue, and, even if they do not follow their
author’s lives down to the time when the memoirs were written, they do make it
clear that the story went beyond 1945. They also do not show the tendency to
minimize the distance between narrator and protagonist that we have seen is
common in other Holocaust memoirs; instead, they emphasize it, and in particular
they remind us that all these authors became professional historians after the war.
When they look back on their earlier experiences, they do so through the prism of
this professional training, which they did not have at the time, and they thus
necessarily see things differently than they did then. (Popkin 60)
Popkin’s emphasis on the gap between early experience and latent recollection is easily detectable in My German Question, wherein Gay approaches his early years from the specific—and privileged—position of historian. Still, Popkin’s approach to the writing of an autobiographical text from the perspective of a professional historian does not merely say something about the autobiographical subject or his or her profession, but may indeed
History, Theory, Trauma (1994), especially his chapter, entitled “Reflections on the Historians’ Debate.”
Sobelman 17 bring to light distinct forms of understanding scholarship published prior to an autobiographical work. Popkin makes a further important distinction between historian and non-historian autobiographers of the Holocaust, claiming that the primary difference between the historian autobiographer of the Holocaust and the non-historian autobiographer of Holocaust is rooted in each autobiographer’s approach to his or her
Jewishness:
In survivor memoirs, Jewish identity appears as a matter of fate, and the
protagonist’s own attitude toward it, although it may vary widely, is ultimately
irrelevant… [T]he question of identity is a much-discussed issue in [historian-
autobiographical] texts, and the authors’ comments on it are evidence of a strong
desire not to let their lives be entirely defined by what happened to them during the
Holocaust years. (“Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs” 60)
As chapter one of this dissertation elaborates, Peter Gay fulfills the role of historian autobiographer of the Holocaust, particularly as his autobiographical rejection of Judaism and Jewish identification is supplemented with his previous critical arguments regarding the role of Judaism in the life and work of Sigmund Freud.
Sarah Kofman as Philosopher Autobiographer
This dissertation situates Sarah Kofman as a “philosopher autobiographer,” an identification that establishes an informed philosophical, psychoanalytic, and poststructural analysis of several texts in her repertoire, both critical and autobiographical.
Engagement with, and comprehension of, these subjects are imperative to these readings.
A key to understanding Kofman’s approach to writers such as Freud and Derrida is the
Sobelman 18 inward turning of her arguments related to the theories of these figures onto her own scholarly and autobiographical texts. That is, using the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and poststrucuralist methods that she employs throughout her corpus is an integral, if not necessary, process in comprehending some of her most complex ideas. As the investigational readings of Kofman’s works presented in this dissertation suggest, the texts of philosopher autobiographers may serve as key sources for introducing complex and dynamic arguments that revise past and current criticism of philosophical texts.
Relatively little has been written on the subject of autobiographical texts written by scholars of philosophy, although a great number of scholar autobiographical texts have been written by philosophers, which are saturated with highly philosophical ideas.
Indeed, that the autobiographical works of René Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Friedrich Nietzsche, or Jean-Paul Sartre9 have not been canonized or characterized by specific similarities and distinctive attributes may indicate a need to locate these writers and texts in autobiography studies.
The life writing of Sarah Kofman, in contrast to that of Peter Gay, finds its implications across a multitude of academic fields, including philosophy, gender, women’s, and feminist studies, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis. In this dissertation, she is defined as a philosopher autobiographer; her location as a woman, professor, and a
Holocaust survivor are secondary identifications, particularly when her scholarship concerns the work of Sigmund Freud.
9 Rousseau’s often cited autobiographical text—which has been examined most exhaustively of all of the scholar autobiographies listed here—is Confessions (1782); Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (1908) is considered to be his most obviously autobiographical work; Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words (1963); and Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1912) are the latter writers’ most recognized autobiographical works. Patrick Riley’s Character and Conversion in Autobiography: Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, and Sartre (2004) seems to offer the most in-depth study of these specific philosophers in relation to their scholarship.
Sobelman 19
In contemporary criticism, Kofman is most commonly identified as a
“philosopher,” a “deconstructionist,” and a “feministic critic.” Michael Stanislawski, for instance, in Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (2004), claims that
Kofman “was an extraordinarily prolific philosopher at the Sorbonne who penned over twenty books on philosophers and philosophical problems from Socrates to Nietzsche and Freud” (Stanislawski 139). Similarly, Christie McDonald, in “Sarah Kofman:
Effecting Self Translation” (1998), defines Kofman as a “woman-writer-philosopher,” a title which was previously challenged by Kofman herself, who stated in an interview for
Yale French Studies: “Obviously one starts with the fact that I am a woman, and that I write as a woman. In fact, I write as a philosopher first… When you say to me ‘do you write as a woman?,’ I cannot accept this metaphysical formulation” (“Exploding the
Issue: ‘French’ ‘Women’ ‘Writers’ and ‘The Cannon,’” 248). When asked in the same interview: “As a philosopher and a Derridian, how would you go about discussing the notion of the canon?” part of Kofman’s response was: “I still want to keep the title of philosopher, but in quotation marks, for I believe that the specificity of philosophy is a conceptual, rigorous reflection and I do want to claim that” (247-48). Kofman’s own words attest to the difficulty of assigning Kofman to a single profession, though singular identifications allow critics to perform tightly knit readings and clear-cut gaps between the genres presented throughout her corpus. The difficulty of naming Kofman strictly as a
“philosopher,” however, does not imply that she is exempt altogether from categorization.
I suggest that Kofman is a “philosopher autobiographer,” not because of her critical interests alone, but because of the interaction between her life writing and philosophical claims, which are most clearly extractable from her autobiographical works.
Furthermore, I suggest that Kofman is a philosopher autobiographer because her autobiographical texts “act out” her previously argued theories related to the subjects of
Sobelman 20 biography and autobiography. That is, with full awareness of the impossibility of “true” autobiography—autobiography which is uninhibited by conscientious self-reflection, linguistic embellishments, and memory distortion—Kofman makes her lived life the subject of criticism in texts such as Smothered Words and, in less obvious ways, Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat.
Insofar as Kofman engages directly with the linguistic complications of autobiographical writing, she is willingly trapped in what Paul de Man describes as a
“revolving door” (“Autobiography as Defacement” 921), repeatedly confronted with the paradox of writing her own life and using an inherently distorted language to describe that life. “The interest of autobiography,” de Man claims, “is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is, the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (922). This paradox can be drawn out of the autobiographical works of many authors, but is prominent in Kofman’s texts precisely because she discusses this paradox in her scholarship (citing Freud, Derrida, and others) and furthermore acts out this paradox by writing highly personal texts like Smothered
Words, “Damned Food,” and Rue Ordener Rue Labat. Kofman thus implicates her scholarly assertions in and through her autobiographical texts, where “Sarah Kofman” and her critical arguments become philosophical subjects that are fully open to critical scrutiny by virtue of being written in autobiographical form.
Finally, and more specifically, Kofman’s use of quotation marks on the first page of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat solidifies her position as a philosopher autobiographer. These lines, which refer to her father, read:
Sobelman 21
Of him all I have left is the fountain pen. I took it one day from my mother’s purse,
where she kept it along with some other souvenirs of my father. It is a kind of pen
no longer made, the kind you have to fill with ink. I used it all through school… I
still have it, patched up with Scotch tape; it is right in front of me on my desk and
makes me write, write.
Maybe all of my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about
“that.” (3)
Kofman’s use of quotation marks can be explained by Derrida’s assertion in his essay
“Signature, Event, Context” (published in Margins of Philosophy [1982]), that “[e]very sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written… as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (320). Kofman’s
“that,” as a linguistic sign purported to contain all of Kofman’s experience during the years that frame Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and, moreover, as a linguistic sign located between quotation marks, contains no realizable contents of that life (according to a
Derridian analysis). But by combining Kofman’s autobiographical endeavor to accurately depict a life, with her scholarly acknowledgement of the distortions inherent in this endeavor, and adding to these notions Kofman’s utilization of quotation marks at the beginning of her autobiographical text, Kofman becomes a philosopher-autobiographer.
Applying this designation to Kofman is the first step towards analyzing her life writing and critical works intertextually.
______
Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman as Freudian Autobiographers
Sobelman 22
The biography and scholarship of Sigmund Freud are absolutely essential to both
Peter Gay’s and Sarah Kofman’s repertoires. One challenge of examining two scholars whose work in each of their fields does not seem to intersect in many places is aided by a look at Kofman’s and Gay’s work on Freud—the figure at the center of several essays and books authored by both scholars. What makes each of these scholars “Freudian autobiographers,” I propose, are not simply their critical discussions of Freud and the fact that they have both written autobiographical texts. Rather, what binds the two scholars is the presence of a distinctly Freudian play between their scholarship and autobiographical works. The deeper connections between Gay’s and Kofman’s Freudian autobiographies are elaborated in chapter One and Two of this dissertation. Chapter One elaborates Gay's use of psychoanalytic displacement in his life writing and biography of Freud, and points out sites of literary, historical, and psychoanalytic intersection. In Chapter Two I examine
Kofman’s critical Freudian concepts related to summary, fictionality, and the roles of autobiographers and biographers as they are illustrated in her life writing. Gay and
Kofman thus surface as scholar autobiographers who are intimately linked to Freud, and by virtue of these links, to one another in unsuspected ways.
This dissertation is broken up into three central chapters, each focusing on the works of Peter Gay, Sarah Kofman, and, finally, an analysis of Gay’s work through a
Kofmanian lens. Combined, the various analyses provided throughout this dissertation aim to illustrate the importance of scholarship in reading and analyzing the critical works of scholar-autobiographers and, of equal if not more pressing importance, the necessity of
Holocaust autobiographical works of scholars in understanding a scholar’s critical ideas and arguments. Chapter one, “Peter Gay: Freud Scholar, Freudian Autobiographer,” provides an analysis of Peter Gay’s biographical texts on Freud, and, correlatively, his autobiographical My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin. A primary goal of
Sobelman 23 chapter one is to respond to the shortage of references to Gay's scholarship in the existing secondary literature on his My German Question. As many current analyses neglect to mention the scholarly elements in Gay’s autobiographical work, let alone Gay’s particularly unique position as a historian of his own background, this chapter combines readings of a number of Gay’s scholarly texts alongside My German Question. The argument resulting from this analysis is that Gay’s depictions of Freud and his critical work on psychoanalysis are refracted and complicated in his autobiographical text, where
Freud plays a major—albeit hidden—role in Gay’s self-depictions. Gay’s critical texts under examination in chapter one include: Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and
Victims in Modernist Culture (1978), Freud for Historians (1985), A Godless Jew: Freud,
Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (1987), and Freud: A Life for Our Time
(1998). Although each of these writings on Freud will be addressed in one way or another,
Gay’s extensive biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time, will serve as a repeated point of return when discussing My German Question. Published ten years apart, his biography of Freud and his autobiographical work may be read as complementary texts, the latter a self-reflective response to the former. Some correlations between his scholarship and My German Question are framed by his passages on digestion, elaborations on his depictions of Jewishness and, more specifically, the ever-complicated
German Question and Jewish Question. Gay’s “German question,” which serves as the very title of the text and appears throughout the narrative under various guises, I point out, are concepts that also appear throughout his works on Freud. The intertextual conclusions based on these correlations point to the necessity of incorporating Gay’s scholarship in an examination of My German Question in order to gain a deeper understanding of the themes and concepts commonly appearing in Gay’s repertoire.
Sobelman 24
Chapter Two, entitled “Sarah Kofman: Elusive Freudian Autobiographer,” provides an intertextual analysis of Kofman’s purportedly autobiographical works—
Smothered Words (Paroles suffoquées [1987]), Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Rue Ordener, rue Labat [1994]), “Damned Food” (Sacrée nourriture” [1980]), and “’My Life’ and
Psychoanalysis” (“’Ma vie’ et la psychanalyse” [1976])—through various theoretical lenses she presents in Camera Obscura: Of Ideology (Camera Obscura [1973]), Freud and Fiction (Quatre romans analytiques [1974]), The Childhood of Art (L’enfance de l’art: Une interprétation de l’esthétique freudienne [1988]), and her shorter essays, including “No Longer Full-Fledged Autobiogriffies” (Autobiogriffures [1976]),
“The Impossible Profession” (“Ce n’est pas un métier” [1983]) and fragments of
Explosion I: Of Nietzsche’s ‘Ecce Homo’ (Explosion I: De l’ ‘Ecce Homo’ de Nietzsche,
1992). The intertextual analysis carried out in Chapter Two includes the argument that
Kofman’s texts related to Freud serve as “preludes” to her autobiographical texts, as, for instance, in the case of the interpretable links between The Childhood of Art—wherein
Kofman examines Freud's texts on art and artistic faculty—and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, which can be read as Kofman’s “performance” of her own scholarly conclusions about the “Freudian” practices of artistic creation and literary summary. Another argument presented in Chapter Two suggests that, through the writing of Freud and Fiction,
Kofman takes on the role of the biographer of Freud's intellectual development, providing close readings of Freud as an analyst and creative writer based on an examination of the writers and philosophers who had the greatest impact on his theoretical suppositions, his analytic techniques, and his compositional style. This chapter concludes with the argument that, while Smothered Words appears to contain distinctive autobiographical and critical statements, Kofman’s homage to particular philosophers and writers in the text’s opening lines inform her critical readings of their works in Smothered Words, and
Sobelman 25 signify her autobiographical relation to these writers. That is, the whole of the text may be read as scholarship which is informed by autobiography. The intertextual readings in
Chapter two are thus given a directionality that expands the complexity and applicability of critical-autobiographical readings to a multitude of texts.
Chapter Three, entitled “Freudian Convergences: Kofman Reading Gay,” presents a “Kofmanian” reading of Gay's critical and autobiographical texts, and first proposes that Gay reads and analyzes Freud very much in the same way that Kofman claims Freud reads his “idols,” including the biblical figure Moses, Michelangelo, Wilhelm Jensen,
Shakespeare, and Leonardo da Vinci. The central argument presented in chapter three suggests that by analyzing Freud and attempting to find that which is hidden, or that which explains the aesthetic value of his work, Gay inadvertently dismantles Freudian theory on the whole. Thus, when reading Gay's biographical work on Freud, and applying particular statements from Freud: A Life for Our Time to a reading of My German
Question, Kofman’s argument regarding biographers and their subjects is clearly evidenced: Gay’s figural “murder” of his biographical subject, Freud, is carried out through a simultaneous heroification and displacement of father figures.
While the major points deduced throughout this dissertation address key correlations between the critical and autobiographical works of Sarah Kofman and Peter
Gay, I conclude by proposing an extended application of the theoretical methods presented here to the works of other scholar autobiographers. The final example I propose is an intertextual study of the works of Peter Gay and Sigmund Freud. Successful expansion of these methods indicates the potential for a wide range of opportunities for critics to find undiscovered links and unknown theoretical constructions by way of intertextual examinations of scholarship and autobiography.
Sobelman 26
Chapter One
Peter Gay: Freud Scholar, Freudian Autobiographer
In the Introduction to this dissertation, I categorized Peter Gay as a historian autobiographer and a Freudian autobiographer. These categorizations serve as the platform from which I will examine Gay’s scholarly and autobiographical texts. The following chapter opens with an introduction to the “German Question” and the “Jewish
Question” in their historical and literary contexts. I will furthermore study the ways in which Peter Gay addresses these two themes in his work. What emerges from this analysis are a number of contradictory points between Gay’s biographical texts on Freud and his autobiographical representations of Jewishness, Germanness, and rage. The contradictions found here become evidence for the possibility of Gay’s autobiographical texts to engage critically.
The title of Gay’s autobiographical text, My German Question, provides the first indication of a close-knit relationship between Gay’s scholarly texts and life writing. The complexities that arise from the concept of the German Question are found throughout
Gay’s repertoire, spanning his nearly 60 years of publishing, and are nowhere more apparent than through an intertextual reading of My German Question with Weimar
Culture, Freud: A Life for Our Time and A Godless Jew. Such an analysis provides a number of important detours to Gay’s conceptions of the German Question, particularly through dual readings of his self-depictions in My German Question and his comments on Sigmund Freud’s Germanness and Jewishness in his biographical work on Freud.
The discrepancies found between Gay’s two drastically different visions of the
Jewish and German pasts first and foremost gives comprehensibility to Gay’s very first sentence of My German Question: “This is not an autobiography…” (ix). This fragment, I
Sobelman 27 propose, relieves Gay of a certain responsibility of private truth telling. That is, without detailing just what he means by not an autobiography, and further stating that the text is, rather than an autobiography, a “memoir” based on a strict historical timeline (1933-
1939), he positions—and privileges—himself as a historian rather than a subjective witness recalling his past experiences. Yet, according to definitions set forth by James
Olney, Georges Gusdorf, Karl Weintraub and others whose claims make up the critical framework of modern day conceptions of the term autobiography, Gay’s book is autobiography, or, at least, autobiographical. It also abides by several autobiographical forms, such as memoir, ego-history, and what Weintraub famously termed “literary self- portrait.” In the opening to My German Question, Gay does not clarify that he indeed presents an autobiography—a detailed account from recollection of childhood events—of a historian. He seems to have undermined his own historian’s voice rather than promote his self-scrutiny as the consequence of decades of research on the very subjects that are nearest to his personal experience. While he certainly lends his knowledge of Freud in discussions of trauma in My German Question, he fails to mention his biographical work on Freud. He states at the start of Chapter Two of My German Question: “Some traumas survive everything—the passage of years, the rewards of work, the soothing touch of love, even psychoanalysis. They can be counterbalanced by life, overborne and outweighed, but an ember remains lodged in one’s being to flare up, however fleetingly, at unexpected moments” (Gay 21). Yet Freud, Gay’s personal stoic whose self-analysis Gay calls “an act of patient heroism, to be admired and palely imitated but never repeated,” (Freud: A
Life 96) seems less of an example for Gay in his personal writings than would appear the case in texts such as Freud: A Life for Our Time.
My German Question provides an excellent focal point for a corresponding study of Gay's scholarship and life writing. Gay—named Peter Joachim Fröhlich at birth—
Sobelman 28 details in the text the events of his childhood in Berlin from 1933-1939, that is, during the time of the Nazi assumption of power in Berlin. Freudian concepts appear sporadically throughout My German Question, both as proof of Gay’s in-depth knowledge of psychoanalysis and as clues to his insight into the life of his own psyche and the psyche of the people (and, evidently, the larger society) around him.
The title of Peter Gay’s autobiographical work should perhaps not be taken too literally. In the preface, he poses a question to which he only returns at the end of the text: “Why didn’t we pack our bags and leave the country the day after Hitler came to power?” (xii) The question, he writes, is an “agonizing one,” and one which he is “going to ask again and again in these pages” (xii). And thusly he introduces his first German
Question in the text, though he provides few resolutions. He continues, “I came to believe that I could appear as a witness for the defense as well as taking satisfaction from unsparing self-examination—and, I hope, giving satisfaction as well. Whether I have succeeded is not for me to say. But if I thought I had failed I would not have published this book” (xii). In what indeed reads like a defense, Gay’s opening signals the attainment of solutions to his German Question, though he is arguably bound by his earlier work pertaining to the subject.
Gay’s real defense of these contradictory statements can be found in Freud: A
Life for Our Time, wherein Gay claims that Freud periodically changed his ideas, and embraced his own contradictions. Gay writes: “… Freud found it possible to change his mind about some of his most cherished ideas… Improvisation held no terrors for him”
(159).
My German Question is also quite improvisational, at least in its contradictory statements and admittance to ambivalence about Germany and the Germans. Gay, on the one hand, enthusiastically reveals his disdain for Germany’s Nazi past; on the other hand,
Sobelman 29 however, he maintains that traumatic events cloud his memory. In hiding with a friend of
Gay’s father—Emil Busse—immediately following the events of Kristallnacht (which of course saw the destruction of nearly 8,000 Jewish-owned business fronts and synagogues), Gay admits to the impact of traumatic events on his ability to recollect: “I only wish I could recall our intimate conclave, and I curse my partial amnesia” (My
German Question 143). At the same time he refers to a particular scene of the same day, which, he writes, “remains anchored in my mind as though it had taken place only a few hours ago” (143). Why, then, as a promoter of Freud, does Gay not address the conflict of his own inability to remember and impossibility to forget? Where has Freud gone in
Gay’s writing of his own experience?
The year of the Frohlich family’s escape from Berlin, 1939, Gay writes, “was the grimmest [year] we had experienced so far in Nazi Germany. These are the times on which I do not like to dwell… I have found that thinking back on them only revives my old rage. But I dare not slight the last months of 1938 and the first months of 1939” (My
German Question 5). Gay simultaneously resists and promotes his feelings about this period of time, never admitting forgetfulness, and repeatedly enforcing the notion that this time has made a permanent impact. His testimony is obscured by traumatic events; he admits as much. Yet these recollections are at the same time concealed by his claims about the richness of Berlin in texts such as Freud: A Life for Our Time and Weimar
Culture and the importance—and lack thereof—of Jewishness for both Gay and Gay’s biographical subject, Freud.
Relevant Critical Perspectives on My German Question
The three academic reviews of My German Question discussed in the following section are connected by way of their similar indifference towards the connections
Sobelman 30 between Peter Gay’s scholarship, his position as a cultural historian, and his autobiographical narrative. While critics such as Jeremy D. Popkin acknowledge Gay’s complex role as historian and autobiographer, Popkin and other reviewers rarely go beyond this idea. In “Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs: First-Person Narrative and the Memory of the Holocaust,” for instance, Popkin states that Gay, like all historians:
has a private story to tell that has special meaning for its author… he imports his
historical training into his memoir, carefully putting his own memories into their
historical context, but, at the same time, he embraces the individualism of
autobiography and the opportunity it provides to write about matters—his stamp
collection, the soccer team he cheered for—that tell us much about him but little
about history. (78)
While these lines are important for understanding the process of life writing for professional historians, Popkin neglects to mention Gay’s extensive background in
Freudian psychoanalysis, a note which would render Gay’s “special interest” in telling his “private story” more dynamic and complex than Popkin suggests.
A similar problem is found in other academic reviews of My German Question.
Heinz Kuehn, for instance, writes that he has “rarely come across a ‘real’ autobiography in which the author reflects as intensely on his deepest self as does Mr. Gay” (“A
Separation of Spheres” lxxx). Noah Isenberg also provides a mostly complimentary review of My German Question, honing in on the familial elements of the text and Gay’s representation of his “ideal” family situation, even during the Nazi years. Isenberg writes that, “[a]midst the turmoil of the Nazi tyranny and the increasingly dismal conditions for
Sobelman 31
Jews, there are surprising moments of joy, hope, and prosperity,” and “[l]ike most stories of escaping the Nazis, Gay’s is one of good fortune, determination, and generous assistance” (“Thanks for All the Memories” 289-290). Assistance, that is, by a number of non-Jews, Emil Busse—Gay’s father’s business partner—for instance, who helped the
Gays (the family’s surname at this time was “Fröhlich”) on a number of occasions following the Nazi assumption of power in Berlin. Isenberg’s critique of My German
Question focuses on its sentimental aspects, and disregards the clearly identifiable critical elements of the text, such as the psychoanalytic terminology that permeates it, as well as
Gay’s intellectually informed stance on issues and questions—the most obvious being the
“German Question”—that both frame and are framed by the text.
Situating the German and Jewish Questions
In the following section I suggest that My German Question, when read as a supplement to Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time, draws out Gay’s deeper, critical interest in Jewishness and Germanness. Delineating the arguments that stem from the intertextual reading of Gay’s autobiographical and scholarly texts presented here requires a brief look at the “Jewish question” and the “German question,” first from various perspectives and ultimately as they are defined by Gay himself. Locating these terms in Gay’s larger corpus highlights the importance of his autobiographical work for a number of his historical claims.
The concepts of “Jewish Question” and “German Question” are the subjects of a vast number of works by scholars from the fields of history, literature, philosophy and anthropology.10 Occasionally these questions are claimed to be unanswerable; as early as
10 For overviews of the general interrelations between the German and Jewish Questions, see Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question, Jewish Question: Revolutionary
Sobelman 32
1896, some scholars argued that the Jewish Question dates back to the development of
Christianity, beginning “with the so-called Babylonian exile at the beginning of the sixth century before our era” (Jastrow, Jr., “The Jewish Question in Its Recent Aspects” 458).
Many scholars have pointed to the issue of racial segregation and the problem of the
“Jewish language” against the backdrop of Germany’s national language. Anson
Rabinbach, for example, proposes the existence of an intimate link between the Jewish
Question and the German Question in late-1980s Germany, where “the ‘Jewish Question’ in today’s Germany is simultaneously a sovereignty question” and is the result of a discontinuity between “the Jewish desire to remember and the German desire to forget”
(“The Jewish Question in the German Question” 160). Wilhelm Röpke defines the
German Question in 1946 as an immediately post-Holocaust problem, and asserts that it is answerable only via an examination of German guilt and Germany in the context of post-World War II Europe.11 Röpke further argues that failed attempts to disable the Nazi regime in Germany raised a pressing debate that seemed to have no clear resolution:
“Even enlightened anti-Nazis are beginning to ask themselves sadly whether all has not been in vain, and whether there is any sense in working for a future for their children, while the Nazis scornfully ask them whether they still place faith in the wartime propaganda...” (The German Question 7). Moreover, Röpke claims, “A most disturbing question is, indeed, whether the disappointing way many Germans have reacted to their country’s ignominious downfall, and their growing political obduracy, does not point to incapacity for political and moral regeneration” (8). Röpke also introduces the notion that
Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (2014), esp. 61-69; Sarah Ann Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish Question (1984), esp. 41-49. 11 The term Judenfrage is identified in English as both “Jewish Question” and “Jewish Problem,” although in the autobiographical work of Peter Gay, Judenfrage seems only to imply “Jewish Question.” Self-inquiry, both for Gay and for Gay’s Freud, is at the root of the “Jewish Question” for both figures, while the “Jewish Problem” appears to be more deeply rooted in national policy against the Jewish minority, rather than self-conception.
Sobelman 33 the German Question is one “with which generations have been concerned in the past, and which has now faced the world in its latest and acutest form in the rise and the collapse of National Socialism” (9). In alignment with multiple scholars of post-Shoah
Germany, Röpke is concerned with the problem of how, with its vast array of talented artists, writers, musicians and philosophers, the Third Reich so masterfully plotted and acted out the elimination of its “own” people: “What strength, what inspiration has proceeded from that central country of our continent in those thousand years [between
German rule by Otto I to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich]!” (The German Question 19).
Germany,
one of the leading countries of the West, a country that has given mankind some of
its greatest minds, an industrious and reliable nation, talented and endowed with not
a few virtues, a nation whose culture is rooted in the same soil as that of the other
European nations, whose language is one of our own languages, and of whose
nationals we esteem many and love some… How in the world has this nation come
to such an end? (The German Question 21)
For Röpke, the German question thus becomes a question of Germany’s past. But with regard to the future of Germany, he asks “[H]ow can this nation regain health and find the way back to its true self and to community within the West?” (21). A further inquiry presented by Röpke focuses on the larger question of definition. He asks: “What is
German?” (115)12 and responds to his own inquiry with the suggestion that the German
12 The question is obviously made far more complicated by Mann, Adorno, and Karl Marx before them, all of whom address the notion as a complex amalgam of national policy, political agendas, conceptions of Germanness in relation to the German Kultur, and reflections on Germany as a function in the Enlightenment period and in contrast to the rest of Central Europe.
Sobelman 34 citizen has always found it difficult to “stand by his own nation as the German,” for “[i]n no other country have precisely the best people so candidly declared that they regard it as a real misfortune to belong to their own nation…” (115). This hatred of one’s own nation,
Röpke concludes, is “with the characteristic exception of the Jews” (115). He thus distinguishes between the Jewish and non-Jewish German, belonging to the same nation but dealing with self-identification in very different ways.
With these perspectives on the German Question in mind, I propose that Peter
Gay’s work addresses the German Question through his presentation of the Jewish
Question. The Jewish Question, I argue, dominates Gay’s repertoire, at times contradictorily to his writings on his own and Sigmund Freud’s Germanness. Important for this discussion is a brief overview of the “Jewish Question” from various scholarly perspectives, including Gay’s.
In “Recycling the ‘Jewish Question’” (1980), Paul Piccone and Russell Berman investigate the shift in perception of the Jewish Question in the late 1970s in both
Germany and the United States, which is evidenced by dissimilar American and German receptions of NBC television network’s miniseries, Holocaust (1978). Piccone and
Berman criticize the post-Frankfurt School approach to the definition of anti-Semitism, claiming that “the American left… has misunderstood the political significance of the
‘new and improved’ Jewish Question [of the “status of anti-Semitism” in 1980], and that a careful updating of the Frankfurt School’s account of anti-Semitism explodes a whole series of myths and leftist conventional wisdom on the matter” (“Recycling the ‘Jewish
Question’” 113). Addressing the varied receptions of the miniseries, most of which are political in nature, Piccone and Berman criticize those reviewers of the series that claim:
“Germany’s ‘catharsis of the nation’ will, like a primal scream, thoroughly transform its political and cultural profile” (114). The miniseries, they argue, has not succeeded in
Sobelman 35 reforming second-generation perpetrators, but has propelled left-winged critics to utilize pseudo-Freudian readings of the miniseries in order to “avoid dealing with the problem of
‘Germans and Jews’ within the broader context of national and international political dynamics” (114). Holocaust, Piccone and Berman further argue, was an essentially capitalist enterprise, “indeed a contribution, but to the culture industry’s corporate income and to the stability of the German status quo,” which, they vehemently argue, is
“hardly an excuse for a collective euphoria!” (114). The partial recovery of past afflictions imparted by the Nazis is false, they continue, and the anti-fascist politic, led by social democrats and “liberal politicians” (115) has, in the wake of the television broadcast, promoted an anti-fascism which “reduced the political critique of authoritarianism” and avoided any firm analysis of “those social structures typical of modern industrial states that represent a latent source of fascism” (115). Citing Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, they argue that “the original formulation of the problem of anti-Semitism… was seen as having very little to do with the Jews as such and everything to do with capitalism” (125). The Jews, they conclude, were not the target, but rather “almost accidental victims” (125). For these critics, the so-called Jewish
Question, then, does not find its cause in ethnic, racial, or religious factors, but is rather an issue of capitalist efforts by Western nations to propagate their agendas, and part and parcel of the German Question.13
13 There exist many volumes on the subject of the German Question in the context of the Jewish Question, and vice versa, only a small number of which are presented here for the purpose of explaining, with as much clarity as possible, how these concepts relate to the work of Peter Gay. Primary literary and philosophical sources related to the German Question and/or the Jewish Question in different contexts are vast in number. For those most related to the German and Jewish Question in the works of Peter Gay, see Theodor Adorno’s “On the Question: ‘What is German?’” in New German Critique 36 (1985) 121-131; Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Die Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1983 [1918]) and “Freud and the Future” in Essays of Three Decades (1947); Fyodor Dostoevsky’s provocative diary entry, “The German World Problem. Germany, a Protesting Country” in A Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik pisatelia za [1873], 2009), which conveys a number of issues related to the concept of a “German nature,” and his “A Lie is Saved by A Lie” diary entry of 1877, which presents the inescapable connection between Jews and Judaism. For secondary analyses of Dostoevsky’s works listed here, see David Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews (1981), esp. Joseph Frank’s “Forward” (ix). Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo is to my mind Nietzsche’s most intriguing commentary on Germanness, as Nietzsche himself is the main
Sobelman 36
Overall, the “German Question” and “Jewish Question” are complicated by a number of historical events and scholarly perspectives, beginning with the status of the
Jews in Germany from the early eighteenth-century onwards, to the rise of the Third
Reich in 1933, to the “German Question” of the post-Holocaust era, following the literal erasure of the Jews as a so-called problem in the German national context. Scholars from fields across the Humanities have taken part in addressing the Jewish and German
Questions at different periods of time, from multiple perspectives and locations. As the remainder of this chapter suggests, Gay’s work interweaves the two concepts to the point of his displacement of the German Question by the Jewish Question. This displacement is evidenced by the discontinuities between My German Question and the following critical texts: Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture;
Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider; A Godless Jew; and Freud: A Life for Our
Time.
Peter Gay’s German and Jewish Questions
Gay’s approach to the German Question and the Jewish Question is clearly demonstrated by his comments on Thomas Mann. Although Gay does not give nearly the amount of attention to Mann as an intellectual or literary hero as he conveys through his work on Sigmund Freud, Gay seems to have had strong scholarly ties to Mann, as
Mann’s and Freud’s correspondences indicate a personal, but also critical, connection.14
subject of scrutiny in the work. This work is an important subject for the larger study of Freudian scholar autobiography, as it is addressed throughout Sarah Kofman’s corpus, specifically in her texts related to autobiography. For secondary sources that examine the above literary and philosophical sources, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974); Stanley Corngold, “Mann as a Reader of Nietzsche” (1980), esp. 47-74; Arnold M. Eisen, “Nietzsche and the Jews Reconsidered” (1986); Robert C. Holub, “Nietzsche and the Jewish Question” (1995); Jacob Golomb, “Nietzsche’s Judaism of Power” (1988); Michael Rothberg, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe” (1997); and Hannelore Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann (2004), esp. 105-112. 14 Freud’s and Mann’s work and lives overlapped frequently: Freud applied Mann’s work in his own psychoanalytic studies, and Mann equally referred to Freud, most powerfully in his celebratory statement
Sobelman 37
In Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (2001), Gay declares that his intention in writing the text “is to bring together themes that dominated the hectic life of the [German] Republic, and to juxtapose them in ways that will… permit us to define the
Weimar spirit more clearly and more comprehensively than it has been done before” (xv).
Gay provides neither historical accounts nor a timeline of historical events (except in the book’s appendix, which displays a basic political history of the Weimar Republic), and rather focuses on the figures and ideas that permeated Weimar and made it a vastly rich period in the fields of art, literature, music, and science. Mann was one dominating figure in Gay’s depiction of this time period.
Mann’s Germanness is discussed on multiple occasions in Gay’s Weimar Culture.
According to Gay, Rainer Maria Rilke and Heinrich von Kleist were major influences on
Mann, who “obsessively returned to Kleist” (61) in Mann’s poetry and prose, participating in “the passion” of Kleist scholarship in the Weimar period. Gay suggests that Mann moved his readers with his 600-page Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
(Die Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, [1983, 1918]) and his promotion of Germany’s
“cultural mission” (73), which encouraged a heroic and authoritative German Kultur, unblemished by the corruptions of politics but unrelenting in its promotion of all things
German. Mann, Gay notes, changed his views after the publication of Reflections, taking up democratic sympathies, but the Weimar Republic saw the author of Reflections of a
Nonpolitical Man as a non-political cultural figure.
Referring to The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1953 [1924]), Gay notes
Mann’s explicitly “German” nod to aristocracy. The book, he claims, “was the literary event of 1924,” and its influence was vast. Gay describes Mann as a “splendid storyteller
entitled “Freud and the Future,” delivered to an American audience on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth birthday in 1936.
Sobelman 38 and fascinating reporter, with a penetrating eye, an accurate ear, and—perhaps surprisingly—deft, direct humor” (Weimar Culture 124).
Although Mann could not call himself a Berliner (having neither been born nor raised there), Gay makes a point of tying Mann to Berlin, describing it as “the city of
Samuel Fischer, the great publisher, who had on his list Thomas Mann [and] Hermann
Hesse,” amongst others (Weimar Culture 131). Berlin, Gay writes, “was eminently the city in which the outsider could make his home and extend his talents” (131). The city from which Gay was to escape in 1939 is also the city he connected to his literary heroes
Mann and Freud; Berlin is found in Gay’s work as the center of twentieth-century
German life, especially for the Viennese habitant, Sigmund Freud.
Gay and the German Jew from Vienna
Gay’s anger, which is articulated through his contradicting depictions of Vienna as the backdrop of Freud’s adult life, and expressed through his descriptions of Berlin as the center of intellectual and artistic exchanges in Freud’s times, and as the city of Gay’s childhood recollections.
In Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture,
Gay claims that Freud was detached from Vienna, both as an Austrian and an ethnic
Jew15:
15 One of the most important scholars of the subject of ethnic Jewishness, Jewish racialism, or the “Jewish genotype” is Sander Gilman, whose texts address the question of race and the Jews, physiognomical “studies” of ethnic Jewish difference, and Jewishness as it relates to the work and correspondences of Sigmund Freud. Of Gilman’s work, see The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siecle (1994); The Jew’s Body (1991); Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (1985); Freud, Race, and Gender (1995); Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (2003); Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (1995); and Jews in Today’s German Culture (1995). Other scholars who address the subject of Jews and race in late-nineteenth to early twentieth century include W. Petersen (esp. “Jews as a Race”); Peter Loewenberg (esp. “Sigmund Freud as a Jew: A Study in Ambivalence and
Sobelman 39
… Freud lived far less in Austrian Vienna than in his own mind; he lived with the
international positivist tradition, with the tantalizing triumphs of classical
archeologists, with the admirable and moving model provided by that great
French scientist of the mind, Jean-Martin Charcot, with the consolations of his
far-flung correspondence, and with the infinitely instructive surprises of
systematic introspection. Naturally his introspection fed, often casually and quite
unconsciously, on materials Freud gathered up in Vienna, on visits to his cigar
merchant or during his regular card game, in the slow progress up the academic
ladder and with his experience of Austrian anti-Semitism. (34)
Gay would thus perhaps agree with Sander Gilman that Freud’s
conscious opposition to racism in his writing and thought was to no small degree
shaped by the meaning of being Jewish in the culture he was born into. He
belonged to that group targeted as different and dangerous. An acculturated Jew
in the European Diaspora, he could not help responding, in complex and often
contradictory ways, to the image of the Jew found in his world. (The Case of
Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity in the Fin-de-Siecle 216)
In Gilman’s review of A Godless Jew and Freud: A Life for Our Time, he writes that, contrary to Gay’s claims, Freud was, “clearly not an ethnic Jew. He saw himself as a transplanted Moravian, as an Austrian, as an unhappy Viennese. Only far down the line did he identify himself as an ethnic Jew… For Freud, of course, the definition of the Jew
Courage”); Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (2011), esp. 1-32.
Sobelman 40 certainly has nothing to do with religion, politics, or ethnic identity” (Gilman, “Gay’s A
Godless Jew and Freud: A Life for Our Time” 251-52). Freud’s ethnic Jewishness,
Gilman asserts, only comes up later in Freud’s life, and even then his self-identification is merely an “internalized” version of the “feminine” Jew defined in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903): “Freud had internalized Weininger’s definition of the Jew and transvalued it, making it into a positive self-definition which avoided any religion, political, or ethnic dimension” (Gilman 252). Gay, Gilman claims, ignores Freud as the counter-transferred ethnic Jew, and “in defining Freud’s Jewish identity, avoids… an evident model, which is one of internalization and projects”
(Gilman 252). Gay thus appears to disregard the ethnic Jewishness that was imposed upon Freud by the physiognomic policies—however unofficial they seemed—enforced by Austrian (and German) governments.
Gilman addresses Freud’s coping with “these models of the Jew within himself in order to function within his world”: “[W]hat is this world?” (253) His claims apply directly to scholarly-autobiographical readings of My German Question, and illustrate
Gay’s grappling with similar challenges. Gilman answers this “what is this world?” question vaguely, stating: “It is the world of science into which Freud enters as a student and young colleague in the university, within which he formulates the basic structures of psychoanalysis, and out of which he attempts to escape in the 1920s with his advocacy of lay analysis” (Gilman 253). The atheist Jew in late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Vienna is thus, for Gilman, a Jew whose self-identification matched the characteristically negative conception of the Jew put forth by other Jews and non-Jews alike. Gay, conversely, sees Freud’s Jewishness as coming from the inside, that is, from Freud’s
Sobelman 41 grappling with the religion of his parents, his patients, and, eventually himself in the face of the impending Nazi persecution of the Jews.16
Reading My German Question as a response to Gay’s earlier insistence on
Freud’s absolute rejection of Jewishness results in the drawing of a complex map of
Gay’s varied stances on Germanness and Jewishness. A German Jew from Berlin, a child survivor of the Nazi era, a forced émigré, a historian of German history, and a scholar of
Freud and psychoanalysis, Gay re-appropriates the German and Jewish Questions, initially from an academic perspective—with traces of his autobiography in tow—and, nearly 60 years following his first witnessing of Berlin anti-Semitism and his subsequent escape to the United States via Cuba, in My German Question.
Gay’s definitions are central to an analysis of his larger body of work on Freud, as the terms according to him clash at some points and connect at others. I propose that what
Gay means by German Question can be found in his conception of Freud’s Jewish
Question; that is, his “answer” to the German Question surfaces through his approach to the Jewish Question via biographical details about Freud’s life and work. Gay’s displacement of the Jewish Question from his Berlin childhood to Freud’s Vienna and discussions of Freud’s Jewishness, somehow unaltered by his identification as
“emphatically secular” (Freud: A Life for Our Time 599), allows Gay to distance himself from the Jewish Question in his life writing. By doing so he exempts himself from any categorization which may locate him as a Jewish scholar. For Gay, Freud’s Jewish
Question, however, is based mostly on details of Freud’s life in anti-Semitic Vienna, where his Jewishness prevailed over his Germanness, chiefly due to surrounding
16 For an important article on the subject of Freud’s Jewishness, despite his declarations of atheism, see Jay Geller, “Atheist Jew or Atheist Jew: Freud’s Jewish Question” in Modern Judaism (2006) and Y.H. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1993), esp. Chapters 1 and 2.
Sobelman 42 circumstances, including anti-Semitic acts of colleagues and the impending attacks against the city’s Jews.
In Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, Freud: A Life for Our Time, and A Godless
Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, Gay cites the same 1926 interview in which Freud allegedly states: “My language is German… My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew” (cited in Viereck’s Glimpses of the Great [1930] 34).17 His repeated citation of this interview illustrates Gay’s attempt to distinguish between
Freud’s early rejection of Jewishness and identification as a German on the one hand, and his later (post-1926, the apparent time of the interview given by George Sylvester
Viereck) identification with his Jewishness over his Germanness, on the other. For instance, Gay writes that Freud’s decision to identify as German or Jew in certain time periods illustrates “how deeply anti-Semitism had penetrated his consciousness in his later years; earlier, he would have done what others did, call himself a German and a Jew at the same time” (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 91). Furthermore, Gay claims that
Freud’s choice of identification as Jewish implies that Freud “momentarily repressed” the successes of German culture, including the French philosophical, English and German scientific influences that were part of Germany’s “dazzling array of theoreticians, experimenters, and clinicians…” (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 92).
17 See Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 91; Freud: A Life for Our Time 488; and A Godless Jew 139. It should be noted that Freud did not confirm this statement elsewhere following the interview, and that Gay, in two of the three footnotes corresponding to this quotation, clarifies the citation problem by arguing that, since Freud did not outright reject the citation after its publication in 1930, the quotation must be accurate. See Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 91, fn. 112 and Freud: A Life for Our Time, 448. The implications of Gay’s inclusion of the quotation despite its possible inaccuracy include a consideration of Gay’s self-identification as directly related to Freud’s own self- identification.
Sobelman 43
Looking at Freud’s physical Vienna surroundings from as close as the interior of his work study to the city outside, Gay argues that “[t]o see how [Freud] lived is the first step toward resolving the tension in Freud between candor and concealment, a tension which his ideas amply explain and his character imperiously exacted” (Freud, Jews, and
Other Germans 39). In Freud’s Vienna home, an “unpretentious apartment house on a respectable residential street in northern Vienna” Gay writes that he
wrote most of his books and analyzed most of his patients; here he gathered his
library, collected his art, met his associates, raised his children, and conducted a
voluminous correspondence in which he rehearsed his momentous ideas and kept
threads of the psychoanalytic movement from twisting or from disintegrating
altogether. (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 35)
But the building labeled Berggasse 19, which now houses a museum dedicated to
Freud, Gay claims, is hardly a proper dedication to the father of psychoanalysis.
Moreover, the celebration of Freud’s talent and success has not come from the fibers of
Vienna’s population, but rather that “most of the recognition Freud has received in
Vienna has been the work of foreigners” (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 35). Vienna was not kind to Freud or his science of the mind, Gay continues, as it has named no street
“Freudgasse,” and “[g]uidebooks and leaflets advertising the city… barely mention his name” (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 36). For Gay, “[t]he public indifference, the latent hostility, are chilling,” and the city’s “mixed feelings” led to an attempted repression of Freud, the “irrepressible” Viennese scientist (Freud, Jews, and Other
Germans 36).
Sobelman 44
Gay’s criticism of Vienna in its dealing with Freud includes a second, more personal, element that ties Freud’s Vienna to the Berlin of Gay’s childhood presented in
My German Question. In Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, Gay claims: “The most misleading implication commonly drawn from the misinformed myth about Freud’s cases is the conviction that psychoanalysis is somehow characteristically, inescapably,
Viennese—as though Freud could never have made his discoveries in Munich, let alone
Berlin” (30). Gay’s description of Freud as a Jew in Vienna is further complicated by a number of claims in which he describes Freud as German, rather than Austrian. Also in
Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, Gay first admits that Freud “remains hard to place” on the “cultural map” of modern German culture and thought, for although he lived in
Vienna, Freud’s culture “was larger than Vienna. It was not even centered there” (89).
Rather, Gay writes, Freud’s science was “centered” in Gay’s own hometown of Berlin.
Freud, the “cultivated German with an astonishing memory” who enlisted his surroundings to create his most detailed theories, was neither a mindless technician nor a parochial Austrian” (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 51). Gay’s understanding of Freud as a Viennese doctor who was stuck in the grips of anti-Semitic Vienna as an inescapable
Jew becomes highly ambivalent at the point where Gay’s description of Freud necessitates a distinction between Freud the Austrian and Freud the Jew. That is to say that in Vienna, Freud was a persecuted, alienated, almost defeated Jew; as a non-Austrian
German, however, Freud was hardly a Jew but rather a middle-class, bourgeois, cultivated product of the Enlightenment.
According to Gay, Freud “did all the things the good bourgeois is supposed to do.
He worked hard, worried about money, loved his wife, fathered six children, played cards, attended lodge meetings… smoked cigars, and went on vacations” (Freud, Jews, and
Other Germans 62). However, Gay’s ambivalence about Vienna arises as he explains that
Sobelman 45
Freud was different from the “average Viennese bourgeois” in his “sincerity” (Freud,
Jews, and Other Germans 63) and in his distaste for the wants of the bourgeois, such as the opera, where “Freud rarely went, lest he be bored” (63).
Vienna, Gay claims in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, only became a booming cosmopolitan capital—a cultural center of science, literature, and the arts—because of its
German influence: Vienna was “almost dominated by famous Germans from Germany.
The university and leading hospitals filled some of their most prestigious posts with men who had been born and had reached their distinction in the Reich” (Freud, Jews, and
Other Germans 90). In Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments, in a larger discussion of Freud’s (highly Jewish-influenced) choice of names for his six children,
Gay describes Freud’s “world” as a Jewish figure in the world of Vienna’s scientific circles: “The world of these medical scientists, clustered in the University of Vienna, became Freud’s world. It was a world for which he was, as an adolescent atheist, thoroughly prepared and into which he plunged with a will… His Vienna was medical
Vienna. And that Vienna was, in Freud’s student days, dominated by professorial physicians imported from Germany” (Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments
60). Vienna may have been the birthplace of many geniuses, but Berlin was the breeding ground from which such genius would flourish.
Naming German scientists such as Carl Claus, Ernst Brucke, Theodor Billroth, and Hermann Nothnagel, Gay asserts that precisely because they hailed from Germany, the presence of these men in Vienna made Freud feel truly “at home” (Reading Freud 61).
In Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, Gay argues that it was the German influence that allowed Vienna’s bourgeois to participate in German culture. He goes so far as to say that
Freud’s acceptance of the Goethe Prize in 1930 was a scoff at Viennese prizes and celebrations that Freud “disdained” and “rejected” (90). As early as 1890, Gay claims,
Sobelman 46
Freud avoided “frigid blasts of anti-Semitism” in Vienna because he was in the company of German scientists such as Brucke and Nothnagel. These men, he writes, “made it possible for Jews like Freud to see themselves as other than pariahs” (Reading Freud 61).
Thus only with these German men, claims Gay, could Freud develop his science.
Gay, an exiled Jewish German whose intellectual interests remain “German” in content
(Freud, Wagner, Nietzsche, Weimar culture, and Nazism are to name but a small fraction of Gay’s historical subjects), yet whose nationality, location, and spoken and written language is American or heavily American-influenced, his relation to his Germanness as exemplified in his autobiographical text is no less complex than Gay would have us believe about Freud’s German Question, specifically in the decades between the world wars.18
The connection between Gay’s biographical emphasis on Freud’s German
Question, and his own, I propose, are both anchored by Gay’s proclamation of his and
Freud’s Jewish godlessness. He writes in Freud: A Life for Our Time that upon the publishing of Future of an Illusion in 1927, “Decades of unprincipled atheism and of psychoanalytic thinking about religion had prepared [Freud]” for the writing of this controversial text. Gay writes: “He had been a consistent militant atheist since his school days, mocking God and religion, not sparing the God and the religion of his family”
(525). Of Gay’s own godlessness, rooted in his parents’ teachings, he writes: “My father, bluff and outspoken, left no doubt where he stood in the historic battle between reason and unreason. With his bellicose view of past and present, he was a true son of the
Enlightenment…” (My German Question 51). Gay concludes his discussion of Freud’s atheistic manifesto Future of an Illusion with: “This is the air that Freud's analysis of
18 In the concluding chapter of this dissertation, I elaborate in detail the complex relationship between Gay’s autobiographical notes on his experience of America as an American immigrant, and his biographical description of Freud’s experiences in and evaluations of America.
Sobelman 47 religion breathes—the critical spirit of the Enlightenment” (Freud: A Life 527). These texts depict two children of the Enlightenment, Freud and Gay’s father, and Peter, the son, whose upbringing, he says, “was not simply irreligious,” but “anti-religious” (My
German Question 50). Gay’s real and surrogate father together frame Gay’s autobiographical narrative as much as they together frame his biographical conclusions about Freud. Although Gay’s distance from his Germanness, and his discussion of
Freud’s surrender to his Jewishness, seem parallel, it is this Jewish godlessness, I suggest, that frames much of both of these texts.
Gay makes his most elaborate claim regarding Freud’s atheism in his 1987 text, A
Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. The thread that runs through his study of Freud’s rejection of his Jewishness includes a number of claims related to Freud’s relationship to the religious identification of his parents, his approach to religion in his non-religious science of psychoanalysis, and his staunch resistance to the place of religion in the development of the human psyche. Godlessness, Gay asserts, was Freud’s gateway to psychoanalysis.
Gay’s description of Freud’s place as a Jew in early twentieth-century Vienna is striking in its acceptance of Freud’s Jewishness in the context of Austria. He writes:
It was not easy to be a Jew in Imperial Austria, especially a Jew with aspirations.
In Vienna, especially at the end of the century, anti-Semitism was more than the
confused broodings of psychopaths; it pervaded and poisoned student
organizations, university politics, social relationships, medical opinions. To be the
destroyer of human illusions, as Freud was by intention and by results, was to
make oneself into a special target of the anti-Semite. (A Godless Jew 76)
Sobelman 48
In this way Freud’s Jewishness defined him, although according to Gay he staunchly rejected all religious connotations of the term. Where Freud “persisted, both in doing psychoanalytic works and in calling himself a Jew” in the face of resistance to his new science in the early twentieth century, and although “Freud was the opposite of religious,” he nonetheless
granted the existence of some mysterious bonds that tied him to Judaism, and he
attributed his objectivity and his willingness to be in a minority at least partly to
his Jewish origins… To deny [his Jewishness] would have been senseless and, as
he also said, undignified. The Jewish bond he felt was the recognition of a
common fate in a hostile world. (77)
Freud’s victim position defines Gay’s reading of Freud’s work, and it is the oppressed
Jew for which psychoanalysis was made possible at all. Gay writes that as early as 1925,
“[Freud’s] exposed position as a Jew gave him ample opportunity to cultivate his stance”
(Freud: A Life 604) and that he “saw himself… as a marginal man and thought that this position gave him an inestimable advantage” (602). Gay implies here that it was Freud’s
Jewish outsider stance that made him most at home in Vienna. “Individualistic and problematic as it was,” Gay continues, “Freud’s Jewishness made an intimate bond between him and Vienna” (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 77). Gay’s repulsion of the city in his defense of Freud, is striking:
For Vienna, never in reality the city of operettas and flirtations, was, even in
Freud’s time, a city of ugly rehearsals; it made Freud the Jew suffer even more
because he was a Jew than because he was Freud. A laboratory of every known
Sobelman 49
species of anti-Semitism, Vienna virtually compelled Freud to see himself as one
among a band of potential victims, and one among Vienna’s Jews. (Freud, Jews,
and Other Germans 77)
Despite Freud’s feelings of rejection, however, Gay claims that is was precisely as a
Jewish outsider that his connectedness to Vienna increased and kept him from moving to calmer social climates such as England, where he had familial ties and friends. “There was an element of defiant stubbornness in his residential conservatism: he found a certain exhilaration in what he once described… as his ‘struggle with Vienna—Kampf mit Wien’”
(Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 89). Moreover, Gay states in his Freud biography that,
“as long as he had lived in Vienna” during his final years in which he wrote his most confessionary “Jewish” text, Moses and Monotheism, he “had indeed been willing to suppress the last part of the book” (Freud: A Life 648). Freud’s Vienna, as suggested in
Freud: A Life, was both the suppressor and the enabler of Moses and Monotheism.19
Furthermore, notwithstanding Gay’s rigid denial of Freud’s Jewish religious beliefs, he confesses in Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments that he has put forth Freud’s atheism in his work in order to demarcate psychoanalysis as a science completely free of religious practice yet not immune to religious identification. “He was a good Jew” writes Gay, “in the sense that he never denied his ethnic Jewish ancestry, took pride in the achievement of Jews across the centuries, and regarded the quality of his
Jewishness as a mysterious bond with fellow Jews, a bond still resistant to psychoanalytic explanation” (Reading Freud 59-60). Gay’s description of Freud as “a good Jew” is
19 Moses and Monotheism (1939), it should be noted, was first published in Imago in Germany, though only its first two parts would appear there (Sections I and II of the final text). Not until after Freud’s settling in England did he complete the text, and it was published only after his death in 1939. See SE vol. 23 for full the publication history of Moses and Monotheism.
Sobelman 50 troublesome, as his evidence for this claim seems more widely based on Gay’s relationship to Berlin of the Third Reich period and after, rather than on Freud’s connection to pre-Reich Vienna. Gay’s Vienna is ridden with anti-Semitism, and Freud was its central victim. And Berlin played the same role for Gay.
In the same chapter of Reading Freud in which Gay identifies Freud as a Jewish member of the German-influenced Viennese society of medical scientists, he also denies
Freud’s Jewishness, creating a contradiction that appears throughout Gay’s repertoire of works on Freud. Examples of Gay’s slim characterization of Freud as the unfortunate, yet paradoxically privileged, outsider in Vienna abound in his books on Freud. Freud: A Life for Our Time, Gay’s 700-page biography of the atheist Jew from Vienna, reveals the core of Gay’s contradictory statements, a number of which find partial resolution in My
German Question. Freud: A Life for Our Time was written in 1988, ten years following
Gay’s first text on Freud’s Germanness, entitled Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, and one year following his declaration of Freud’s atheism in A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. The dates of publication are relevant here, as they take a position in his corpus in relation to My German Question, which was published exactly ten years following the publication of Freud: A Life for Our Time.
In My German Question, Gay presents himself as a strict atheist. Yet, while he writes that his “parents made me into a village atheist, and, with a few psychological refinements, I have remained one” (50), Gay admits that his parents “did not altogether abandon all ties to Jewishness, however little it meant to them” (50). He fills his text with questions, beginning with: “They had me circumcised. Why? Was it a remainder of
Jewish identification or a medical procedure? Why did my father light a candle on the anniversaries of his parents’ deaths? A touch of surviving Jewish loyalties or an expression of private, secular piety?” (My German Question 50). Gay provides no direct
Sobelman 51 clues to the answers to these inquiries, but his descriptions of Freud in the context of
Vienna provide some tentative answers. It was Freud’s Vienna, Gay insists, in which the scientist exploited his “status” as a Jew in the making of a number of psychoanalytic claims. Although Gay argues in Freud: A Life for Our Time that Berlin—as opposed to
Vienna—was the German center of scientific discovery and cultural activity, he also claims that his own native city was a place in which alienated Jews manipulated their otherness. The truth of this statement is of course highly questionable, but in the context of Gay’s autobiographical writing, his Berlin and Freud’s Vienna are oddly alike. He writes of his school life in 1936 Berlin: “I had to keep my balance amid the anxieties that were my daily fare—the possible risks of harassment at school, the unresolved question of my future, and, worst of all, the avalanche of assertions, pouring over me from every conceivable source, that I (like all Jews) was a blot on humanity” (My German Question
84). This report is followed by Gay’s note on the Nazi implementation of racial restrictions on Berlin’s Jewish population: “I cannot tell how representative I was, but I shared the life history of thousands of Jewish adolescents in Nazi Germany who had somehow come to terms with their hormones amid massive slander of their ‘race’ and mounting threats to their survival, threats which were in themselves, not so subtly, offenses to their manhood or conviction of desirability” (My German Question 90). The minority stance of Gay’s younger self is clear from these citations, and they add much meaning to Gay’s historical notes on the place of Jews in Berlin in his earlier scholarship.
They also, however, underline Gay’s ambivalence about Berlin.
In Freud: A Life for Our Time, Gay situates Freud at the center of modern
German thought and culture, beginning in the late nineteenth century, when for a period in Austria and Germany, he writes, "the opportunities beckoning emancipated Jews" were numerous, and "Jews participated prominently in the life of Vienna's culture as its makers
Sobelman 52 and its middlemen" (Freud: A Life 20). For Gay, Freud was the Jewish doctor, psychoanalyst, scientist, philosopher, and devoted family man who, despite repeated run- ins with anti-Semitism in academic, scientific, and social spheres, and being at great odds with many colleagues, remains “the old stoic”—the genius whose curiosity Gay compares to a “grain of sand in the oyster that could not be ignored and might in the end produce a pearl” (Freud: A Life 314). Gay's work on the man Freud focuses primarily on
Freud's private life and relationships, his place in Viennese and German-Jewish history, the development of his psychoanalytic ideas, and the history of the psychoanalytic movement, including an elaborate defense of psychoanalytic readings of cultural and historical events.
Still, the city of Vienna is central to Gay’s comments on Freud’s development as a thinker and a man. Gay points to major contradictions in Freud’s public statements, critical works, and private letters, which elucidate Freud’s complex relationship with
Vienna: “To be sure, for someone who hated Vienna as fiercely as Freud told everyone he did, he proved uncommonly resistant to leaving it” (Freud: A Life 9). Vienna, according to Gay’s biography, essentially made Freud a Jew, though, much like Peter
Gay, the Berliner presented in My German Question, “[t]he atheist in Freud was always glad of an opportunity to speak out” (Freud: A Life 550). Jewishness, according to Gay, was unavoidable in Vienna and Freud took advantage of his position: “Paradoxically,”
Gay writes, particularly in the years following the rise of Hitler, “were good years for
Freud to be a Jew. He found hard times for Jews particularly suitable for proclaiming his
‘racial’ loyalties, and these were hard times for Jews” (Freud: A Life 597). Though an unfortunate time for most Viennese Jews, the situation, he claims (despite earlier reports of Freud’s rejection of all aspects of Jewishness), brought Freud to “admit” his belonging to the Jewish population: “Freud never rejected, or concealed, his ancestry,” Gay writes.
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“But in the poisonous atmosphere of the late 1920s and early 1930s he did more than refuse to deny his Jewish origins. He trumpeted them” (Freud: A Life 597). Freud used his minority position as a Jewish victim to his advantage, Gay asserts, satisfying a rage against anti-Semitism, and claiming participation in the Jewish minority to beef up his theories, particularly those illustrated in Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930), and “Der Mann Moses” (1934). By the late 1920s, Gay claims,
“Freud was as much an atheist as he was a Jew” (Freud: A Life 599); Gay never goes so far as to claim himself a Jew in My German Question, though his self-definition as a devoted Berliner allows him to truncate his Jewishness, despite its obvious presence in his childhood recollections.
Denial of Gay’s Jewishness and emphasis on his Germanness can be extracted from his pre-autobiographical scholarship, which aid a dual reading of Gay’s Vienna in his work on Freud and his own Berlin. In Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, in a chapter entitled “The Berlin-Jewish Spirit,” Gay describes the condition of Berlin’s Jews in the late nineteenth century:
The Jews’ prominence in Berlin has a long and respectable history… In the
decades of the Berlin salons, early in the nineteenth century, Jews made their
contributions to the life of Berlin in a distinctive way. Jewish salons, especially
over which women presided, became favorite centers of good talk, quotable wit,
original thinking. But these contributions were not then, nor did they become later,
in any special way Jewish… For both internal and external reasons, Jews had for
centuries trained themselves for the commercial and intellectual life that found its
proper soil in Berlin. (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 173)
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The problem with these lines is two-fold. Firstly, as his autobiographical text makes clear,
Gay’s relationship to Berlin is tied to his private life. His visit to Berlin in 1961, twenty- two years following his family’s escape, is described in My German Question as a difficult one. In his recollection of visiting the neighborhoods of his childhood, he points out those structures that had remained (of which there were very few), and those that had been destroyed (of which there were many). Those that remained he names “survivals”:
“But were these survivals a cause for rejoicing or rejection? I did not know and was too torn to find out,” he confesses, “All I knew was that the Nazis had poisoned my hometown as they had poisoned so much else, including me” (My German Question 19-
20). When Gay arrives in France following his disturbing tour in Berlin, he writes: “[M]y mood drastically improved. After all these years I can still summon up my sigh of relief”
(20). Gay’s “autobiographical” Berlin is linked to his “scholarly” Berlin by way of his emphases on the same “Jewish” issue: on the one hand, in texts such as Freud, Jews, and
Other Germans, Gay endorses Berlin as a Jewish cultural mecca, as “a world city, hospitable to the stranger,” (Freud, Jews, and Other Germans 173); on the other hand,
Gay’s Berlin is the place from which “we were literally fleeing for our lives” and where, in 1961, “murderous anti-Semitism was alive and flourishing in my native land” (5). Gay may at once agree with Ernst Jones’s account of Berlin’s treatment of Freud in 1910:
“Freud was the chief villain who started all the evil” (Jones, The Life and Work of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, 110), but at the same time Gay’s critical texts, such as Freud,
Jews, and Other Germans, approach the issue from an oppositional standpoint.
Reading Peter Gay’s Rage
A final point of convergence in this chapter relates to Gay’s use of the term “rage,” both in his autobiographical text and his Freud biography. In a two-part contribution to
Sobelman 55 the New York Times on August 3 and 4, 1976, Gay expressed his conflicted feelings about Germany in the post-Nazi era. The theme that runs through both short articles is presented in the form of a number of questions: Who is a German? Is there a Jew that is
German, and, conversely, a German that is also a Jew? Are post-Third Reich Germans, living more than three decades after the Holocaust, absolved of their Nazi-affiliated
Germanness, or are they accountable for the atrocities of their parents and grandparents, as liable for the Holocaust as the Nazis themselves? “The German question,” Gay writes,
“which has long haunted the civilized world,” is still relevant in 1976, and in fact “seems acute as ever” (“Thinking About the Germans: I”). For Gay, a searing, nagging rage prevents him from accepting any manifestation—linguistic, material, or otherwise—of
West German existence. “Possibly, as a refugee from Hitler and a historian of modern
Europe,” writes Gay, “I get more than my share of anguished, and angry, debates over the
German question, but clearly disbelief in the new Germany is widespread, intense—and inappropriate” (“Thinking About the Germans: I”). By the time of this article’s publication, Gay had not relieved himself of his longstanding anger towards Germany, even though three decades had elapsed since the Holocaust and following his myriad publications confirming the existence of a decent, cultured, civilized West Germany. His emphasis on Freud’s personal rage sheds light on Gay’s self-depictions in My German
Question. In Freud: A Life for Our Time, Gay writes: “Normally, Freud felt better after he had an opportunity to ventilate his rage; he preferred vocal opposition, no matter how obtuse, to silence” (195). Of Freud’s stubbornness and its manifestation in angry, sometimes public, rejections of the ideas of his fellow analysts, Gay notes that for Freud,
“Denunciation was a form of action” (Freud: A Life 385).
Gay attempts to define his own experience of rage through a childhood recollection of unnecessarily fibbing to his mother: “My single childhood lie stands out
Sobelman 56 like a stain of red wine on a white tablecloth… What was it?... [S]heer rage or perhaps a masochistic need to be found out and punished?... [W]hether directed against myself or others, what place should rage of any kind have in my young life? Surely if there ever was a boy who had no cause for it, I was that boy. One thing is certain—I have no doubt on this point—I was never consciously angry at my parents” (My German Question 38-
39). Concluding another episode in which Gay, a “far angrier boy than [he] could have imagined,” provoked a fistfight with a classmate, Gay confesses: “[O]f this long stretch in my childhood, only one act of rage has survived in my mind. An accident? There are no such accidents in the universe that Freud has discovered for us” (My German Question
41).
Memories of self-admonishment and masochism appear throughout My German
Question like fragments of recollection emerging from a psychoanalytic exercise of free- association. The links between his private recollections of childhood and his biographical descriptions of Freud tie Gay’s texts together, and suggest that Gay’s autobiographical moments are direct responses to his critical suppositions. Gay admits that My German
Question, “by itself, distorts my personal history” (143), and had he only acknowledged this same subjectivity in his previous work on the life and work of Freud, his scholarship and life writing would openly appear as complements to one another. It is thus a critical reader’s task to tease out these connections in order to find the connections and contradictions which add a great deal of intrigue to several of his theoretical suppositions.
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Chapter Two
Sarah Kofman: Elusive Freudian Autobiographer
The previous chapter examined Peter Gay’s autobiographical work from a number of critical perspectives presented in his scholarship on the life and work of
Sigmund Freud. Relying on similar intertextual modes of analysis, this chapter explores several of Sarah Kofman’s critical and autobiographical texts with markedly different results. Whereas the previous chapter extracts Freudian notions from My German
Question and relates them to Gay’s psychohistorical scholarship on Freud, this chapter calls attention to the highly scholarly elements presented through Kofman’s autobiographical texts. Her works discussed here thus yield close, sometimes veiled, correspondences with one another. Beginning with an evaluation of Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat, this chapter seeks to reveal several of these links in order to call attention to the highly critical nature of her life writing and the possibilities emerging from incorporating these autobiographical works in discussions about the theoretical conclusions posited in her scholarship.
In order to begin engaging Kofman’s autobiographical texts with her theoretical works, this chapter first addresses the various and sometimes conflicting ways in which critics define her intellectual interests and her individual texts as strictly autobiographical or scholarly. I suggest that the tendency to divide her works into these categorizes marginalizes important theoretical elements at play throughout her writings.
Sarah Kofman and Her Work
A consideration of criticism of Kofman’s work reveals that she has not been definitively classified as a scholar in any single academic field. Kelly Oliver and
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Penelope Deutscher, for example, point out that Kofman is a “consistently elusive figure, well known but hard to classify within Nietzsche studies” (Enigmas: Essays on Sarah
Kofman 2). She is “little discussed among psychoanalytic theorists despite the overwhelming role of psychoanalytic theory in her work…” (2). And she is “equally difficult to classify from a feminist perspective, despite the feminist themes in her work”
(Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman 2). According to Oliver and Deutscher, then,
Kofman is an interdisciplinary scholar skilled in philosophical arguments, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis, and also a writer of her life. The following section proposes that certain analytical studies of Kofman’s personal life overlook many critical links between her scholarship and life writing. Overlooking these connections, I argue, is a detriment to understanding her intellectual arguments.
Although critics commonly emphasize the wide range of Kofman’s intellectual subjects, they also closely associate her broad interests with her lived life and make assumptions about her based on her work. DeArmitt, for instance, argues: “It is
difficult, indeed impossible, to discuss Kofman’s vast interdisciplinary corpus without telling Kofman’s own story” (1). Christie McDonald and Michael Stanislawski examine
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a kind of literary precursor to Kofman’s suicide.20 For instance, Kathryn Robson claims that “Kofman’s suicide so soon after the publication of her only book-length autobiographical text has, perhaps inevitably, inspired much critical speculation as to the potential relation between writing an autobiographical story of trauma and suicide” (Robson, “Bodily Detours: Sarah Kofman’s Narratives of Childhood
20 While Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is often considered Kofman’s final text, she saw the publication of one more essay, “Scorning Jews: Nietzsche, the Jews, Anti-Semitism” (published originally as Le mépris des Juifs: Nietzsche, les Juifs, l’antisémitisme (1994)). And her “final” work, which was in progress at the time of her death, was published posthumously as “Conjuring Death: Remarks on The Anatomy of Doctor Nicolas Tulp (“La mort conjurée. Remarques sur La Leçon d'anatomie du docteur Nicolas Tulp” in La Part de l'Oeil, 1995).
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Trauma” 608). And although Robson criticizes scholars who “have looked to Kofman’s life, rather than to her work, for evidence to support their analyses,” she too points to connections between Kofman’s writing of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and events in her life:
“It is likely to be no coincidence,” she concedes, “that Kofman did not write this text until 1994, by which time the experiences of hidden Jewish children during the war were rising to the forefront of public consciousness throughout Europe” (4). Verena Andermatt
Conley asserts that the final lines of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat leave readers “perplexed, wondering if indeed the death of Mémé,” Kofman’s caregiver in hiding during the deportation of Paris’ Jews, “prompts also the subsequent suicide of the author in October of 1994, shortly after the publication of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat” (115-56). Indeed, while
Kofman’s suicide on October 15, 1994 (Nietzsche’s 150th birthday) may have importance for strictly biographical readings of her work, reading the text as a kind of
“suicide note” provides little more than a form of textual closure: a final analysis.
Furthermore, not only does focusing on Kofman’s suicide detract from a greater understanding of her theoretical work, but the same is true for critical readings that emphasize Kofman’s marginalization from academic circles and positions, and her lesbianism. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver are thus correct in their cautioning against life/text analyses in Kofman’s case. They claim that “preoccupation with a tragic
‘Kofman’ persona inhibits a strong interpretation of her philosophy” (Enigmas 9).
Madeline Dobie also criticizes strictly biographical readings of Kofman’s Smothered
Words (which is most often considered autobiographical and critical): “[I]t would be misguided,” Dobie states, “to oversimplify the relationship between Kofman’s life and her writing” (xi). Jacques Derrida makes a similar point to Dobie’s in his introduction to the Selected Writings of Sarah Kofman (2007), wherein he writes of Kofman’s last published work, “Conjuring Death”:
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Like others, perhaps, I am tempted to approach Sarah’s last text today so as to
take by surprise, in some sense, but also to make linger these last words leaving
her lips, to make them resonate with her first words, as I will later do, and to hear
in them a final confidence imparted or confided to us—and notice I am not saying
a last wish or a last word. (8)
Here Derrida points out the circularity of Kofman’s repertoire, suggesting that the whole of Kofman’s corpus cannot be reduced to chronological segments in her intellectual development, or by placing her extratextual thoughts and written ideas into separate categories.
A small number of scholars examine Kofman’s scholarship and autobiographical works simultaneously and address the relations between them. McDonald, for example, points out that specific encounters between her texts may be understood as “slippages,” that is, as unexpected shifts “from philosophy and psychoanalysis to aesthetics and literature, to a writing of the self” (“Sarah Kofman: Effecting Self Translation” 185).
These “slippages” allow for the identification of autobiography-scholarship connections and make possible a more concentrated comprehension of some of Kofman’s most complex notions related to Freud, literature, and autobiography.
It has been argued by a number of scholars that Kofman’s philosophical work contains autobiographical elements. Joanne Faulkner, for instance, claims that in
Kofman’s work “[t]he personal interpenetrates the philosophical, and vice versa, because for her the two could not properly be separated,” (“’Keeping It in the Family’” 41). She further asserts:
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Kofman recognized that, like all philosophers, she did philosophy for her own
reasons—that her writings were motivated by a vital interest, and psychological
need… The capricious coexistence of the philosophical and life narratives is
precisely her object, such that philosophical interpretation merges with
autobiography. (41)
This claim satisfactorily describes Kofman’s tendency to conflate the autobiographical with the philosophical. Yet it does not fully recognize the theoretical elements at play in her autobiographical writings, including her highly deconstructive utilization of quotation marks, as well as distinct revisions of her earlier argument that, by summarizing a literary text, a writer (or psychoanalyst) changes the text’s fundamental qualities. Pointing out the scholarly elements in Kofman’s autobiographical work, as the following sections illustrate, requires a look at Kofman as a “Freudian” and a “post-structuralist critic.”
These two characterizations frame two of the multitude of ways that Kofman’s autobiographical work can be read as scholarship.
Kofman as Freudian and Post-Structuralist Critic
Deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism are the most obvious analytical methods by which Kofman approaches texts in her scholarship. Her evaluation of psychoanalytic—particularly Freudian—techniques, theories, applications, and failures pervade a number of her works, most obviously The Childhood of Art, The Enigma of
Woman, and Freud and Fiction. Other texts, such as Nietzsche and Metaphor and
Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, are replete with Freudian notions, including his use of analogy and metaphor in his explanation of unconscious processes and his repeatedly
Sobelman 62 revised theory of death drives. McDonald claims that in Kofman’s work on Freud and
Nietzsche, philosophical and psychoanalytic modes
modulate into ‘life writing’ and create a kind of translation which neither alone
can fully explain… Reading Nietzsche through Freud, and Freud through
Nietzsche, Sarah Kofman unleashes powerful analytic tools from which emerge a
very personal kind of writing in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. (“Sarah Kofman:
Effecting Self-Translation” 196-97)
Although McDonald points out a number of threads between Kofman’s various works, she does not take the notion further by examining what is “scholarly” about Rue Ordener,
Rue Labat. That is, although McDonald discovers critical elements of Kofman’s study of
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Explosion I and Explosion II, in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, she does not suggest the complications of Kofman’s scholarly arguments within the framework of a discussion of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, or the ways in which the content and form of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat challenge or complicate Kofman’s assertions put forth in Explosion I and Explosion II.
As a postructuralist reader, Kofman regularly employs the work of Maurice
Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others who have been associated with post-structuralism and deconstruction. Her choice of philosophical influences and methods of analysis indicate her tendency toward reading and analytical practices which are based on the notion of language’s inherent instability and distrust of a text’s historical context (including an author’s biography) as the basis for literary analysis. Her readings of Freud’s work are particularly poststructuralist in their construction and themes; these
Sobelman 63 readings provide the basis for reading her autobiographical texts in relation to her earlier work on Freud, literary analysis, biography, and art.
In The Childhood of Art, for example, Kofman explains Freud’s method of
“reading” works of art, and suggests that, for Freud artistic creation is akin to a written text insofar as it is “an enigma or a riddle to be deciphered…” (54-55). The “enigma” of the work of art, she argues, is a function of the work’s utter inaccessibility: “The enigma is everywhere, because the meaning that is always postulated is always absent in its plentitude. It is given only in distorted form through a chain of signifiers which are always already substitutive” (55). Thus, Kofman writes, explicitly referring to Derrida, that like all psychic reproductions, “the text is given only in its difference, its deferral, its alteration, its transformation, as the variant of a type which is never present—an originary substitute, a translation devoid of an original text” (56). The instability of language, and, indeed, the “impossibility” of an “original” text is a key concept in
Kofman’s writings. Smothered Words, for instance, not only discusses the non-originary nature of all texts, but, I propose, is also an acting out of these notions.
Smothered Words: Autobiographical Scholarship
As already stated, Smothered Words is both philosophical and autobiographical; it is also deconstructive and formulaic, an instance of an attestation to life and a literary
“rehearsal” for death. As a cross-disciplinary scholar-autobiography, Smothered Words is an important example of a problematical text for “truth value” readings of autobiography, which, Paul De Man notes, “depend on actual and potentially verifiable events” (920). As a “book-length autobiography,” as Pleshette DeArmitt calls it, the text interweaves a biographical detail (accompanied by historical documentation) of Kofman’s father’s death in Auschwitz into her reading of Maurice Blanchot’s short story, “The Idyll,” and
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Robert Antelme’s autobiographical account of the Holocaust, The Human Race.21 In her analyses, Kofman plays with layers of memory and representation, driving forth her assertion that when approached through a particular critical lens, Blanchot’s and
Antelme’s texts transcend intellectual and experiential limits of philosophy and biography. Eilene Hoft-March provides a clear explanation of Kofman’s methodology in
Smothered Words:
In the course of the book she moves through a range of ‘philosophical’ positions:
at first not being able to imagine a human position—a survivor’s position, for
example—from which to write and memorialize the event, but eventually to
imagining (writing) the collective positions of a radically diverse community… as
a condition of ensuring human survival. (“Still Breathing” 110)
Smothered Words thus offers repeated re-contextualizations of a survivor’s position and forms of memory, from fictional individuals (similar to Blanchot’s main character, Alex
Akim), to a group of concentration camp prisoners (similar to the prisoners in Antelme’s
The Human Race). By looking carefully at its “complex structure,” as Madeline Dobie calls it, Smothered Words indeed “may be read as a textual staging of the difficult encounter among contrasting imperatives of history, autobiography, and critical writing”
(viii). Identifying and examining these encounters advance a method of textual analysis whereby Kofman’s autobiographical works are understood as extensions of her criticism, particularly insofar as they incorporate or respond to her previous scholarship.
21 Kofman additionally addresses Blanchot’s “After the Fact” (in Vicious Circles, 1985) as well as his Infinite Conversation (1993), but her references to these texts merely complement her more directed, post-structuralist readings of “The Idyll” and The Human Race.
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Smothered Words: Kofman Reading Blanchot and Antelme
Seeking out the links between these “positions”—historical, autobiographical, critical—I propose an extension of Kofman’s scholarly claims in Smothered Words to include a refracted examination of the work’s autobiographical passages alongside
Blanchot’s and Antelme’s texts. Blanchot’s “The Idyll,” which is the first short text of three in his collection of works entitled Vicious Circles (1985), Kofman writes, is “a story from before Auschwitz that openly forbids all tears, all cries” that “could not, without scandal, be considered a story anticipating Auschwitz” (Smothered Words 31).
The third text in Vicious Circles, entitled “After the Fact,” is Blanchot’s response to critical speculation that “The Idyll,” which was published in 1936, “prophesized” the
Holocaust. He writes that, at the time of writing “The Idyll” and “The Last Word” (the second of the three texts), he “was astonishingly cut off from the literature of the time and knew nothing except what is called classical literature…;” “[n]othing,” that is, “that could have prepared [him] to write these innocent stories that resound with murderous echoes of the future” (64). Blanchot thus explains that, because his literary influences were limited to “classical literature,” he could not have written a text that resembles any other work as a prophetic or representative text of the Holocaust. And beyond this point,
Blanchot remarks that if “The Idyll” foretold the Holocaust, it, too, would have perished like all other texts related to the Holocaust.
“The Idyll” tells of a man, named “the stranger” by the narrator and “Alexandre
Akim” to everyone else, whose life is disrupted by forced entrance into “The Home,” where he is psychologically and mentally tormented and from which he does not escape
Sobelman 66 despite a number of attempts.22 Ullrich Haase and William Large provide a helpful summary of “The Idyll”:
Here we see Alexandre Akim, a foreigner brought to a hospice, incarcerated in a
nameless society’s prison. But the strange point is that this prison is a rather
idyllic community, the foreigners are well received, are given the opportunity to
wash and feed themselves, and all that is expected in return is some work, not
much, but completely meaningless. The proprietors of the asylum seem friendly
and happy, the inhabitants of the next village away always open and welcoming.
While being warned by others that not all is as it seems, it is quite difficult for
Akim to see any danger. Now and then punishments of one or other of the
inmates who were not so assiduous in their duties takes place, but always
accompanied by an air of regret. (90)
The strange and ambivalent setting of Blanchot’s story is reminiscent of a number of other narratives of punishment and entrapment in a place whose façade is one of welcoming and inclusion yet whose penal system enforces repeated and seemingly senseless physical labor. In “The Idyll,” the vagabonds in the Home are forced to perform the endless exercise of moving stones from one place to another:
They were supervised by a giant, a very ugly but good-natured person who was
always agitated and upset. The work consisted of taking the stones that were dug
out of the mountain each day by the city laborers and carting them to a huge pit.
22 Blanchot wrote the story, according to Ullrich Haase and William Large, “at a time when he was presumably supporting xenophobic views” (Maurice Blanchot 89). The implications of this statement for reading “The Idyll” as a “prophetic” text suggests the need for further consideration.
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In the heat of the sun this was an exhausting task, exhausting and useless. Why
throw the stones into this pit when special trucks would be coming afterwards to
haul them away?... But the vagabonds had to be given work, and vagabond work
was never to any great purpose. (Blanchot 7-8)
In “After the Fact,” Blanchot recalls Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Of Camus’s story, he asks, “Who is the stranger? There is no adequate definition here. He comes from somewhere else, he is well received, but received according to rules he cannot submit to and which in any event put him to the test—take him to death’s door” (“After the Fact”
65-66). Similar to the arbitrary work endured by the laborers in “The Idyll,” Camus’ The
Myth of Sisyphus (1942) also describes repetitive labor as a method of punishment. Like
Camus’s Sisyphus, Blanchot’s Alexandre Akim recognizes the senselessness of this forced labor, but unlike Sisyphus, Akim is never able to find personal freedom, despite his punishment. Akim is never informed that he may be subjected to such work for eternity. Nonetheless, Blanchot’s reference to the moving of stones—like that of
Sisyphus’ hauling of a stone up a hill repeatedly and forever—suggests that Alexandre
Akim is caught in a similar cycle, wherein attempts to escape never free him of his exilic status under an unnamable law. 23
23 Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1955) has been read by a number of scholars as an allegory of eternal punishment set forth by the law, and the protagonist as one who successfully transcends that law by virtue of his finding peace in his absurd surroundings. Some of these scholars include Jacques Ehrmann (“Camus and the Existential Adventure”), Marc Blanchard (“Goodbye, Sisyphus”), and George Winshester Stone, Jr. (“The Legacy of Sisyphus”). Of relevance here is yet another text which has been analyzed by Blanchot and referenced by Kofman: Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Blanchot’s works, most notably his “Reading Kafka,” “Kafka and Literature,” and The Writing of the Disaster, address Kafka’s and, separately, his main character Joseph K.’s position in relation to the law. These concepts are also found in Kofman’s short work, “Tomb for a Proper Name,” wherein she dreams she is the translator of Kafka’s work, and where she references The Trial. Through an additional interweaving of autobiography and scholarship, Kofman’s “Tomb for a Proper Name”—autobiographical in its own right—
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Sarah Kofman writes about the concept of “the law” in “The Idyll” in Smothered
Words. “The law tries to fight errancy by means of punishments that sometimes prove deadly,” she writes, “by condemning the detainees to work that is absurd, by beatings inflicted with insane cruelty” (21). Senseless physical punishment is central for Kofman in Smothered Words, as she compares the forced labor depicted in “The Idyll” to that imposed on her father in Auschwitz:
In Auschwitz, work is, in every sense, without end, without goal, without respite,
without leisure, without beginning, and without interruption. Work is the exact
equivalent of death… Auschwitz: the impossibility of rest. My father, a rabbi, was
killed because he tried to observe the Sabbath in the death camps; buried alive
with a shovel for having—or so the witnesses reported—refused to work on that
day, in order to celebrate the Sabbath, to pray to God for them all, victims and
executioners, reestablishing, in this situation of extreme powerlessness and
violence, a relation beyond all power. And they could not bear that a Jew, that
vermin, even in the camps, did not lose faith in God. (Smothered Words 33-34)
Kofman’s identification of her father as an Akim-like stranger uncovers the force of her autobiography in the broader theoretical framework of Smothered Words. The parallels between Alexandre Akim and her father moreover imply that “the stranger” is analogous to the persecuted Jew. Akim, she writes, is “always already” a “stranger,” for his place is infinitely outside all communities. Thus, as an infinite other, he “escapes power’s jurisdiction and answers to another law, that which affirms his truth as a stranger”
(Smothered Words 75-76, fn. 8). The “Jewish position” is thus inescapable, for it always
appears in direct relation to Blanchot’s fictional “The Idyll,” his critical work on Kafka, and Kafka’s The Trial.
Sobelman 69 turns upon itself and reaffirms its isolation. Blanchot’s main character recognizes that the
“senseless breaking of the human race into two” (8), such as what took place in the
Holocaust, is one which, if it indeed “makes sense” at all, confirms the Jew as the infinite
Other. The Jew, for Blanchot, Kofman thus asserts, “is the emblematic figure” whose force is outside of the aims of Nazi extermination, since he “has been able to preserve throughout his history the vocation of foreignness, of exile, of the outside” (8). The
Jewish condition, Kofman suggests, is unmovable precisely because of its endless otherness.
Halfway through Smothered Words, in Chapter V, Kofman introduces French writer Robert Antelme and his autobiographical The Human Race. The Human Race is comprised of detailed literary descriptions of Antelme’s experiences as a political prisoner. He was arrested for his active participation in the French Resistance and was incarcerated in Buchenwald, Dachau and Gandersheim concentration camps. The text also contains highly philosophical reflections on his experiences. His work emerges as part autobiography, part allegory. Furthermore, for Kofman, the imaginative introspection derived from the self-reflection provided by Antelme’s work is manifested in her utilization of Blanchot’s fiction as a gateway to
[t]hat which cannot, without delusion, be ‘communicated’… That for which there
are no words—or too many—and not only because the ‘limit experience’ of
infinite privation, like all other experiences, cannot be transmitted… Knotted
words, demanded and yet forbidden, because for too long they have been
internalized and withheld, which stick in your throat and cause you to suffocate,
to lose your breath, which asphyxiate you, taking away the possibility of even
beginning. (38-39).
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In another analytic crossing over from Blanchot’s fictional work to Antelme’s autobiographical account, Kofman describes “the Home” in “The Idyll” as a place where the Stranger is amongst detainees
who will never be true ‘comrades’ for [Akim], despite the shared mattresses, the
excessive familiarity which gives rise only to ‘suspect forms of intimacy.’ In this
false community, in which there is no esprit de corps, where everyone lives only
for himself, jumbled together with others, they will soon come to view the
stranger as an informer who will not submit to the general rule, even to avert it
(Kofman 24).
Interestingly, Kofman does not respond to The Human Race in similar ways as she responds to “The Idyll,” especially with respect to the betrayal of comradeship in close quarters. Her description of “the Home” in Blanchot’s text rather seems more applicable to Antleme’s description of the train car in his final chapter, entitled “Escape,” to which
Kofman does not directly refer. Referring particularly to the “bondless entanglement” of the detainees’ bodies in “The Idyll,” however, Kofman asks of concentration camp inmates: “If no language was possible between the SS oppressor—the god whom one could not look in the face or approach without being scorched, blinded, pulverized, as if by the sun—and the victims, could the deportees at least establish amongst themselves relationships of real community?” She negatively responds to her own inquiry: in “The
Idyll,” no, because the detainees, no more than a “bondless entanglement” of bodies, were stripped of the possibility of selfhood through the destruction of the possibility of language: “[T]here was no potential for true expression” (Smothered Words 49).
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The Human Race, Kofman notes in contrast to “The Idyll,” shows how “on the deportees’ side as well, true speech was for the most part betrayed, compromised…,” but only for the “most part,” since at Gandersheim, the SS foreman “couldn’t prevent words from passing from one man to another” (Antelme 193). But for the detainees, Kofman writes, “speech was necessary if they were to avoid becoming the animals that the Nazis wanted to turn them into,” and “if, though deprived of everything, they were to continue to resist, to exist” (52). Nevertheless, I propose that The Human Race conveys precisely what Kofman claims “The Idyll” conveys: the utter impossibility of speech, manifested as “suffocation” due to one’s being Other in an environment—the Home in Blanchot’s text, and the traincar depicted in Antelme’s text—inside of which scores of inmates are entangled within one another’s bodies yet enemies all the same (in Blanchot unable to speak and in Antelme unable to speak “without choking” [Smothered Words 38]). The purpose of Kofman’s “cutting” the scene of entangled bodies and extinguished comradeship in her summary of The Human Race can perhaps be explained by the analogy she makes between her father’s status at Auschwitz and Antelme’s position as a prisoner in The Human Race. Bereck Kofman, who was beaten and buried alive for uttering prayer and who literally choked as he attempted to use words in order to convey his devotion to a God greater than the SS “gods” of the camp, is perhaps for Kofman most optimistically conveyed through Antelme’s self-depiction. The inmate can be understood, according to Kofman, as caught in a “double bind,” that is, an
infinite claim to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irrepressible
force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a choking
feeling. Knotted words, demanded and yet forbidden, because for too long they
have been internalized and withheld, which stick in your throat and cause you to
Sobelman 72
suffocate, to lose your breath, which asphyxiate you, taking away the possibility
of even beginning. To have to speak without being able to speak or be understood,
to have to choke, such is the ethical exigency that Robert Antleme obeys in The
Human Race. (39)
The key words in this passage, which seem to lessen the force of Bereck Kofman’s death described in Smothered Words, impart an opening in asphyxiated speech and a break in the “double bind” of the camp prisoner. Kofman describes an “almost” impossibility to speak, a “feeling” of choking, to “have to speak” not only because one is not able to, but also because one might not be “understood” (39). Eilene Hoft-March notes precisely this distinction. According to her, as a result of this “double-bind” defined in her text,
Kofman “adopts two consecutive and very different positions on remembering and writing the Holocaust: on the one hand, that one cannot write, and on the other, that one must” (Hoft-March 110). But the absoluteness of Kofman’s depiction of Akim in “The
Idyll” is slightly altered in her characterization of Antleme in The Human Race, for without some kind of self-proclaimed autobiographical depiction of a man, which provides a more coherent analogy to describe her father’s experience, there are no “living” words at all, only invented ones, those conceived, as Blanchot’s were, outside of the realm of historical reality. As I argue below, in recognizing the fundamental split between literary depiction and historical reality, Kofman supplements the description of her father’s death with archival material.
Kofman’s Historical Proof
Kofman’s conception of the Holocaust—“this event, my absolute, which communicates with the absolute of history, and which is of interest only for this reason”
Sobelman 73
(10)—is partially presented through her inclusion of a historical document in the text.
She describes the document, which she found in the Serge Klarsfeld Memorial,24 as such:
[W]ith its endless columns of names, its lack of pathos, its sobriety, the ‘neutrality’
of its information, this sublime memorial takes your breath away. Its ‘neutral’
voice summons you obliquely; in its extreme restraint, it is the very voice of
affliction, of this event in which all possibility vanished… This voice leaves you
without a voice, makes you doubt your common sense and all sense, makes you
suffocate in silence… (10-11)
Kofman’s lines suggest the existence of historical “proof” of the Holocaust. They also fill in the gap of communication between life and language. Here it is possible take Hoft-
March’s claim further, for by playing the dual role as critic and autobiographer,
Kofman’s distinctions are perhaps even necessary if her father’s death is part of the
“absolute history” to which she must remain faithful as she writes in the book’s opening; thus she not only takes up an autobiographical presence in the text “in order to privilege the vacated position of her father and the second- and third-hand narrations that
‘authenticate’ his position” (111), but she distinguishes between Antelme’s and
Blanchot’s texts in order to reveal an analogy between Antelme and Bereck that further
24 The recorded list of names to which Kofman refers, officially entitled “Memorial de la Deportation des Juifs de France,” contains statistics of more than 75,000 Jews deported from France between the years of 1942 to 1944. Serge Klarsfeld—a “leading Nazi hunter” in France—with his wife Beate, established and published the list, later adding statistics of deportees from Belgium during the same years. The records are in microform, and were originally published as a 600-page document by Klarsfeld himself. An English translation was produced by the Klarsfeld Foundation in 1983. See bibliography for full citation.
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“authenticates” the latter’s position, and clearly establishes a distinction between
Blanchot’s fiction and Antleme’s account.
Finally, defining Kofman’s autobiographical position in Smothered Words through her use of language itself is helpful for beginning a reading of Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat. Although it can be argued that Kofman’s first “I” appears in the dedicatory notes preceding her introductory citation wherein she writes “my father,” this “I” is a conceivably “historical I,” while the “I” on page one of the text can arguably be called
Kofman’s “narrative I.”25 In the text’s opening paragraph, Kofman writes:
[I]t behooves me, as a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the Holocaust,
to pay homage to Blanchot for the fragments on Auschwitz scattered throughout
his texts: writing of the ashes, writing of the disaster which avoids the trap of
complicity with speculative knowledge, with that in it which is tied to power, and
thereby complicit with the torturers of Auschwitz. (7-8)
Through the line “[I]t behooves me, as a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the
Holocaust…,” Kofman not only takes up the role of the text’s author, but she does so as a
“Jewish woman,” thus inserting herself into the text as a subject of scrutiny. It is thus not
25 For distinctions between four modes of the “autobiographical I,” see Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith’s Reading Autobiography, wherein they cite scholars such as Chantal Mouffe and James Phelan, and autobiographers such as Mary McCarthy, Faith Ringgold, and Henry Adams in order to delineate between the following four types of autobiographical “I”: the “real” or “historical ‘I’”; the “narrating ‘I’,” “the narrated ‘I’,” and the “ideological ‘I’” (Smith and Watson 72-77). With these various demarcations in mind, it can be argued that Kofman’s “I” of her dedication to her father in Smothered Words is not necessarily equivalent to the “I” inside the text itself, not only due to the fact that she writes “my” and not “I” in the dedication, but also because she has chosen to sever the text into these separate parts. An additional possible analysis of Smothered Words emerges when the text is read via Blanchot’s ideas in his essay “The Narrative Voice,” wherein he writes of the Kafkian “I,” which is a “neutral” voice that asserts itself between the writer and the work he or she writes.
Sobelman 75 singularly Kofman’s “I,” or the record of her father’s deportation, which prompt a scholar-autobiographical examination of the work, but it is rather the fact of the “I” in the text that indicates and establishes Kofman’s autobiographical position throughout
Smothered Words.
Some scholars, such as Eilene Hoft-March, discuss a link between Smothered
Words and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, which locates Kofman’s later text within the web of critical assertions she makes in Smothered Words. Smothered Words, Hoft-March claims, illustrates Blanchot’s “paralyzing dictum” of communicating details of Auschwitz, while
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, is written, rather, “in light of Antelme’s urging” (115). To explain further, Kofman reads Blanchot’s “The Idyll” as representative of the impossibility of communication about Auschwitz, which is “always already” cut off from communication. Antelme’s “urging” of communication, however, allows for the possibility of an opening through which language potentially begins. Smothered Words expresses precisely what its title suggests: words about Auschwitz are “choked on”
(indeed, suffoquees translates literally as “suffocated”26), without the possibility of beginning. Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, however, as the remainder of this chapter indicates, is an opening through which communication about Auschwitz occurs.
Challenging Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as Autobiography
26 More specifically, Madeleine Dobie explains her translation of Kofman’s book as Smothered Words: “The title Paroles suffoquées is derived from a passage in Robert Antleme’s The Human Race that describes the feeling of choking or suffocation experienced by the survivor when he or she tries to speak of the camps. In French, the verb suffoquer has both an instransitive meaning, to choke or suffocate, and a tansitive meaning, to strangle or smother. As a result, Antelme’s and Kofman’s use of the word resonates with the memory of asphyxiation of millions of victims” (Smothered Words xxiii). For “aesthetic reasons,” Dobie notes, she titled the work Smothered Words, which “captures only one of the possible meanings of suffoquer” (xxiii).
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Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is considered by Kofman scholars to be the most autobiographical of her longer texts. Pleshette DeArmitt calls this text, along with
Smothered Words, Kofman’s “explicitly autobiographical texts” and describes Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat as a “haunting work” (2) wherein Kofman “provides an account of her childhood and adolescence as a Holocaust survivor in France” (“Introduction,” Sarah
Kofman’s Corpus 2). Similarly, John K. Roth describes Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a
“memoir about antisemitism, family separation, and hiding during the German occupation of her native France” (Ethics During and After the Holocaust 6). In the major two-volume encyclopedia, Holocaust Literature, S. Lillian Kremer characterizes Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat as Kofman’s “memoir of survival” (Holocaust Literature: An
Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work v. 1 Agosín to Lentin 680). The work is singled out from Kofman’s corpus as distinctly personal and is thus given little attention as a theoretical text.
As a scholar-autobiography, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat poses a problem for strictly autobiographical readings that focus on the text’s literary elements. In some cases, of course, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat’s literary characteristics challenge definitions of autobiography more generally, but discussions of the literariness of the text complicate its scholarly characteristics even further. Therefore, in order to begin analyzing the text as scholar-autobiography, questions about its status as an autobiography require some elaboration.
Literary critic Stephen Shapiro argues in “The Dark Continent of Literature” that
“[o]ne of the most important conventions” in autobiographical writing is “the structural metaphor of the ‘turning point’” (438). Citing “turning points” in the autobiographical works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Shapiro claims that these writers “are drawing their lines very clearly for the sake of dramatic impact and narrative
Sobelman 77 perspective” (439). As a challenge to “a life as lived,” however, “turning points do not appear so carefully marked or so readily detachable from the web of daily experience”
(439). As a result of writing autobiography, then, “[l]ife’s long arcs become sharp angles of literature” (439). Although Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, I propose, follows along the lines of Shapiro’s claim in its “sharp” points and shifts in narrative, in several ways the text complicates the notion of the “turning point” as a stable characteristic in life writing texts.
By examining Shapiro’s claim, as well as existing commentary on Kofman’s literary
“tendencies” in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, a reading of the work emerges that both challenges these notions and suggests new scholar-autobiographical ways of reading the text.
A number of scholars define Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a linear, chronologically constructed narrative depiction of Kofman’s childhood in Paris before, during and after the Holocaust. Vivian Liska, for example, broadly defines the text as a “traditional autobiography” (Liska 11), which, “contrary to [Kofman’s] praise of the fragmentary and rhapsodic form” in the works of Nietzsche and E.T.A. Hoffmann in her scholarship, is a story “telling a continuous, coherent sequence of events…” (7). The narrative, Liska claims, “tells the story of Bereck Kofman’s deportation to Auschwitz, of his death there, reported by witnesses… and of its aftermath for the little girl Sarah who was then eight years old” (7). In another discussion of the literariness of the text, Christie McDonald calls Rue Ordener, Rue Labat “a searing, magnificent account of her childhood” (“Sarah
Kofman: Effecting Self Translation” 185), and argues that the work takes up a dramatic style more often found in fictional works.
Conley proposes a very different approach to Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, arguing that the work can be read “as a sort of fairytale of a child born into a difficult history”
(153). Classifying Rue Ordener, Rue Labat at different points in her article as a “novella,”
Sobelman 78
“fiction,” and “utopian novel,” Conley describes it as a highly literary text containing a
“psychoanalytic resonance” which follows the classical notion that “equates autobiography with children’s literature” (153) and a “kind of proto-feminist narrative” which follows a “French tradition of stories and storytelling” (153). These points regarding the text’s comparison to French traditions and children’s literature are of little importance to the arguments presented here, and I focus rather on Conley’s identifying the work as a “novella” and a “fiction.” Conley’s assertions are similar to Shapiro’s claims regarding “turning points,” as she also, though in a different manner, points to the existence of “turns” in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, suggesting that the text is inherently fictional (Shapiro only claims that the autobiographical work is fictional due to its impossibility of accurately depicting a lived life). According to Conley’s assertions,
Kofman’s text “folds onto itself and seems to be born through its own spatial inversions—by an itinerary that reaches back into itself, that crawls into the womb that it at the same time constructs” (157). By “creating this literary space,” Conley writes,
Kofman “incorporates herself ” into the framework of the text (157).
While Conley’s assertion that the inward turn in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is one of the text’s central characteristics is helpful for beginning to understand the narrative disjointedness in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, her emphasis on a precise “turning point” in the narrative is problematical. She identifies chapter twelve, entitled “Metamorphosis,” as the text’s “central chapter” amongst twenty-three “memory flashes” (157). Chapter twelve, Conley claims, essentially “divides the work into two halves” (157), between which can be found “the impossibility of resolution” (157) of Kofman’s choosing between her real mother and Mémé, who kept Kofman in hiding during the Holocaust.
Michael Stanislawski also assigns critical importance to the location of chapter twelve within the larger text. He writes: “[I]t is not at all by chance that the longest
Sobelman 79 section… called ‘Metamorphosis,’ comes precisely at the middle of the book—the pivot of the narrative” (152). Regarding this “pivot,” which is also suggested by the chapter’s title, Stanislawski argues that the chapter’s content “is the ‘metamorphosis’ that the chapter title speaks” where “the chiasmatic descent into the second half of the autobiography begins” (164). Although Stanislawski’s and Adermatt Conley’s examinations of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat bear different conclusions from those suggested by Shapiro’s general definition of autobiography, they all propose the existence of textual
“turns” in autobiographical narratives. In order to challenge all three critical arguments, the following section looks at the highly disjointed chapters in the work.
Shapiro notes that dividing an autobiographical text into many short chapters enables autobiographers to construct a chronologically ordered and coherent series of recollections that conceal the disjointed nature of autobiographical acts. “Many autobiographers,” he writes,
have avoided the problem of strict narrative stitchery, without sacrificing
continuity, by resorting to the use of many chapters, complete in
themselves and not requiring the tedious explicit linkages and bridge
passages of traditional narrative. The spaces between passages or chapters
are like cinematic transitions that simultaneously signal discontinuity and
continuity. (440-441)
Kofman’s short chapters in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, can also be read as her literary response to the “the chaotic density of experience” which “defies direct representation”
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(438). Particularly relevant to recollections of traumatic events,27 “the strategies of indirection must be used to stimulate, to give the illusion of a life being lived or relived”
(438). While Shapiro’s concept is generally applicable to Kofman’s text, there may be other reasons for the irregular pattern of narration in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat.
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as Kofmanian Work of Art
Kofman’s critical arguments in The Childhood of Art, specifically related to the repetition of art as a natural process in the act of memory recollection, may help to explain the disjointed form of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. In The Childhood of Art, Kofman argues that art is describable as a “double, an internal division of the self from the self, a repetition” (129) and as a collection of “phantasmal constructions of memory traces”
(129) which “put the past into play by distorting it” (129). And earlier she asks: “[C]an childhood memories be distinguished from fantasies?” Through a symptomal reading of
Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in which “Freud actually constructs one of the painter’s fantasies,” (Childhood of Art 61) Kofman asserts that
Freud’s interpretation is virtually impossible, since, according to Freudian theory itself,
“fantasies themselves are produced from material acquired from one source or another” and thus “can barely be distinguished from memories” (61). The “meaning” of one’s past experience, Kofman continues, “is always given after the fact” and thus “[s]cenes from the past act in deferred fashion” (62). When a child lives through an experience, “he does not understand it” but only captures it “when it is relived, at which point he fantasizes the
27 See, for instance, Cathy Caruth, “Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim’s Voice” in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001); Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992); Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Assault on Holocaust Memory”; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time”; and James Young, “Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor” and “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust”. See Bibliography for full bibliographical details.
Sobelman 81 memory…” (62). All indications that the events depicted in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat may be read “as lived” experiences are proven false, for even Freud’s conception of memories,
Kofman argues, “no longer has anything to do with the logic of representation”
(Childhood of Art 62). The “memory fragments” purported by scholars to represent
Kofman’s experience in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, then, are akin to fantasies, for they are
“originary substitutive formations that supplement the lack of meaning in past experience”
(62). Considering Kofman’s assertion that the work of art is analogous to hysterical symptoms and childhood memory recollection, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat becomes a fascinating subject of interpretation.
Furthermore, while the text appears to convey traces of Kofman’s childhood experiences, it also fails to fill in its own “traces”:
Since the raw material of memory traces is unknown in its original form, solving
the riddle of psychic productions consists neither in digging up the past as if it
existed anywhere but in its mere traces, nor finding its prefabricated meaning in
the unconscious. The riddle is thus a false one, because meaning is nowhere to be
found. Solving the riddle, therefore, consists not in retrieving an original full
meaning that never existed, but in sorting out the distortions, distinguishing the
originary substitutive formations from the later ones. (64)
A Kofmanian interpretation of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat therefore may necessitate a critical search for possible distortions in the text. Finding these distortions requires tracing the places in the text in which Kofman partakes in what Jacques Derrida calls the
Sobelman 82 act of “citational grafting.”28 Examining Kofman’s use of citational grafting, the first of which is in the form of quotation marks in the opening of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, as well as her use of footnotes in the text, will encourage a new critical understanding of the work.
“That” (“ça”) in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat: Studying Kofman’s Quotation Marks
The seemingly minor “ça,” (translated by Anne Smock as “that”) in the opening lines of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat has been pondered over by a number of critics of
Kofman. Christie McDonald reads “ça” as the testament to Kofman’s life in hiding during the Holocaust; Michael Stanislawski reads the word as an illustration of “the push and pull over her and within her, between her real, Jewish mother, and the non-Jewish mother who saved them both” (Stanislawski 153). I suggest that the “ça” (hereafter written as “that”) in the text’s opening lines is both a literal reference to Kofman’s father’s broken fountain pen, and an allusion to the impossibility of writing “that” autobiographical text—the one that contains the purportedly non-fictional account of
Kofman’s early experiences. I propose that Kofman, following Derrida, uses quotation marks to indicate the hiddenness of all that has prompted her to write this text, as well as all of her works that came before. I further argue that Kofman follows Derrida’s assertion that the meanings afforded by signs are infinitely changed when they are positioned between quotation marks. Derrida describes the analogical capability of all signs in
Margins of Philosophy:
28 For further clarification of the term “citational grafting,” see Derrida’s “Signature Event Context,” 12.
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Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this
opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, but between quotation marks;
thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new
contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the
mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts
without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or
duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that
(normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called
‘normal’ functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose
origin could not be lost on the way? (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy 320-321)
Kofman’s “that” is properly explained by Derrida’s above claim that the content expressed within a set of quotation marks need not heed a final calling or signification, but rather by virtue of its enclosure and its inherent expression of a meaning outside of its appearance contains no attainable—even if recognizable—signification. Kofman’s positioning of herself as a philosopher and autobiographer can be found between and within these quotation marks. Her obscure “that” is all but obscure on the one hand, that is, it is a clear reference to the fountain pen resting before her, pleading with her to “write, write”; on the other hand, by virtue of being cited, it is incapable of contextualization, for the “that,” as long as it has been written in quotation marks, renders it infinitely meaningful, and hence also lacking meaning, and infinitely contextualizable, that is, without context.
Moreover, Derrida’s Of Spirit, which addresses Martin Heidegger’s original use of quotation marks around the word “spirit” in Being and Time (1927), and his later omission of these marks in his “Rectorship Address” (1933), helps to explain Kofman’s
Sobelman 84 use of quotation marks in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. According to Derrida, six years separated Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), in which the word “spirit” appeared in quotation marks on every occasion, and the “Rectorship Address.” What is important in
Derrida’s “Of Spirit” for the present study of Sarah Kofman’s “that” in the opening lines of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is Derrida’s sketch of “the law of quotation marks,” which follows:
Two by two they stand guard: at the frontier or before the door, assigned to the
threshold in any case, and these places are always dramatic. The apparatus lends
itself to theatricalization and also to the hallucination of the stage and its
machinery: two pairs of pegs hold in suspension a sort of drape, a veil or a curtain.
Not closed, just slightly open. (463)
Derrida’s imaginative description of the placing and lifting of quotation marks relates to Kofman’s work in a number of unsuspecting ways: Firstly, Kofman’s use of these marks around “that” support the Derridian claim that quotation marks serve as
“curtains” around a central drama, played out only with the lifting of the marks, as was the case of Heidegger’s omission of the marks surrounding “spirit” in the “Rectorship
Address.” Of Heidegger, Derrida states: “Six years later, 1933, and here we have the
‘Rectorship Address’: The curtain-raising is also the spectacle of academic solemnity, the splendor of the staging celebrating the quotation marks’ disappearance” (463). Derrida’s evaluation of Heidegger’s linguistic move is highly complex, but his elucidation of “the law of quotation marks” aids in explicating Kofman’s marks around “that,” for in the
Derridian sense of the “law of quotation marks,” the word “that”—which, as I explained above, cannot be contextualized by virtue of its citational character—is now full of the
Sobelman 85 entire text of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. The “that” becomes in this way a “stage” for the drama played out in the text, and an opening (if only “slight” as Derrida notes) to be filled by the remaining space of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat.
Kofman’s Derridian/Freudian Footnotes in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat
A second, but essential, textual act is Kofman’s use of footnotes in the text. In
“Complicated Fidelity: Kofman’s Freud,” Penelope Deutscher proposes the idea that
Kofman may be “a disturbingly faithful Freudian critic” (161). Kofman’s faithfulness to
Freud, however, Deutscher continues, is only an apparent one, for it is complicated by
“the way in which the textual references” (161) to thinkers besides Freud, such as
Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Marx bounce off one another, or, as Deutscher puts it,
“ricochet” (161). In a number of Kofman’s works discussed throughout this dissertation,
Kofman performs what Deutscher poetically defines as a “flickering across a stream of philosophers,” whose varied methodologies she employs in order to “facilitate the connectivities between her male philosophers” (161). A close examination of the ways in which Rue Ordener, Rue Labat illustrates her practice of patch-working her intellectual forerunners reveals an important connection between Kofman’s Freud and Kofman’s
Derrida, which surfaces only through an intertextual Derridian reading of the first of two footnotes in Kofman’s chapter entitled, “In Flight.” The following reading shows that
Kofman’s use of quotation marks and footnotes weaves a common thread from Kofman to Freud via Derrida. In order to illustrate Kofman’s use of academic-style footnotes particularly in the manner that Derrida approaches them, serve not only as annotations in the text, but they also “unmask” that which cannot be contextualized according to
Derrida’s formula: Koman’s memories of the events of her childhood, her father’s murder, and the very possibility of writing this work without “choking” on words.
Sobelman 86
Shari Benstock provides a helpful discussion of footnotes in Derrida’s “At the
Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” which, when supplemented with
Derrida’s comments on the same subject, clarify Kofman’s use of the first footnote in
“Flight.” Benstock is interested in Derrida’s emphasis on “the physical existence of the footnote—the placement and form that make the footnote obviously what it is” (Benstock
220, n2).29 She explains further:
While notes are separated from the text on which they comment, keyed by
superscript numerals and placed at the bottoms of pages or at the ends of chapters,
they nonetheless negotiate an invisible and constantly changing line between this
text and the texts that precede or will follow it, between this text and themselves.
(120, n. 2)
Footnotes thus, according to Benstock, play different roles depending on the texts in which they appear. Her essay focuses on footnotes appearing in fictional works, which is certainly applicable to the present reading of Kofman’s footnotes in Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat, particularly as the work has been discussed as a kind of fiction. Looking at the text as one which “cries out for literary treatment,”30 however, helps in a roundabout way to understand Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as scholar-autobiographical work.
Kofman’s first footnote in “Flight” reads as follows: “I later wrote a short book entitled Camera obscura” (Paris: Gallilée, 1973). What can be immediately understood
29 Benstock looks at a number of Derrida’s texts which discuss footnotes, but her primary references—only in certain cases the same as those used in this chapter—are “Living On,” which includes Derrida’s examination of Blanchot’s La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day, 1981), and which, interestingly for any study of footnotes, presents a single running footnote through the whole of the text. 30 William Cloonan and Jean-Philippe Postel, “The Revues in Review: The Novel in 1994,” 920.
Sobelman 87 here is that Kofman’s extratextual reference to her earlier scholarly work immediately locates her as a scholar-autobiographer. In the midst of a recollection of childhood events she refers to her own academic work, which is a highly curious move in a text which tells the story of her lived life and not the “life” of the “Sarah Kofman” who writes.
Benstock’s explanation of footnotes in literary texts is especially helpful here. She refers to the footnote in literary texts as “skeletal” and “succinct,” whose purpose is to
“elaborate on the text without engulfing it” (204). Furthermore, Benstock asserts that a footnote “adjusts the limits of the textual universe in which [it] participates” (204), which is highly applicable for reading Kofman’s footnote. It provides this adjustment, particularly as it appears within the framework of a chapter entitled “In Flight.” That is, the footnote as a textual “departure” or “flight” from the text exposes Kofman’s utilization of the citational mark as a symptom of the chapter’s role in the broader text: to bring context to that which is inherently impossible to contextualize, namely Kofman’s
Holocaust childhood and knowledge of her father’s murder. She invents context by acknowledging an earlier work and in doing so engages Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a scholarly work.
Kofman’s first footnote reference appears in parentheses and follows:
(On the Rue Ordener, when [my mother] couldn’t get us to stop shouting, crying,
or quarreling, she would shut us up in a dark room [footnote 1] that served as a
storage space, threatening us that ‘Maredwitchtale’ [footnote 2] would come for
us…). (73)
The footnotes in this passage, embedded in parentheses, call special attention to themselves. As if to doubly conceal her extratextual reference, Kofman further immerses
Sobelman 88 her text in Derrida’s game of citational grafting by once again reaffirming the impossibility of context. Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, to which Kofman refers in
Footnote 1, contains a short chapter entitled “Freud—The Photographic Apparatus,” which addresses Freud’s analogy of the “camera obscura” to the unconscious. Kofman’s linking of the analogy of the camera obscura to the theory of the unconscious in Freud’s work is useful for understanding Kofman’s first footnote in her “Flight” chapter in Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat, for it implies that in Freud’s texts—particularly Project for a
Scientific Psychology (1895), Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), and Moses and
Monotheism (1939)—according to Kofman’s formulation, there exists a “passage from darkness to light, or from the unconscious to consciousness” (Kofman, Camera Obscura:
Of Ideology 21-22). Kofman asserts that Freud’s utilization of the photographic apparatus and the photographic negative is “intended to show that all psychic phenomena necessarily pass first through an unconscious phase, through darkness and the negative, before acceding to consciousness, before developing within the clarity of the positive”
(22). And Kofman’s most pertinent assertion in this chapter of Camera Obscura for understanding its relevance in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is that the “passage from darkness to light” (27), and its redefinition in Moses and Monotheism as the “passage from infancy to adulthood” (27) is not dictated by linearity, but rather, as an analogy of photographic development. It has nothing to do with “development,” but rather with the possibility of
“darkness to be made light” (27). The example of Moses and Monotheism makes evident that “the psychic apparatus, the passage from negative to positive”—from darkness to light, from unconscious to conscious—“is neither necessary nor dialectical” for “[i]t is possible that the development will never take place” (27). Repression—the veiling of that which awaits movement from darkness to light through psychoanalysis—is, according to
Kofman, “originary, and there is always an irretrievable residue, something which will
Sobelman 89 never have access to the unconscious” (27). In the Derridian sense explained above,
Kofman’s first footnote in “In Flight” can be read as an analogy for that “irretrievable residue,” for the footnote by its basic characterization refuses contextualization; it lingers
“in flight,” never grounded, always without “full meaning” (Camera Obscura 28). “To pass from darkness to light,” Kofman writes in Camera Obscura, that is, to force meaning through extratextual reference, is not “to rediscover a meaning already there”
(28), but is rather “to construct a meaning which has never existed as such” (28). And since Kofman argues that total meaning “has never been present” in the process of psychic development, her inclusion of the footnote, which ironically refers to a text that points out the impossibility of finding originary meaning through psychoanalysis, admits to psychic “substitutive procedures” that “allow us to construct, after the fact… the meaning of experience” (28). And furthermore, since this constructed meaning is always
“hypothetical” (28), Kofman’s footnote has a contradictory effect, as it cannot be contextualized within any limits, and it cannot, like processes at work in the unconscious, find any true origin. It is thus an example of the limitation of expression of meaning through writing and confirmation of meaning as endlessly “in flight.” The “dark room” to which Kofman refers in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat can also be understood as the “dark room” that is the unconscious, where even repeated contextualization will offer no assistance in finding full meaning of unconscious activity. Any potential context that will bring origin or meaning to the events depicted in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is unrealizable.
Reading Eating in “Damned Food” and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, and Kofman’s short text, “Damned Food” also illustrate the notion of the impossibility of communicating one’s experience of the Holocaust. As the following section illustrates, Kofman’s autobiographical depictions related to food
Sobelman 90 and eating have strong theoretical undertones, which suggest an intrinsic link between her life writing and scholarship. The following analysis examines passages from a selection of Kofman’s writings about food and eating. By first confronting a number conclusions made by scholars who deal with the theme of food in Kofman’s autobiographical work, this chapter proposes that understanding Kofman’s most complex ideas about food requires an examination of her scholarly assertions in Smothered Words, combined with her autobiographical depictions in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and “Damned Food.”
Food—as threat, sustenance, and feces—is undeniably a central subject in
Kofman’s work. While some scholars have noted Kofman’s particular emphasis on food in her work, few have linked her writings on food to one another, and even fewer have noted how specific ideas presented in these writings engage, complement, or contradict one another.
One scholar who addresses Kofman’s repeated return to the theme of food is
Frances Bartowski, who writes that “Damned Food” is a “discourse of/about scarcity and impoverishment—in its materiality and fearsomeness” (“Autobiographical Writings” 6).
Bartowski connects “Damned Food” to Kofman’s autobiographical prose pieces
“Nightmare” and “Tomb for a Proper Name,” stating that, in all three texts, “the loss of food… and shelter… coalesce in the loss of the name… through a terrible version of self- sufficiency that leads only to self-destruction—feeding one oneself… To link [the three pieces] is to move from food to the body to language” (“Autobiographical Writings” 6-7).
His analysis considers these three autobiographical texts, but does not factor in any of her scholarship related to food. Indeed, the issue of food in Kofman’s autobiographical works has rarely been assessed in relation to her larger body of work. Kathryn Robson, for example, in “Bodily Detours: Sarah Kofman’s Narratives of Childhood Trauma,” asserts that “Damned Food” expresses Kofman’s loss of her father in childhood:
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[A]lthough the father seems forgotten [in “Damned Food”], we can trace the
child’s (in)ability to mourn and to give voice to her father’s death through what
she eats and what she does not—or cannot eat. Having already lost her father, the
child carries out hunger strikes… [E]quating eating with accepting separation and
loss, she resists separation through self-imposed starvation. (Robson 614)
What is immediately problematical in Robson’s reading is its emphasis on Kofman’s biography. While she brings some of Kofman’s texts together for a comparative analysis, she does so in order to concretize biographical facts of Kofman’s experiences as they are depicted through her life writing. Some of the problems that emerge from such readings were addressed earlier in this chapter.
Robson’s analysis is flawed in other ways as well. Although she notes Kofman’s rejection of food, in her central argument she neglects to mention Kofman’s references to vomiting found in both Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and “Damned Food.” Additionally, and to the detriment of reading Kofman’s work as representational rather than factual,
Robson provides a comparison of Kofman’s work to published case studies and scholarship on the subject of eating disorders. The insertion of statistical information detracts from the comparative analysis she purports to present.
Finally, among Kofman scholars who emphasize the relationship between her texts and feeding, food, digestion, and purging, Michael Stanislawski claims that
Kofman’s “food issues” are comprehensible by way of Freud’s description of the satisfaction children feel following a breast-fed meal, which, Freud argues, belatedly emerges as “a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life” (159).
Stanislawski equates what he calls Kofman’s “hysterical vomiting” with a “’defensive
Sobelman 92 regression’ against positive Oedipal wishes” (159). These Oedipal wishes, he proposes, are embodied in Kofman’s “homosexual attraction to her surrounding surrogate Christian mothers,” (159) including Madame Fagnard and Mémé. This somewhat reductive reading, as an about-face to Robson’s analysis, focuses on eating and vomiting, rather than on starvation and vomiting. The following analysis responds to Stanislawski’s and Robson’s claims, and proposes a reading of Kofman’s work that exposes an intimate and highly theoretical connection between feeding, ingestion, digestion, and vomiting in several of her texts.
“Damned Food” and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat are two texts that resemble one another most obviously in their approaches to self-diminishment by way of refusing nourishment and subsequently attempting to vomit what was never ingested. The issue of food for Kofman in both writings is also significant in that food and food-related anxiety are always linked to a mother or mother figure. In the case of “Damned Food,” the fixed source of food is Kofman’s mother, while her father is depicted as the gentler, less forceful provider of sustenance:
“You must eat,” said my mother. And she stuffed and stuffed and stuffed us. Not a
chance of being deprived of dessert with her.
“You must not eat everything,” said my father. Not mix milk and meat, not eat just
any meat; not eat off just any dish; not mix plates and silverware, milchig and
fleischig; purify them once a year at Passover, in case of a mistake made misguidedly.
(8)
Kofman’s mother, she writes, “officiated in the kitchen, where it was not uncommon to see a cut of salted beef dripping blood for hours, or a carp wriggling in a deep pan…” (8).
Sobelman 93
Her father, an orthodox rabbi, was “a ritual slaughterer” who provided Jews in the surrounding neighborhood with kosher meat; he “killed chickens in the toilet according to the law” (8). Her father acted according to Jewish law, her mother forced it upon
Kofman and her siblings. As Kelly Oliver points out in her study of “Damned Food,”
Kofman’s mother “is the voice of paternal law, while her father, through his paternal authority, is beyond the ritual protection of the paternal law. Her father’s authority purifies, but her mother’s contaminates” (“Sarah Kofman’s Queasy Stomach,” Enigmas
185). In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman often refuses to eat the food “stuffed” by her mother, regardless of her hunger. Several lines in “Damned Food” interconnect and moreover shed light on her autobiographical depictions in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. The text suggests two explanations for her refusal to eat her mother’s food in Rue Ordener,
Rue Labat. A look at Smothered Words furthers these explanations.
Firstly, however, she asks in “Damned Food”: “Was it fear of transgressing some taboo, or the consequence of being stuffed, the fact that I had hardly any appetite and resisted with all my might the maternal categorical imperative?” (8). Her second suggestion, the “maternal categorical imperative,” is an important concept in the context of Kofman’s statements about her mother’s demands. In the first pages of Smothered
Words, Kofman states that the “categorical imperative,” which is constructed by
Theodore Adorno “in the style of Kant, though ridding it of its abstract and ideal generality,” is most comprehensibly addressed by Freud in The Ego and the Id. In The
Ego and the Id, Freud asserts that a child’s initial “compulsion to obey his parents” is a defining point in her or her psychic development which ultimately transforms into the tendency to rebel. In the stage of rebellion, “the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego" (48). From this initial rebellion forward, the child is under the authority of the id, ego, and super-ego, the first two of which are controlled by
Sobelman 94 fantasies emerging in the super-ego. Kofman’s explanation of the categorical imperative in Smothered Words helps to explain her use of the phrase in “Damned Food.” Thus, by reading “Damned Food” as the primary source of analysis, and Smothered Words as the secondary critical source, Kofman seems to have answered her own inquiry: by denying her mother’s food, she is resisting her childhood desire to gain satisfaction brought on by maternal love.
Moreover, in “Damned Food” Kofman proposes that not eating is analogous to her breaking “Jewish law.” This suggestion further complicates the description of her mother in “Damned Food”: “To accomplish her ends,” she writes, “my mother would follow me to school with her bowl of café au lait, taking the teacher as witness of my crime: ‘She didn’t eat this morning!’” (8). It is therefore not only a problem that her mother “stuffed and stuffed and stuffed us” (8), but that she also punished her children for not being “stuffed.”
Kofman writes that her mother’s regard for food shifted in times of chaos:
“[D]uring the war” when “things became complicated” and Kofman wonders “How to find anything to eat?” and “How to continue eating kosher?” she describes how her mother, once “stuffing” her children, now restricted the eating of non-kosher food, specifically the ham and butter sandwiches handed out by the Red Cross to evicted
Jewish families in Paris. “The ham and butter, once decreed impure,” she writes, “I found delicious, now purified by circumstances and paternal authority” (8). When she writes immediately following these lines: “A few years later my father was deported. / We could no longer find anything to eat,” an even sharper turn against the “maternal categorical imperative” occurs, as she is soon to be fed exclusively by Mémé, Kofman’s non-Jewish mother figure:
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After countless turns of fortune, I was ‘saved’ just in time by a woman who
kept me in her home in the middle of Paris until the end of the war.
At the same time that she taught me what it was ‘to have a Jewish nose,’ she
put me on a totally different diet: the food of my childhood was decreed bad for
my health, held responsible for my ‘lymphatic state’...
Put in a real double bind, I could no longer swallow anything and vomited
after each meal. (9)
Kofman’s concept of the “double bind” appears here for the second time in her larger body of works, embedded in the text as describing a state in which Kofman cannot digest food, but vomits. In Smothered Words, Kofman explains the “double bind” of Holocaust survival by citing Robert Antleme’s The Human Race: “When you walk around with this word [unimaginable] as your shield, this word for emptiness, your step becomes better assured, more resolute, your conscience pulls itself together” (Kofman citing Antelme
38). What is “unimaginable,” says Kofman, cannot be expressed “without delusion,” for it is “[t]hat for which there are no words—or too many…” (Smothered Words 38). The
“double bind” in this context can be defined as “an infinite claim to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irrepressible force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a choking feeling” (39). The connection between the double-bind of Kofman’s “Damned Food” and that of Smothered Words becomes even clearer when food is equated with words, and when the act of eating—equivalent to experiencing—is not followed by the act of digesting—equivalent to processing an experience for its later expressions through words—and so must be vomited. Thus for
Kofman the experience of eating is the experience of accepting that which has the potential to poison if digested fully. By recognizing the “binding” of experience and
Sobelman 96 desire for expression, as an analogy for the “binding” of the digestive system expressed in “Damned Food,” Kofman thus identifies with Antelme through her analysis of his work as an expression of the choking caused by efforts to express “[k]notted words” which are “demanded and yet forbidden” and “which stick in your throat and cause you to suffocate, to lose your breath…” (39). Reading Smothered Words as a reference to
“Damned Food” enriches Kofman’s description of the double bind of traumatic experience and necessary, but impossible, expression. The theme of doubling is found elsewhere in Kofman’s corpus as well.
Kofman’s Three Mothers
I propose that Kofman successfully analogizes the model of mother doubles, and takes it further to a tripling of mothers in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. This analogy, I explain through this section, is observable only when taking into account her reading of
Freud’s “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” in her work, The
Childhood of Art.
Throughout Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman focuses particularly on the conflict between love for her mother and affection for Mémé, but she also includes a highly theoretical chapter entitled “The Two Mothers of Leonardo da Vinci.” By referencing her earlier scholarship on Freud’s readings of Leonardo da Vinci, Kofman encourages a deeper examination of her scholarship which relates to this chapter of Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat. By presenting a “reversed” reading which evaluates The Childhood Art according to notes found in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, I propose that Kofman creates a rupture in her own analogy of double-mothers, reinforcing a reading of the work as scholarship.
Critical analyses of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat commonly address Kofman’s “two mothers” in the text, her biological mother and Mémé (whose real name is Claire). Mémé
Sobelman 97 ensured a hiding place for Kofman during the Holocaust. Tina Chanter, in “Playing with
Fire,” discusses “the two mothers of Kofman” (98) as analogous to the two women depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s oil painting, “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne”
(“Carton de Londres”). Kofman discusses this painting in detail in The Childhood of Art and refers to the painting in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat; chapter 18 of the text is entitled
“The Two Mothers of Leonardo da Vinci.”
Without referring explicitly to Kofman’s scholarly work on Leonardo da Vinci,
Kathryn Robson proposes that her “two mothers” in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat are her biological “Jewish” mother and her “gentile” mother, who are represented, for instance, by their conflicting approaches to food: “The Jewish mother and the Gentile mother figure compete to offer the child sustenance; the conflict between the two is played out in the kitchen” (Robson 614). Christie McDonald summarizes the text according to the concept of mother doubles: “Saved by a woman she calls Mémé, Sarah Kofman tells of a dramatic doubling that constituted her life in those years and propelled within her a search for models of understanding” (192). The model of “double mothers” in Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat suggested by Chanter, Robson, and McDonald is highly complicated by Kofman’s insertion of Madame Fagnard in the text. Kofman’s “double mothers,” the following analysis shows, are rather “triple mothers,” a point which reframes Kofman’s
Freudian analysis of da Vinci’s “St. Anne” in The Childhood of Art, revealing particular gaps in her examination.
I argue that Kofman’s depiction of Madame Fagnard, her primary school teacher in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, is Kofman’s first “second” mother in the text. She writes that
“despite the prevailing anti-Semitism” in Paris during Kofman’s school years, Madame
Fagnard “bravely urged her pupils” to go to the funeral of Mathilde Klaperman, a Jewish classmate who had died and whose mother committed suicide—by “turn[ing] on the gas
Sobelman 98 in the apartment during the night” (18). A number of important points surface from these short passages, the most obvious being that the non-Jewish Madame Fagnard held a deep interest and motherly concern for her pupils, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It was
“Madame Fagnard I revered,” writes Kofman, for “[s]he was not only a remarkable teacher but a thoroughly kind woman, sensitive to everyone’s troubles” (19). She continues:
Whenever the siren sounded, we would go down into the cellar of the Lemire
bookstore with her. She made us forget about the air raid and our fright by having
us sing or play games or by telling us stories like the rather disturbing Pied Piper
of Hamelin to distract our attention from the immediate danger. (20)
She further writes:
When food rationing started, she asked her pupils to bring carrots and potatoes
to give to the old people of the neighborhood who were especially needy.
When she handed out dietetic cookies and skim milk in the school courtyard,
she served me as much as I wanted, much more than the prescribed portions. One
day during my last year, I drank so much milk at recess that I vomited in the
middle of class. I was put in a corner, on my knees. This incident was all the more
upsetting to me because my family had always forbidden me to kneel: it was
much too Christian a posture.
When Jewish Communist organizations urged my mother to hide us in the
countryside and furnished us with fake ration cards, we chose, for an alias, our
teacher’s name. (21)
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Another example of Madame Fagnard as a mother figure is in a scene in which young
Kofman turns up at Madame Fagnard’s house at three o’clock in the morning without warning. Kofman writes:
I couldn’t think of anyone but Madame Fagnard. I can still see her surprised and
worried face when she opened the door. She made no comment at all, only asking
us not to make any noise so as not to wake her aged, infirm mother. She made me
some herb tea, brought covers, and I went to sleep, exhausted, in one of her living
room armchairs. (24-25)
These lines suggest that Madame Fagnard is more than Kofman’s teacher; she is also a maternal figure, whose kindness is recognized not only through Kofman’s autobiographical descriptions, but also through the fact that Kofman accepts food from her more willingly than from either her mother or Mémé. Kofman’s “triple mother” depiction challenges the scholars’ claims I’ve addressed above, which emphasize
Kofman’s doubling of mother figures.
Furthermore, if Kofman’s mother figures can be read as “tripled” rather than
“doubled,” which I have already argued, then it is also possible, according to my questioning of the original formula presented by Kofman scholars, that Mémé and
Kofman’s mother can be also understood as a single figure with two distinct “faces.”
From this critical perspective, the “triple mothers” formula is broken down once again into two distinct forms: the uncanny doubled figure with characteristics of both Mémé and Kofman’s mother, and the second, idealized Freudian mother figure, Madame
Fagnard.
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The Analytic Novel in Kofman’s Critical and Autobiographical Texts
Yet another method of pushing the boundaries of her autobiographical work is through an intertextual interpretation of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and a reading of her scholarly arguments related to Freud’s “analytic novels.” The following section challenges critical readings of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat by using Kofman’s theoretical writings in order to reevaluate the presence and effects of mother figures in her text. In order to begin this analysis, I now turn again to Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and its relation to what Kofman defines as the “analytic novel” in Freud and Fiction. Common conceptions of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a literary work were touched on earlier in this chapter, but here the text will be reexamined according to the boundaries of literary analysis set forth by Kofman in her scholarly conclusions related to Freud’s methods of reading certain literary works and her conception of Freud’s philosophical predecessors.
Kofman’s own analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s A Lady Vanishes in Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat ties her work on Freud back to her autobiographical text.
Kofman’s Freud and Fiction critically evaluates Freud’s literary interpretations of five texts: Empedocles’s two major poetical works, Christian Friedrich Hebbel’s Judith,
Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman. Kofman argues from the very beginning of Freud and Fiction that Freud was much more than a psychoanalyst of the authors of these works and the characters presented in them. Through the act of psychoanalytic interpretation, including summarizations of the literary works under scrutiny, Freud’s studies, she claims, enter into the realm of metaphysics.
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Kofman finds that certain characteristics of the analytic novel push the text into the realm of metaphysics. 31 Once conceived as a metaphysical work, the analytic novel can now “concur with the texts of the whole of philosophical tradition” (8) and can thus,
“genealogically speaking” (8), be considered a work of philosophy. For Kofman, reading
Freud’s literary analyses transforms him into something far more than a psychoanalyst, scientist of the mind, literary analyst, or revealer of “his own personal fiction” (8); he becomes a philosopher. His method of literary analysis is a “gesture” which is “related to the gesture of mastery which is symptomatic of philosophy, and a gesture inaugurated by making myth the infancy of philosophy” (8). Going back to philosophical origins, which included a turning towards (or perhaps realizing of) myth as a primary philosophical subject of scrutiny, Kofman’s finding that Freud is also a writer of philosophy is most strongly evidenced by her particular conception of Aristotle’s metaphoric philosophy.
That is, for her, insofar as Aristotle “subordinates metaphor to concept”—myth to its philosophical analogues—so Freud subjects his “predecessors,” like Sophocles (as creator of Oedipus Rex), to his authority.
Kofman advances her study with an analysis of Freud’s work on Hebbel’s Judith
(1841). Here Kofman hones in on Freud’s The Taboo of Virginity (1917) and traces the text’s wider implications for literature and psychoanalysis. The Taboo of Virginity, she writes, “proposes to solve the mystery of the strange evaluation primitive peoples make of virginity…” (Kofman 55-56). She further points out the circularity of Freud’s
31 Freud’s conception of the “analytic novel” is defined as such: “The analytical novel is methodological (but then ‘there is method in every madness’), a scientific or artistic method which progresses by means of dangerous short cuts, by a process of selection and torture of the text, by dissections, by dismemberments, in order, finally, to arrive at a hidden truth, concealed by the veil of a seductive beauty whose charms must be stripped away: the intervention of a whole process of translation, of formal and semantic changes, a violent ‘manipulating, deforming and disfiguring’ process which delivers up the original text in the form of a ‘mutilated telegraph message’, carrier of the analytic gospel” (Kofman, Freud and Fiction 5).
Sobelman 102 arguments in the text and the seeming disorder of its contents and posits that Freud’s use of language is actually “strategic” rather than unknown to him, for “it erases the oppositions, the hierarchical distinctions between different mental faculties and between people which lead to the privileging of the normal over the pathological, the civilized over the primitive etc.” (56). Freud’s disordered language is also “methodical,” since
“through this disorder, Freud hopes to construct a primal configuration which repeats itself, and which it makes by the heterogeneity of different texts” (57). Kofman’s reading privileges Freud’s consciousness, for even in the most erratic of his texts, such as The
Taboo of Virginity, Freud’s method is not only premeditated but also fully warranted, since his goal in psychoanalytic terms is to create movement from “the most superficial to the most profound, the most repressed to the least repressed, from the most general to the most specific” (57). As pertains to the content behind Freud’s theory of the taboo of virginity, Kofman proposes that Freud, who was determined to push his assertions to their furthest points in all directions, utilized Hebbel’s Judith as an example to “prove the survival of the taboo of virginity in modern civilization and confirm the various hypotheses” (62). The Apocryphal figure of Judith—akin in Kofman’s analysis in many ways to Oedipus Rex—is the prototype for Hebbel’s Judith. Freud analyzes the figure, since the “dramatization” of Hebbel’s text merely “harks back to the primal scene, always already repressed, which it plays out, transformed by anxiety or derision into a tragedy or comedy” (64). Judith of the Book of Judith provides Freud with a literary “original,” no doubt owing to the quasi-fictional nature of the biblical text in which Judith is revealed in
The Taboo of Virginity.32
32 Theodore Ziolkowski’s “Re-visions, Fictionalizations, and Postfigurations: The Myth of Judith in the Twentieth Century” (2009) provides an interesting commentary on the history of the Apocryphal figure of Judith and the mythic value of the Hebrew biblical tale in which Judith is the heroine.
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Furthermore, Kofman’s utilization of characteristics of the creative writer in connection with Freud as an “analytic novelist” is turned upside down by both the act of writing Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and the text’s depictions of Kofman’s childhood identification as a Freudian subject. It seems, in fact, that the relation of Kofman to Freud which is exposed in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, encourages a rereading of several of her arguments presented in Freud and Fiction.
And even further, Kofman’s study of Freud’s summaries of literary works suggests a re-framing of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as an “analytic novel.” She argues in
Freud and Fiction that Freud’s summaries in his psycho-literary analyses are “in their turn fictions,” or “‘romances’ in their own right” (3). This assertion may be turned back onto Kofman’s summaries of literary works in Smothered Words and Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat. Kofman’s life writing finds its place amongst Freud’s texts whose interpretive characteristics, she argues regarding Freud, make them “rewritings of the texts from which they stem” (Freud and Fiction 3). Kofman’s approach to Freud’s readings of
Empedocles, Hebbel, and Jensen, is an attempt, she writes, to present “a purely analytic kind of reading” (3) by a “pushing of Freudian interpretation to its limits, in the most faithful way possible…” (3). Much in the same way that Kofman’s summaries of fictional texts are formulated in several of her scholarly and autobiographical writings, she argues in Freud and Fiction that “the Freudian summary is not solely designed to refresh the reader’s failing memory, but has a very specific methodological function: it is the condition of possibility of the interpretation at the same time as being its product” (3).
The Freudian summary, Kofman claims, may indeed detract from the larger aims of psychoanalytic interpretation, since it lacks the possibility for, and power of, free association, which is a practice central to the aims of psychoanalysis.
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In Kofman’s evaluation, the absence of free association in literary analysis does not necessarily imply, however, that Freud’s literary interpretations have no value for psychoanalysis, for “they are in fact the constructs of a completely different text; rewritings which weave the thread of the elements in the original text into a completely new tissue, involving them by displacement in a completely different play” (Freud and
Fiction 4-5). When Freud summarizes a text in preparation for psychoanalytic interpretation, a new text is thus created, which bears signs of the work undergoing analysis, but is otherwise a product of psychic displacement. Freud’s analysis of literature, writes Kofman, results in the construction of an “analytic novel” which does not, like successful interpretations of the human psyche does, “confirm the truth of psychoanalysis”
(6); it is rather a valuable “’white lie’, a bait to take the carp of truth” (5). Despite the
“white lie” in which the analytic novel participates, signs of psychoanalytic truth are not entirely lost through interpretive summary, since the analytic novel may indeed constitute a completely new text, stripped of the “poetic and rhetorical ‘effects’” (6), which are now
“removed like veils” (6) through interpretation. Although the original text is lost, a kind of “novel,” emerges. And what seems like a major “loss” for the promises of literary
“effects” is for Kofman a minor one. As such, a loss is incurred “only in terms of the ideological function society accords to works of art” (6), which is “a function of illusion”
(6). The analytic novel thus does not attempt to convey the artfulness of the original work it analyzes; the only remaining connection it has to the original text is that it “endures the death of the author as father of the text” and “denounces the contract of implicit pleasure between artist and public” (6). The analytic novel is “father” of the original “orphaned” text; the original is given conscious recreation through summary and interpretation.
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Following Kofman’s exploration of Freud’s “Judith” is her chapter entitled
“Summarize, Interpret (Gradiva),” which provides material that helps to reveal gaps in
Smothered Words, wherein she takes up Freud’s method of “summary” to ends which contradict her own defense of Freud’s method in his Gradiva essay. I suggest that revealing these gaps suggests that Smothered Words is not only a scholar-autobiography, but also an analytic novel.
In her chapter “Summarize, Interpret (Gradiva)” in Freud and Fiction, Kofman examines Freud’s method of summary in his “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva.”
Freud’s essay is fascinating for a number of reasons, not the least of which relates to his autobiographical disclosures in the text. Kofman first, however, focuses on Freud’s particular mode of summarizing Jensen’s Gradiva as a precondition for his interpretation:
It is once the summary is completed that the work of interpretation is to begin: the
moment of the summary is that of a ‘naïve’ reading of the text when the reader,
swept along by the same feelings and hopes as the hero, is in too great a state of
suspense to be able to understand it. (85)
Kofman further considers a number of possible problems stemming from Freud’s practice of summary: artistic license suffers the risk of being discredited, and the summary creates a drastic and possibly irreparable divergence from the text’s original form and content.
Pointing to Freud’s own perspective on the complications arising from summarizing texts,
Kofman states that Freud “presents his summary as an imperfect substitute for the text itself: to summarize is necessarily to strip the text of its charms by changing the form of the narrative: it is to deprive the reader of any pleasure incentive” (85). This deficit in
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“pleasure incentive,” Kofman verifies, however, may not be without specific purpose in the larger Freudian project of psycho-literary interpretation. Freud’s method, she argues,
seems necessarily to exclude any summary, any transformations of the text.
Interpreting the text correctly should mean looking at the whole text, and, indeed,
Freud does refer the reader first of all to the text. Nevertheless, he summarizes it;
he even summarizes the dreams [in Gradiva] which are of particular interest to
him. (87, emphasis mine)
Freud’s method may thus in fact require summary; it may have a “precise function within the Freudian method” (88). Kofman reiterates this function by showing increasing enthusiasm about the necessity of Freud’s practice of summary for a psychoanalytic interpretation of Jensen’s work, specifically for interpreting the text’s central dream wherein Norbert Hanold fleetingly catches sight of the statue Gradiva, leading him to believe that Gradiva is a living woman wandering the streets of Pompeii. Kofman writes:
A summary of the work is necessary to provide the dream’s context: its context is
decisive in determining its code. The selection operated by the summary is a
function of its finality. Henceforth the summary no longer appears to be a useless
supplement but a complement to the method of interpretation. It is designed to
prepare the way for interpretation since, as a whole, Jensen’s text, by the excess
of meaning it conveys, conceals the fact that of itself it is not fully transparent.
The summary is not a supplement added to the text, a surplus: it comes to reveal
the gaps hidden in the text’s continuity and plentitude. The dismemberment of the
text introduces ruptures, discontinuities and cuts into its seamless fabric. In order
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to construct, the analytic work always begins by deconstructing. It is the summary
that performs this deconstructive process. (88-89)
Before continuing my evaluation of Kofman’s passage and for purposes of getting closer to her text, it seems fitting to present a bulk of Freud’s summary of Gradiva in his
“Dreams and Delusions”:
And now I ought properly to ask all my readers to put aside this little essay
and instead spend some time in acquainting themselves with Gradiva (which first
appeared in bookshops in 1903), so that what I refer to in the following pages
may be familiar to them. But for the benefit of those who have already read
Gradiva I will recall the substance of the story in a brief summary; and I shall
count upon their memory to restore to it all the charm of which this treatment will
deprive it.
A young archeologist, Norbert Hanold, had discovered in a museum of
antiquities in Rome a relief which had so immensely attracted him that he was
greatly pleased at obtaining an excellent plaster cast of it which he could hang in
his study in a German university town and gaze at with interest. The sculpture
represented a fully-grown girl stepping along, with her flowing dress a little
pulled up so as to reveal her sandaled feet…
Soon afterwards he had a terrifying dream, in which he found himself in
ancient Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius and witnessed the city’s
destruction… Fear of the fate that lay before her provoked him to utter a warning
cry, whereupon the figure, as she calmly stepped along, turned her face towards
him. But she then proceeded on her way untroubled, till she reached the portico of
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the temple; there she took her seat on one of the steps and slowly laid her head
down on it, while her face grew paler and paler, as though it were turning into
marble. When he hurried after her, he found her stretched out on the broad step
with a peaceful expression, like someone asleep, till the rain of ashes buried her
form.
When he awoke, the confused shouts of the inhabitants of Pompeii calling for
help still seemed to echo in his ears, and the full muttering of the breakers in the
agitated sea. But even after his returning reflection recognized the sounds as the
awakening signs of noisy life in a great city, he retained his belief for a long time
in the reality of what he had dreamt… The dream had as its result that now for the
first time in his phantasies about Gradiva he mourned for her as someone who
was lost. (Freud 12-13)
Kofman does not provide Freud’s summary in her text,; she therefore takes part in the act of summarizing. Perhaps as an imitation of Freud’s technique of dealing with a primary text, Kofman effectively slows the development of analysis. Her decision to stay outside of her text in this manner, temporarily, suggests her participation in summarizing outside texts in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and Smothered Words, both of which have been conceived as autobiographical but which are also intimately connected to her scholarly assertions about Freud’s interpretation of Gradiva. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, her psycho-literary interpretations focus on Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Lady Vanishes; in
Smothered Words she takes up Maurice Blanchot’s “The Idyll” and Robert Antleme’s
The Human Race.
In order to define the connections between Kofman’s and Freud’s methods used in summarizing outside works, reading Kofman’s full summary of Alfred Hitchcock’s
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1938 film, The Lady Vanishes, in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is necessary. The following takes up the space of nearly the whole of chapter nineteen, entitled “A Lady Vanishes”33:
Hitchcock’s film The Lady Vanishes is one of my favorites. I have seen it several
times and each time I am seized with the same visceral anguish when the nice
little old lady, Miss Froy, seated in the train opposite the sleeping heroine (a
young Englishwoman named Iris), vanishes. It is even worse when she is replaced
by another woman who passes herself off as the first. And my agony is
excruciating when Iris, having left her seat to look throughout the train for the
lady who has vanished, returns to her compartment half-convinced by the
pseudodoctor from Prague that the blow to the head she received before getting
on the train has caused her to have hallucinations (according to the doctor, Miss
Froy—the good little old lady—has never been on the train at all, and seated
opposite Iris has always been this other woman who, in fact, has been put there in
Miss Froy’s place by the conspirators). The part that is always unbearable for me
is to perceive, all of a sudden, instead of the good maternal face of the old lady
(and everything in the film suggests that she represents the good mother: she calls
the mountains at the little ski resort baby’s bonnets; she always has extra food
with her; when there is no longer enough to eat at the inn, she manages to get
cheese for the other guests—especially the English ones; on the train she invites
Iris to share her ‘special’ tea in the restaurant car; she’s concerned about Iris,
advises her to sleep; she poses as a governess, a children’s music teacher) the face
33 Kofman’s manipulation of the title of the film, The Lady Vanishes, in the title of her chapter, “A Lady Vanishes” marks an interesting note on Kofman’s mode of autobiographical writing. While she seems to address only the film, the chapter’s title indicates that Hitchcock’s Miss Froy is not only “the lady” who vanishes on the train, but is perhaps one of Kofman’s mother figures, or even herself.
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of her replacement (who is wearing the clothes of the good lady, who is really a
secret agent for the Intelligence Service and who is at this point in another
compartment, bound and gagged by spies). It is a horribly hard, shifty face, and
just as one is expecting to see the good lady’s sweet, smiling one, there it is
instead—menacing and false. (Rue Ordener, Rue Labat 65-66)
In light of Kofman’s reading of Freud’s summary, her summary of The Lady Vanishes contains some important shortcomings. Kofman writes of Freud’s method of summary that it serves as a “complement to the method of interpretation” and “is designed to prepare the way for interpretation” (Freud and Fiction 88-89). The “effect” produced by
Freud’s method, she writes, “deprive[s] the work of its charm” (91). Kofman’s argument, while understood in the context of a criticism of Freud’s interpretive methods, is contradicted by her summary of The Lady Vanishes in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, for she does not abide by the rules she sets forth in Freud and Fiction, that is, of deconstructing a work as the first step in revealing its meaning. Kofman’s summary of Hitchcock’s film, from the very first line of the chapter, is interrupted by her own recognition of herself as a participant in the film’s summary. She seems thus to be claiming that an interpretation of the film is not relevant here. Kofman’s statements, such as “The part that is always unbearable for me” and “It is a horribly hard, shifty face” implicate her in the summary, thus preventing any “charm” of the work to be perceived in the first place. Where Freud may “prepare” his interpretation through his very directed summary, Kofman’s interpretation is already found within it. As if to prevent the film from having a place outside of her interpretation, Kofman forbids any “mis”-understanding by “eras[ing]…”
“what is truly puzzling” (96). Like Freud’s method of summary presented by Kofman, her summary of The Lady Vanishes “not only fragments, and selects from, the text, it also
Sobelman 111 puts into operation a whole series of semantic substitutions. It is the translation from one language to another. These transformations move in the direction of a certain interpretation of the characters’ behavior. They turn a singular and concrete adventure into a more general and abstract tale” (96). Moreover, in Kofman’s summary, Miss Froy of The Lady Vanishes is not only the little woman who is supposed to have “the sweet, smiling” face, but, when embedded in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat’s maternal map, the summary does not meet Kofman’s conception of summary in her work related to Freud.
And yet, the chapter on The Lady Vanishes is situated between the only other chapter in the text that describes her relation to Freud in her scholarship (which is entitled, “The
Two Mothers of Leonardo da Vinci”) and the only chapter in which she makes direct reference to her scholarly work on Blanchot (the chapter itself is entitled “The Idyll”).
These three chapters—“The Two Mothers of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Lady Vanishes,” and “The Idyll”—together serve as a detour in the text, the last of which includes two of only three footnotes in all of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Thus Kofman’s style of summary in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, as discussed thus far, deviates from her assertions about the role of summaries in psycholiterary analyses. The above analyses have focused primarily on how Kofman’s autobiographical and scholarly works establish lines of communication with one another, leading to the discovery of several contradictions within her larger corpus and implicating her autobiographical work as a kind of scholarship. Kofman’s
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat may be analyzed as a scholarly work in and of itself; that is, by approaching Kofman’s text as one that contains critical arguments, contradictions within the work emerge, substantiating the suggestion that the text is indeed a work of scholarship.
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The Fountain Pen and the Postcard: Scholarly Autobiographical Artifacts
In the following section, I focus on the links between scholarly elements in Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat in order to comprehend the text as one that formulates critical arguments from the text’s very opening remarks. For example, the opening lines of Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat immediately position Kofman as a translator and interpreter of objects once owned by her father:
Of him all I have left is the fountain pen. I took it one day from my mother’s
purse, where she kept it along with some other souvenirs of my father. It is a kind
of pen no longer made, the kind you have to fill with ink. I used it all through
school. It ‘failed’ me before I could bring myself to give it up. I still have it,
patched up with Scotch tape; it is right in front of me on my desk and makes me
write, write.
Maybe all my books have been detours required to bring me to write about
‘that.’ (3)
These lines are described by Tina Chanter as Kofman’s call to write in place of her father,
“in his stead” (99) and it is “[d]ue to her father’s death, she must write. Perhaps she was compensating, with her writing, for her father’s death? Displacing her mourning”
(“Playing with Fire” 99). Despite various examinations of Kofman’s opening words from autobiographical perspectives, little effort has been made towards identifying a contradiction between Kofman’s broken pen, and a postcard allegedly sent by her father to Kofman, her siblings, and her mother.
The postcard to which Kofman refers was “sent from Drancy, written in purple ink, with a stamp on it bearing Marshal Petain’s picture” (9). Bereck Kofman did not
Sobelman 113 write this sentence of the letter—he was apparently forbidden to write in Yiddish or
Polish—but by another inmate, in French. “When my mother died,” writes Kofman, “it wasn’t possible to find that card, which I had reread so often and wanted to save. It was as if I had lost my father a second time” (9); reminiscent of a passage in Ruth Kluger’s
Still Alive in which she explains that learning of the way in which her father died at
Auschwitz meant experiencing his loss a second time, Kofman depicts her mourning. It is perhaps in this state that Kofman forgets,34 that is, the impression she gets is of forgetting, while the unconscious reveals this “forgetting” as rather a refusal to remember, manifesting itself through repetition. Applicable to Kofman in certain respects, Freud asserts that in the case of hysterics, “[t]he unconscious feelings strive to avoid recognition which the cure demands” (“The Dynamic of Transference” 113-114), and they do so through repetition of thoughts or actions. Kofman certainly repeats the sentiments used to describe the fountain pen and, later, the postcard, throughout the text.
As she writes of the pen, “Of him all I have left is the fountain pen” (3). And, of losing the postcard she writes, “From then on nothing was left, not even that lone card that he hadn’t even written” (9). A faulty pen and a lost ghostwritten postcard (and moreover a doubled ghost—the real writer of the card and the card that merely bears Bereck
Kofman’s signature), objects which Kofman seems to avoid linking together.
This avoidance may not, however, be without reason. Kofman’s repetition is strikingly obvious: chapters I, III, and IV all contain references to the lost objects, each
34 I hesitantly utilize Chanter’s preference for seeing “Kofman’s unconscious work here” (99) in these lines. Although I am indeed discussing Kofman’s unconscious forgetting, I am referring only to Kofman as the writing “I” and not, as Chantner does, to the once- living Sarah Kofman. To further complicate the question of Kofman’s writing “I,” one can turn to her “Tomb for a Proper Name,” in which, I suggest, she uses quotation marks around the “I” in the work in order to experiment with Blanchot’s conception of the “neutral I” or what he also calls the “narrative voice.” For more on this issue, see both “Tomb for a Proper Name” as well as Blanchot’s “The Narrative Voice” and “Kafka and Literature,” the latter in which Blanchot claims that Kafka’s “I” (and “he”) is indeed a “neutral voice.” See bibliography for a complete citation of Blanchot’s relevant works.
Sobelman 114 time written as if being mentioned for the first time. Kofman’s use of an archival document in the text, described as a confirmation of historical truth earlier in this chapter, can also be conceived in the present context as a repetition. Kofman’s initial act of revealing is constituted by her description of her father’s death; the repetition is found in her “confirmation” of his death by way of her inclusion of historical documentation as a supplement to her more personal account.
Concluding Remarks on Kofman’s Scholar-Autobiographical Works
In Smothered Words and, to a lesser extent, in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman cannot avoid a writing that attests to her survival. And as Christie McDonald observes, the text affirms its authorship not only by a survivor of the Holocaust, but also by a philosopher: “[Smothered Words] is not an end commanded by a telos, but rather the story of forces that constituted the person, Sarah, and her works as a philosopher” (195).
As Jean-Luc Nancy eloquently states in his preface to Enigmas: Essays on Sarah
Kofman: “With Sarah, the analysis of analysis—interpretation and dissolution—comes with its identification: it is the name of Nietzsche, in other words the one whom, along with Freud, Sarah analyzed and commented upon the most. Their two names run from one end to the other of her books…” (xv). Indeed, The Childhood of Art, Deutscher and
Oliver write, “is a little-known, intensely scholarly, and broad-ranging interpretation of
Freud on art, literature, and aesthetics…” (3), wherein “Kofman realizes a scrupulous reading that entirely rethinks Freud” (3). Tina Chanter points out that “like Freud…
Kofman put off letting go of a text that was most revelatory of her private being. Like
Freud, the text [Rue Ordener, rue Labat] concerns issues surrounding the death of a father, and the desire for a mother” (“Playing with Fire,” Sarah Kofman’s Corpus 113).
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, it can now be said, thus emerges as a scholarly work.
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This chapter utilized Freudian, poststructuralist, and Kofmanian methods in order to illustrate links between Sarah Kofman’s critical and autobiographical works. The intertextual readings in both Chapters One and Two form the basis of the Kofmanian analyses of Peter Gay’s work presented in the following chapter.
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Chapter Three
Freudian Convergences: Kofman Reading Gay
I always wanted to tell the story of my life. The entire beginning of my analysis was me telling a story. A linear, continuous story. I never lost the thread; I ‘strung things together,’ always knowing ahead of time what I was going to say: never the slightest break, the slightest gap, never the slightest flaw where a slip of the tongue might have a chance to sneak in, where something might happen. And thus nothing happened. From the other side of the couch, nothing. ‘My life’ was met with indifference. (Sarah Kofman, “’My Life’ and Psychoanalysis”)
A number of Kofman’s theories—particularly those related to Freud and
Derrida—can be aptly tied to Peter Gay’s works related to Freud, which were introduced in Chapter One of this dissertation. The reading presented here suggests the applicability of Kofman’s theoretical work to scholar-autobiographical texts other than her own. By utilizing Kofman’s theoretical claims in order to examine Peter Gay’s work, his corpus too emerges as a complex amalgam of scholarly and autobiographical fragments which prove to inform one another in unexpected ways. The overall aim of this chapter is to illustrate the applicability of one scholar’s scholar-autobiographical work to another scholar’s scholar-autobiographical work, hence engaging autobiographical texts as critical works from a number of different perspectives.
Gay’s and Kofman’s scholarly conclusions, their proclaimed aims of research, and their distinct forms of scholarly and autobiographical writing make them very different Freud scholars whose ideas and methods of analysis can be, at times, oppositional. For instance, Gay’s reading of Freud’s “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” marginalizes the complexities of the biographer/biographical subject
Sobelman 117 relationship, particularly in oedipal terms, and focuses rather on the success of the analysis. The study, Gay writes in Freud: A Life for Our Time, “for all the brilliance of its deductions” is still “a severely flawed performance” and “[m]uch of the evidence Freud used to establish his portrait is inconclusive or tainted” (Gay 270). As the previous chapter illustrates, Kofman takes a very different approach to Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci, where Freud becomes an example of a biographer who, like all biographers, is involved in an oedipal romance with the biographical subject, playing both the oedipal child—the unrelenting admirer—and the subject’s father—the inventor and master of the biographical subject and his history. In order to position Gay and Kofman in relation to one another based on topics found in both of their repertoires, I will first delineate the ways in which Gay and Kofman conceive of the concepts biography and autobiography; doing so will allow for a pointed intertextual analysis of their texts. The consequence of a
Kofmanian reading of Gay is two-fold. First, and more generally, the reader of both authors becomes further acquainted with the arguments found in their autobiographical texts so that these works may be used in analyses of texts beyond those of Freud. For instance, Kofman’s reading of Gay elicits a vast array of potentially enlivening studies of
Nietzsche, Kant, and others who appear at several points in each scholar’s critical work.
Bringing ideas found in autobiographical texts into academic discussion with an autobiographer’s scholarly texts is the strongest verification that autobiographical texts can, and very often do, have an important place in a scholar’s academic repertoire.
Secondly, and more specifically, a Kofmanian reading of Gay like the one presented here proves that a number of Gay’s arguments related to Freud are inconsistent or contradictory, reaffirming my broader assertion about the importance of engaging autobiographical content with scholarship in order to deepen understanding of a scholar- autobiographer’s critical claims.
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The first major argument of this chapter suggests that a Kofmanian reading of
Gay’s My German Question calls into doubt Gay’s claim regarding authorial presence in his life writing. That is, Gay, according to Kofman’s theories regarding biography and autobiography, is caught up in what Kofman describes as the biographer’s task of constructing a text that is linear, unified, and indivisible. By imposing chronology on an otherwise disjointed set of events and experiences, Gay, according to Kofman’s arguments, deceives himself; his life writing and biographical writings on Freud are disconnected from the reality he purports to represent. Moreover, a Kofmanian reading of
My German Question, when supplemented with a Kofmanian analysis of Freud: A Life for Our Time, reveals a number of displacements in Gay’s autobiographical and biographical work. For instance, in My German Question, Gay displaces his father with the figure of Freud’s father he depicts in Freud: A Life for Our Time. As the arguments presented below elaborate, Gay consequently displaces his own self-conception with his biographical depiction of Sigmund Freud as Jakob Freud’s oedipal son. Emerging from this reading is the suggestion that, inasmuch as Freud textually “overcomes” his father, particularly as his work relates to his father’s Jewishness, Peter Gay, as the biographer of
Freud’s life, attempts an identical enterprise through My German Question. According to
Kofman’s assertions about biographers in Freud and Fiction and Autobiogriffures, Gay’s triumph over Freud (as Gay’s oedipal father) is fated to fail from the moment at which
Gay takes up the task of writing Freud’s life. Following Kofman’s claim that the writer of any text is imbedded in the form and language of the text, and thus has no existence outside of the text—a twist of Roland Barthes’s theory of the “death” of the author—Gay, unaware of his authorial absence, insists on the biographical reality of both Freud and himself. The accuracy of My German Question as an autobiographical account and
Freud: A Life for Our Time as a biographical one is thus not based on how close Gay
Sobelman 119 comes to an accurate description and interpretation of himself and Freud, but is rather based on his distance from the lives he purports to represent.
The following analysis of Gay’s work through a Kofmanian lens addresses three main topics: the Jewish father figure; the problematical relationship between biographers and their biographical subjects, as Kofman sees it (with the help of Freud), and Jewish identification in the context of the oedipal family romance. This chapter refers to My
German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin as Gay’s central autobiographical text, primarily due to the text’s various indications of Gay’s identification with Freud. The broader goal of this chapter is to argue that Gay’s life writing demonstrates his identification with Freud as a Kofmanian biographical father; Gay’s autobiographical father is a Freudian figure. In order to present this notion, the following section presents
Gay’s and Kofman’s varied assertions regarding the validity and function of autobiographical and biographical writing.
Gay as Oedipal Biographer and Autobiographer
Gay’s most obvious statement related to autobiography is to be found in his proclamation in the first lines of My German Question: “This is not an autobiography; it is a memoir that focuses on the six years, 1933 to 1939, I spent as a boy in Nazi Berlin”
(ix). The statement becomes all the more complicated when read in light of Gay’s biographical approach to Freud’s psychoanalytic arguments. At various points in the text,
Gay denies the connection between Freud’s private life and his psychological disturbances. John E. Toews asserts, “as they came to a head in the neurotic and creative crisis at the time of his father's death in 1896, and the formation of the fundamental propositions of psychoanalytic theory, especially as they were articulated as a product of
Freud's self-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams” (“Historicizing Psychoanalysis:
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Freud in His Time and for Our Time” 516). Gay indeed acknowledges a number of connections between Freud’s inner life and the production of his psychoanalytic theories, but he also continually denies Freud’s psychological involvement in the construction of the theories. Gay writes of The Interpretation of Dreams: “While [Freud] freely documented the instigating power of sexual desires and sexual conflicts in others, he refused to explore the libidinal origins of his own dreams with the same uninhibited freedom” (Freud: A Life 124). As a writer of biography, and Freud’s biography in particular, Toews agrees that Gay avoided these links for good reason:
What Gay fears and opposes is a reductive reading of the Freudian texts as
expressions or resolutions of, or escapes from, ‘merely’ personal psychological
conflicts and sufferings. Gay does not want to portray Freud as driven in his
‘scientific’ endeavors by the need to assuage his psychic suffering, to find meaning
for his agonizing personal dilemmas, and to create a story that would make sense of
his experience. Rather, Gay would like us to see the relationship between Freud's
personal experience and his written narratives and theories as homologous to the
relationship pertaining between any relevant evidence and a testable hypothesis. (516-
517)
And thus while Gay writes in Freud: A Life for Our Time that Freud’s “most unsettling ideas,” notably the Oedipus complex, “drew on acknowledged, or covert, autobiographical sources” (90), Gay does not claim that Freud’s ideas came from an examination of these private sources.
When read through the Kofmanian lens of the complex relationship between the biographer and the biographical subject, Freud: A Life for Our Time indicates an oedipal
Sobelman 121 ambivalence Gay has towards Freud as a dominating father and a father to be overcome.
Gay’s identification of Freud’s psycho-biographical tools suggests Gay’s admiration for
Freud as a “heroic” (157) conqueror with “enviable reservoirs of energy” (317) and an equal disdain for Freud as “an old man” (411) whose “own body would betray him”
(418) and who, by the late 1920s, was “more than ever convinced that his writings fell short of his self-imposed standards” (525). Gay’s role, as Kofman puts it in relation to biographers, is “to maintain and to overcome distance” (Kofman 19) from his subject, and thus his descriptions of a heroic Freud are contradicted by Gay’s depiction of a weak, ailing old man. Gay’s ambivalence towards the “old stoic” (314) speaks directly to
Kofman’s notion that the biographer, like the oedipal child, is ambivalent towards the father, simultaneously admiring and detesting him. And so, Gay writes: “Exploring undiscovered regions of the mind… Freud stood ready to use himself as a guinea pig. His metaphor of the Sphinx is telling, but he usually saw himself rather as her conqueror,
Oedipus, the hero who alone mastered that mysterious and lethal creature by answering her question” (xvi).35 And further on: “Freud left tantalizing autobiographical hints on which students of his life have seized with understandable and uncritical enthusiasm”
(xvi). Still, however, “Freud was not his own best judge,” (xvi) and thus his self-analyses should be read with caution. Gay claims: “It is one thing to treat Freud’s self-appraisals with respect; a responsible biographer can do no less. It is quite another thing to treat his
35 The “mysterious and lethal creature” Gay describes is of course the sphinx in Oedipus Rex, who took control over Thebes following the death of King Laius (at the hands of Oedipus). The “riddle of the sphinx”: “What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?” (Oedipus Rex 495) is of particular importance for Freud, for it helped form the construction of his theory of the “oedipus complex” by its usefulness in analogizing psychosexual development in children. Freud refers to the riddle of the sphinx in at least six volumes of his writings. Gay’s comparison between Freud and Oedipus in light of Oedipus’s pacifying of the sphinx is revealing of Gay’s identification with Freud as both Oedipus the child and Oedipus the warrior. For Freud’s references to the sphinx in Oedipus Rex, see Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4 (261), 7 (195), 9 (135), 10 (133), 16 (318), 20 (37).
Sobelman 122 pronouncements as gospel” (xvi). With these forewarnings, Gay secures his role as a detached biographer whose assertions are based on historical documentation, literary analyses, and Freud’s private correspondence. The ambivalence of Gay’s relation to
Freud—as both hero and weakling—is at times extreme on both sides. That is, Gay’s love for Freud as father and deliverer of “gospel” is often challenged by his insistence on
Freud’s failures. Kofman’s proposed methods of reading autobiographical and biographical texts in The Childhood of Art, Autobiogriffures, and Explosion I help clarify
Gay’s biographical ambivalence towards Freud.
Sarah Kofman on Autobiography and Biography
Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver point out that Sarah Kofman “was fascinated by the question of autobiography from the beginning to the end of her career”
(Sarah Kofman’s Corpus 2). Kofman’s writings on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and
Opinions of Kater Murr and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo provide two of the strongest indications of her interest in biography and autobiography. Deutscher and Oliver also point out Kofman’s deep interest in the biographies of the authors she examines in her scholarship, which, they argue, follows Kofman’s suggestion of a “new form of textual analysis” in which “philosophy and psychoanalysis mingle together and the conceptual and the biographical cannot be separated” (Sarah Kofman’s Corpus 2).
Two of Kofman’s texts most saturated with notions related to autobiography are
“No Longer Full-Fledged Autobiogriffies” (1980) and Explosion I: Of Nietzsche’s “Ecce
Homo” (1994). Although the two texts are drastically different from one another in form and content, both may be read as commentaries on the unstable boundaries within and between autobiography and biography. Kofman’s Explosion I: Of Nietzsche’s “Ecce
Homo offers a highly complex and “meticulous reading” (Large 129) of Nietzsche’s
Sobelman 123 autobiographical Ecce Homo. Here, she not only utilizes Nietzschean reasoning, but she also supplies biographical details in the text, including several of Nietzsche’s written correspondences and early drafts of Ecce Homo. Ecce Homo, Kofman writes in
Explosion I, is not the narrative of an “I,” but is rather the autobiographical “story” which itself constructs the “I.” With Nietzsche as her guide, Kofman repeatedly asserts that the paradox in Nietzsche’s autobiographical text is the consequence of a play between two factors: its simultaneous affirmation of Nietzsche’s name apart from those who “sculpted”
(58) him—his philosophical and literary predecessors, “which are now redescribed as so many metaphors for himself” (Large 132)—and all else that he is according to his
“proper name” (58). This “proper name” is found everywhere else in his writings, and necessarily so, for without his proper name on his texts, the “undying renown of these figureheads” would be disassociated from his immortality. And as the “I” is for Nietzsche a paradoxical statement of his being, consciously severed from the philosophical “fathers” who created this very sense of “I,” Ecce Homo is “the most ‘depersonalized’ autobiography there is” (Kofman 57). That is, Nietzsche’s text is considered
“autobiographical” when Nietzsche refers to himself autonomously; when he “attempts to make the break and cut the umbilical cord to all those with whom he amorously, symbiotically coupled until he was corrupted and contaminated by them to the point of confusion” (58). Nietzsche’s split from the “I” in his writings also suggests, Kofman explains, that while Nietzsche is bound to his predecessors, in this he is also the harbinger of his own repeated death. Ecce Homo, she writes, is “first of all a work of mourning— and in this sense a thanatography36—in which Nietzsche buries himself several times
36 On “thanatography,” see especially Anderson, who defines “thanatography” in Derridian terms, that is “a writing not of a living but a dead author” (Anderson 76). In Derrida’s examination of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, he elaborates on the idea of the author’s death as preceding the work which bears his or her “proper name.” Derrida is cited in The Ear of the Other: “In calling or naming someone while he is alive, we know
Sobelman 124 over so as to be able to be reborn to himself and reappropriate himself… he attempts to divide up what in him properly belongs to ‘him’ and what were just borrowed masks, hiding places, more or less demeaning figureheads…” (58). But from Kofman’s reading,
Duncan Large concludes that Ecce Homo must certainly not be called an autobiography, since, as Kofman herself states, “what the text ‘recounts’ is rather the death of the autos as a stable and substantial subject, as conceived by metaphysics; it is also the death of the
‘bios,’ if one takes this to mean that the ‘life’ of a living person has its origin in his two parents to whom he is bound by his ‘blood’” (60-61). Insofar as Nietzsche’s “I” is made up of “more than one person… nothing but an accumulation of superabundant forces which explode,” then Ecce Homo is neither an extension of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought nor a representation of his lived life. Rather, it is a reiteration of Nietzsche’s innumerable “masks” and “hiding places.” Ecce Homo, “in no way a story of a singular destiny,” Kofman writes, is a boundless work of varied voices, as well as a “parody” which affirms that Nietzsche “is and is not all the characters he has fictioned: Wagner,
Schopenhauer, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Voltaire, Lord Bacon, Buddha, Dionysus…
It is oriented and determined by the double perspective he carries within him, that of life’s lowest and of life’s highest, which allows him to know both, to be both” (60).
Therefore, when reading Ecce Homo, “one must first try to find Nietzsche’s thought, and one must not look for it in the form which Nietzsche intended, the formed imposed on his thought by his knowledge [savoir], for this form, the written form, can only hide what is unthought in his thought, which is its essence and its truth” (68). The point of Nietzsche’s departure from all of his doubles, masks, and “names” is most obvious, according to
Kofman, when Nietzsche establishes a “distance” with the “apotropaic assertion” (Large
that his name can survive him and already survives him; the name begins during his life to get along without him speaking and bearing his death each time it is inscribed in a list, or a civil registry, or a signature” (49).
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134): “I am one thing, my writings are another” (“Why I Write Such Good Books” 1).
With this statement, Nietzsche effectively widens the gap between him and his “multiple metaphorical doubles” (134); the distance between them thus “collapses in a fateful and catastrophic moment of absolute identification” (134).
Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche suggests a turning of Kofman’s so-called
“autobiographical” texts on themselves, where Kofman—as the writing “I” —remains alien to the text that bears her name. Large makes the striking claim at the end of his introduction to Explosion I that Kofman’s own “moment of double affirmation”—that is, the moment of recognition of the divide between one’s name and one’s writings—is the precise point at which Kofman forgoes an unhappy Nietzschean death in favor of writing her autobiographical Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. In an intertextual reading of Explosion I and II and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Large’s argument enlists readers to participate in
Kofmanian readings of Kofman’s own writings. He writes: “The Explosion books themselves are not without their Nietzschean provocations: the puns” and “the self- reflexive (après coup) conclusion” (134). In this way Kofman’s inclusion of a fragment from Robert Antelme’s The Human Race into the work can be read against the grain of her reading of Antleme in Smothered Words. Large ultimately concludes that “Kofman herself doubles as Nietzsche,” (134) specifically in the way that she takes on Freud and
Nietzsche as “her own personal Schopenhauer and Wagner figures” (133), that is, as her philosophical heroes. Kofman “plays [Nietzsche and Freud] off one against the other,”
(133), Large argues, by reading Freud through Nietzsche and, conversely, Nietzsche through Freud. While Nietzsche’s work is not an obvious subject of Kofman’s autobiographical works, the notion of doubling is present in and between most of her works, and is nowhere more apparent than in her autobiographical depictions.
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“No Longer Full-Fledged Autobiogriffies,” an essay from her larger text,
Autobiogriffures (1978), presents a reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr as a self-reflective text that plays with the notion of biography and autobiography through certain textual components, including Derridian grafting and citational marks. In The Derrida Dictionary (2010), Simon Morgan Wortham defines
“grafting,” which Derrida elaborates most thoroughly in his Dissemination (1972), as such:
“In Dissemination, Derrida famously observes that ‘to write means to graft.’ For
Derrida, writing (in both its ‘ordinary guise and in the enlarged or ‘general’ sense
developed by deconstruction) is always a matter of the graft. All writing involves
a cutting, a marking, an incision in language (one that does not simply come from
‘within’ language as some kind of self-contained organism). But such incision or
inscription is always accompanied by différence, trace, supplement (and
irreducible addition at the origin) which enters in as a condition of writing’s very
production or, rather, its disseminal structure. Cutting is thus also splicing
(together). To write is to graft in that one always cuts and splices, plus d’un,
between texts (that is, as Derrida puts it in Dissemination, without the ‘body
proper’; thus, dissemination as always pluralizing ‘germination’ without ‘first
insemination’)… Grafting is at once affirmed as irreducible by deconstruction and
adopted as a strategy in order to heighten the deconstructibility at work in each
‘text’ we may be given to read. (69)37
37 The grafting Kofman describes in relation to Hoffmann is also applicable to the idea of grafting described in Chapter Two of this dissertation, which includes a discussion of Kofman’s practice of grafting in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. For its use in relation to Hoffmann in the current chapter, Wortham’s definition is most pertinent.
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Moreover, Duncan Large provides a clear picture of Kofman’s arguments in
Autobiogriffures: “Developing (‘citing’/’grafting onto’) Derrida’s remarks on the generalized ‘iterability’ of language… Kofman argues that Hoffmann’s writing has a
‘deliberate citational quality’” (Large, “Kofman’s Hoffmann” 80). That is, Kater Murr is not a work imbued with Derridian grafts, but rather its author enforces the rift in the text’s language by playing on this very concept through the severing of the text’s multiple “languages” into unstable fragments that “cut into” one another—the various voices, styles, and plays of diférrance, not only within the language of each “text” in
Kater Murr, but between the varying languages of all “texts.”
In Autobiogriffures, Kofman provides a post-structuralist reading of Hoffmann’s main character, a tomcat named Kater Murr. The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr is the title of an “autobiography” written by Kater Murr, which has been interrupted by other written forms and authors, containing three literary forms in all, each with a different
“author.” The central, overriding narrative is that of autobiographer Kater Murr. Murr has written his autobiography on scraps of paper that according to the “editor” of Murr’s autobiography have been torn from a draft of a biography of Murr’s master,
Kapellmeister (“orchestra conductor”): Johannes Kreisler. The editor’s careless handling of Murr’s text led to the publishing of Murr’s autobiography and Kreisler’s biography of
Murr together in a single book. Kreisler’s biography, the editor claims, would not have been published at all if not for his own negligence. The text as a whole is a “hodge-podge of heterogeneous material” (Hoffmann 6), which the editor attempts to divide for the reader’s comprehension using two abbreviations: “s.p.” (“scrap paper,” indicating the biographical voice) and “M.c.” (“Murr continues,” indicating the autobiographical voice).
The “Editor’s Preface” to the text is signed by “E.T.A. Hoffmann,” appealing to yet another layer of authorship. It reads:
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After careful investigation and inquiry, the editor finally learned the following.
When Kater Murr wrote his life and opinions, he unceremoniously ripped up a
printed book which he found at his master’s and simply used the leaves, partly as
an underpad, partly as blotting paper. These papers remained in the manuscript and,
by mistake, were printed as if they belonged to it.
Ruefully and woefully, the editor must confess that this hodge-podge of
heterogeneous material is the product of his own carelessness, since he should have
scrupulously read the cat’s manuscript before sending it to press. (6)
The “Editor’s Postscript,” also signed by “E.T.A. Hoffmann,” reveals news of Kater
Murr’s death:
Bitter death has snatched away the clever, educated, philosophical, poetical Kater
Murr in the middle of his beautiful career…
It is unfortunate that the deceased did not finish his life and opinions which
must, accordingly, remain a fragment. However, among the posthumous papers of
the immortal cat there are many reflections and comments which he seems to have
written down during the time when he was living with Kappelmeister Kreisler. In
addition, there is still a large part of the book that the cat tore up which contains
Kreisler’s biography. (346)
The editor’s preface and postscript frame Sarah Kofman’s examination of Kater Murr in
“No Longer Full-Fledged Autobiogriffies.” Her analysis of Hoffmann is highly complex
Sobelman 129 and can be related explicitly, as Duncan Large points out, to Kofman’s Explosion I and
Explosion II, which she published sixteen years earlier.38
Kofman, in her reading of Hoffmann, problematizes the conventions of autobiography and biography, including the use of chronological time in such works, as they are found in Kater Murr. She does so by pointing out the shifts in these forms of life writing as indicative of Hoffmann’s use of parody in Kater Murr. She writes:
There is rigorous continuity… ellipses which ‘begin’ each page being only the
mark of the provisional and contingent suspension of the cat’s text by the text of
man. It is therefore a linear autobiography, parodying the strict order of
consciousness. The order to the story is that of the Bildungsroman which follows
the individual from birth to death, tracing the detours of an education which leads
him to leave his house of birth, to confront the snares of the world and grapple with
them before returning to his homeland, having gained through experience both
wisdom and reason. (4)
Kofman’s comments here relate to my previous argument that Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, insofar as the text is fragmented, calls into question the necessity of order in life writing.
Kofman’s suggestion that Hoffmann’s text is an autobiography that parodies the literary conventions typical of novels is applicable to Rue Ordener, Rue Labat in the same way.
She does so by presenting a self-reflective analytical tool which acknowledges the natural disjointedness of autobiographical narratives. The element of parody in Hoffmann, she writes, is obvious in Murr’s autobiography, as “the ‘outline’ of this novel is simple… [I]t
38 See Duncan Large, “Kofman’s Hoffmann” in Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, 78- 83. A second important point here is Kofman’s emphasis on the “citational” value of Kater Murr, which I suggest is directly related to her employment of citational “grafts” in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (see Chapter Two of the present dissertation).
Sobelman 130 follows chronological order” and “[t]he continuity of the text of life is indicated by the links that mark the passage from one period to another.” But these links “are always underscored parodically” (4). Kofman also provides a clear criticism of linearity in autobiographical writing by calling attention to Murr’s playfulness with chronology:
“The story of life is punctuated by periods analogous to the seasons or to astronomical periods: a parody of the habitual metaphors left uninterrogated by biographers, heavy with metaphysical presuppositions and here, sapped by the repetitions effected by Murr”
(5). By Murr’s imitation of “all autobiographies of geniuses which operate in this fashion”
(5) he “mocks such autobiographies, which have no fear of boring the reader by recounting the life of the ‘genius’ from beginning to end without omitting anything. They dwell on the most minute details of childhood, however insignificant or inept, as if they were decisive and explained the genius-to-be” (5). “Childhood,” Kofman continues, while being the “the origin” is “simultaneously the ‘cause’ of the subsequent development of which supposedly contains the seed;” it is “a retrospective reading of events where, in hindsight, every past event seems premonitory and extraordinary” (5).
Autobiographies are thus essentialist in that they reveal highly contrived efforts to give originary insight into the history of a life and the roots of the depicted life’s original meaning for both author and reader.
From here, Kofman makes a statement about autobiography that connects
Autobiogriffures to a letter from Freud to Arnold Zweig in 1936. She writes, “All autobiographies are untruthful, for they are written from the standpoint of a retroactive illusion and with a view toward idealization” (6). Like Peter Gay, Kofman also cites
Freud’s 1936 letter to Arnold Zweig in which he states: “Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it”
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(Freud/Zweig 127). Linda Anderson writes of Freud’s conception of the relation between early childhood experiences and their latent manifestations in the adult psyche that
“childhood and neurotic systems, according to Freud, also belonged to the adult’s prehistory, a distant region that remained repressed or unconscious and which thus existed outside the normal processes of time and history” (Autobiography 58). Kofman’s reading, to repeat, serves as a guide for reading her texts, particularly Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat. For Kofman, in autobiography the “absence of original meaning and the gaps in memory” together make “material that is always already rhapsodic, always already unraveled by the work of a non-sublatable negative, of some deadly claw” (11). Kofman thus suggests that unlike fiction, which purports nothing resembling life itself, autobiography destroys itself, its origin being nothing more than an effort to depict a lived life.
Kofman also makes an interesting autobiographical move in “No Longer Full-
Fledged Autobiogriffies” by inserting references to her own previous texts. As Large points out, “Kofman herself weaves into her study numerous quotations on the subjects of cats, animality, and autobiography… Her own playfulness is at its most pronounced in this study… (80). Kofman’s deconstructionist involvement in the text makes her autobiographically part of it. Large explains that Hoffman’s text “has about it a self- consciousness, a self-reflexivity that makes it legitimate to argue, as Kofman does that the novel is ‘about’ intertextuality” (80). Kofman’s autobiographical work is parallel to
Hoffmann’s in the way that Large explains Hoffmann’s relationship to Kater Murr.
The “Editor’s Postscript” in Kater Murr has an important function in Kofman’s conclusions about autobiographical and biographical writing. In the postscript, she writes,
“the ‘ending’ no longer resembles in any way the logically organized corpus. Here, the
‘ending’ is the beginning, and the ending is not an ending, since it does not conclude with
Sobelman 132 the ‘death’ of the character; it is contingent” (6). Kofman explains that the text’s postscript is significant for her argument about the incongruity inherent in autobiographies, for in this “final note the editor thinks it prudent to reassure the reader about this lack of an ending which has disrupted his reading habits and which threatens to frustrate his expectations” (6). Kofman suggests that Hoffmann consoles the reader by promising a “sequel” to the text, but this promise is, according to Kofman, actually “‘co- opted’”; the work is “transformed into a type of ‘suspense’ destined to improve sales on the next volume” (6). Thus even when the text proclaims an order or “continuation,” it will always go on with “the absence of paternity” (16). Without birth or death, the text is merely a system of signs and disclaimers.
A distinctive connection between Hoffmann’s Kater Murr, as Kofman reads it, and Freud’s Autobiographical Study, can be traced here. Written in 1924, and supplemented by a postscript in 1935, An Autobiographical Study declares its function to be that of providing the intellectual turning points in Freud’s career as a scientist and psychoanalyst. Rather than offering a simple timeline, however, Freud’s text is imbued with defensive claims against his scientific and intellectual rivals, and expresses almost nothing about his family life or personal relationships. In fact, Freud’s text makes a single reference to his parents: “My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself.
I have reason to believe that my father’s family were settled for a long time on the Rhine
(at Cologne), that, as a result of a persecution of the Jews during the fourteenth or fifteenth century, they fled eastwards, and that, in the course of the nineteenth century, they migrated back from Lithuania through Galicia into German Austria” (“An
Autobiographical Study” 7-8). About his wife-to-be Martha Bernays Freud writes: “In the Autumn of 1886 I settled down in Vienna as a physician, and married the girl who had been waiting for me in a distant city for more than four years. I may here go back a
Sobelman 133 little and explain how it was the fault of my fiancée that I was not already famous at that youthful age” (14). Although the implications of the first passage for a study of Freud’s
Jewishness, and an evaluation of the second for a study of Freud’s concepts of love relationships are equally extensive, I have inserted both passages here to support the notion that, despite his naming of the text “An Autobiographical Study,” Freud has neglected to provide very much “extra-academic” information about his private, familial battles. He seems to limit these complicated details to his case studies of his patients.
The link that can be found between Freud’s An Autobiographical Study and
Hoffmann’s Kater Murr has rather to do with the “postscript” found in each text.
Whereas Kofman writes that the postscript in Kater Murr confirms the text’s lack of origin, and illustrates the text’s ultimate state of disorder, Linda Anderson writes of An
Autobiographical Study that Freud’s belatedly published postscript similarly reframes the entire text:
The text that we have therefore offers a rewriting of the ending, revealing the
error of his first more tragic perception of finality from the perspective of his
unexpected survival. Death, as if we had been transposed from a Greek tragedy to
a Shakespearean comedy, is no longer the inevitable end, and authoritative
utterance, such as Freud assumed in the Study, loses its meaning. Indeed in the
postscript Freud is ambivalently positioned between being the author of cultural
and historical studies which have taken his writing in ambitious new directions,
and the thinker he was before, who has added nothing original to his own theory
of psychoanalysis… His autobiography exceeds its own conclusion(s) and he can
only recover himself through splitting and repetition; there is always more than
one interpretation to be accounted for. (Anderson 65)
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Anderson’s evaluation of Freud’s Autobiographical Study is problematic for Kofman’s argument related to the naming of an authorial source. While Anderson assumes a “loss” of parentage resulting from Freud’s postscript to An Autobiographical Study, Kofman asserts that this parentage cannot be located in the first place, for it has no origin; that is, it cannot be lost because it has never been found anywhere within or outside the text.
Despite the different appropriations lent to each postscript by Anderson and Kofman, the readings in fact complement one another, for they both conclude that the author of an autobiographical text does not appear in the text; whether he or she is simply “lost,” or has no definable origin, marks the only point of difference.
Fundamental differences distinguish Peter Gay’s autobiographical and biographical texts from Hoffmann’s Kater Murr. These differences deserve acknowledgment, particularly in the case of a historian whose biographical texts relating the life and work of Freud are based not on fragmented, “shredded” details, as in the case
Kater Murr’s autobiography, but are rather the result of a half-century effort to understand the complex theories of psychoanalysis set forth by Freud, as well as modern
German history. Kofman’s notions of the role of the author as a biographer and autobiographer conflict with Gay’s more conservative, fact-based attempts to depict the life of Freud and, later, his own life.39
Because Gay is both biographer and autobiographer, he is already an unusual scholar-autobiographical subject. The following close reading proposes that Freud: A
Life for Our Time and My German Question, when read through a Kofmanian lens as a
39 Taking Kofman’s claims in Autobiogriffures into account, her reading of Antleme’s The Human Race seems to place Antelme’s text outside the normal structure of autobiography. In Smothered Words, Kofman reads the text in a highly literary manner, altogether ignoring the issue of the relationship between Antleme’s text and his life. In this she seems to follow her own theoretical claims put forth in Autobiogriffures.
Sobelman 135 single, continuous text, is comparable to the whole of Hoffmann’s Kater Murr as Kofman understands it. By applying Kofman’s lines about Kater Murr to Gay’s two texts, the works can thus be perceived “in a twofold way, by a double claw, that of the cat and that of the biographer,” and as such “the biographical genre and its linear order are torn apart”
(12). A Kofmanian reading disintegrates—or “explodes”—the linearity proposed by Gay in these two works. Significant examples of the linear break in both of Gay’s texts are found in his passages on Freud’s analysis of Leonardo da Vinci. The following section explains Kofman’s approach to Freud’s interpretation of da Vinci’s writing, which is a necessary starting point for a Kofmanian reading of Gay’s work on the subject.
Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: Kofman’s Victim, Gay’s Perfect Subject
Kofman’s comments on biography that are most relevant to the close readings of
Gay’s texts provided in this chapter are found in The Childhood of Art, particularly in her examination of Freud’s psychoanalytic evaluation of Leonardo da Vinci in Leonardo da
Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910). In The Childhood of Art Kofman defines the “biographical illusion” via the notion that biographies “never provide any insight into the hero, but rather reveal the infantile attitude that the biographer shares with the reader, one of admiration and narcissistic identification” (19). Kofman’s arguments are related to
Freud’s comments found in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood on the source of one’s inquiries into the biography of others. He writes:
Biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they
have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because—for reasons of their
personal emotional life—they have felt a special affection for him from the very
first. They then devote their energies to a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the
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great man among the class of their infantile models—at reviving in him, perhaps,
the child’s idea of his father. To gratify this wish they obliterate the individual
features of their subject’s physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life’s
struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige
of human weakness or imperfection. They thus present us with what is in fact a
cold, strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might feel
ourselves distantly related. (Leonardo 130)
These lines are applicable to Freud’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, which provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of da Vinci’s paintings—specifically The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and Mona Lisa—and concludes with the suggestion that da Vinci’s artwork reveals his homosexual desires, rooted in an infantile wish to be at his mother’s breast.
What is fascinating about the work of Peter Gay in this context is that his biographical work is focused on Freud, and his autobiographical work focuses on issues and subjects that concern Gay in his Freud biography. When reading My German
Question in light of Freud’s claims about the impossibility of writing biography and autobiography, Gay’s texts become “liveliest.” Kofman’s statements in The Childhood of
Art are highly relevant to this claim:
For anyone who has perfect knowledge of his own history, it would seem that the
work of art is neither possible nor necessary, even if the work is consciously
fantasized. It is an originary inscription, but one that is always already a symbolic
substitute. One can state that for Freud, every representation substitutes for an
originary absence of meaning, for one is always referred from substitute to
Sobelman 137
substitute without ever coming back to an originary signified, the latter being
merely fantasized by desire. (78)
When reading Gay as biographer and autobiographer under the scrutiny of Kofman’s comments, his repertoire emerges as a mix of disjointed texts with no identifiable singular source or “originary” voice. I argue in the following pages that, as a result of this lack of truly originary substance, Gay acts out displacement in his text. One example of this displacement is Gay’s father in My German Question, who arguably plays the role of a displaced Freud represented in Gay’s earlier scholarship, primarily in Freud: A Life for
Our Time. Gay’s autobiographical works and his biographical texts on Freud, all of which purport to relate accurate depictions of his and Freud’s lives, become indistinguishable from one another and all without “paternity,” that is, without an original
“creator.” The relationship between Gay’s and Freud’s lives to their lived experiences are thus erased: the “end of the division between life and books” (18). Nonetheless, in turning biographical Freud into an autobiographical father, Gay essentially invents a paternity that gives concreteness to his repertoire through his providing a paternal source in Freud. Without reading My German Question in direct relation to Freud: A Life for
Our Time, the role of biography in Gay’s body of work appears limited, as all connections between his biographical works are never to be established. Gay’s remarks in
Freud: A Life for Our Time may be related to what he deems to be Freud’s autobiographically driven theoretical texts and further qualify Kofman’s characterization of the biographical illusion. The following reading of Gay’s autobiographical and biographical texts is based on Kofman’s assertions about the biographer’s task and illustrates how Gay’s position as “oedipal biographer” of Freud complicates his own autobiographical depictions of the relationship between himself and his father.
Sobelman 138
Gay as Kofmanian Auto/Biographer
Elements of Gay’s biography of Freud signal a reading of the father-son relationship depicted in My German Question in which Gay’s father is identifiable as
Gay’s hero and also his oedipal rival. Kofman’s description of the role of the biographer in The Childhood of Art brings clarity to this particular reading of Gay’s text and suggests that he can be interpreted as both the “son” and “father” of Freud. If one also considers
Gay’s auto/biographical readings of Freud, as well as his fabricated review of Freud’s work in Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments, the father-son/biographer- subject relationships are complicated even further.
Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (1990) was published two years after Freud: A Life for Our Time. Gay prefaces the book with a promise:
It remains for me to add that, unlike a fading opera singer repeatedly offering
what he labels his final farewell recital, I fully intend in my future publications to
leave the person Freud behind. This is not to say that I am done with his ideas.
Not in the least. My conviction that psychoanalytic insights and discoveries are
immensely useful—indeed indispensable—to the practicing historian remains
unimpaired. But I plan to leave further biographical studies of Freud to others.
(Reading Freud xv)
Gay’s vow to leave Freud as his biographical subject was fulfilled for at least eight years.
In 1998, however, Freud again became the subject of Gay’s work, most notably with
Gay’s publication of My German Question. Reading Freud: Explorations and
Entertainments. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it is an amalgam of “playful” essays on
Sobelman 139
Freud.40 Among the book’s eight essays is the republication of a review of Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams, originally (and actually) published in Harper’s magazine in
1981. The review, according to Gay, was written anonymously and found in “an obscure
Austrian medical journal, the Grazer medizinische Vierteljahresschrift XVIII, 3 (July
1900), 139-48)” (Reading Freud 152). Pretending to be translator of the previously undiscovered article, Gay writes of the document: “As far as I can discover, it has been wholly overlooked in the voluminous literature on Freud and appears here in English, in my translation and with my annotations, for the first time” (152). The five pages of Gay’s
“translation” contain a total of seven footnotes, most of which agree with a number of highly positive evaluations of The Interpretation of Dreams presented in the body of the text. The review opens with the following: “[The Interpretation of Dreams] is a brilliant, disturbing, and, for all its suavity, difficult book” (152). Following a chronological summary of Freud’s texts from 1895 to 1900, the reviewer states: “The book’s anecdotal, witty, and confessional character is unorthodox, to say the least, but its purpose is persuasion. Whatever future scientific researches will probe, we must now concede that
Dr. Freud is an advocate of the greatest skill” (155). The statement “I suspect that if there should ever be a need for popular versions of his ideas Dr. Freud will be the one to provide them...” (155) is accompanied by Gay’s footnote, which reads: “Right once
40 Gay writes in his Introduction to the second part of the book: “Piety without playfulness, we can see, invites dullness, pedantry, at worst fanaticism; playfulness without piety, for its part, invites flightiness, caprice, careless utopianism. The intellectual who lacks playfulness will never play host to an original idea; the intellectual who lacks piety will never do the necessary work to translate an intuition into a viable theory” (Reading Freud 127). Gay’s suggestion regarding playfulness is well taken, particularly insofar as his text has been criticized by a number of scholars for this very playfulness. For such criticism, see, amongst others, Judith Hughs’ review in which she criticizes Gay’s republishing of a fake review of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams for Harper’s Magazine, purportedly written in 1900, though written and published by Gay in September of 1981: “One can only regard this episode as an uncharacteristic lapse from [Gay’s] usual scrupulous adherence to the norms of sharing information within a scholarly community” (Hughs, 129).
Sobelman 140 more: Freud in fact published a number of popularizations, from the comprehensive
Introductory Lectures to brief articles for encyclopedias, all of them models of lucidity”
(155, fn. 3). The text contains a surprising confession: the review had been written by
Gay himself, and published anonymously in Harper’s. It was only upon its republication in Reading Freud, that Gay revealed himself as the reviewer, and now translator, editor, and masked discoverer of the review. The interesting weaving of Gay’s various texts can be aptly interpreted using Kofman’s ideas related to the similarly multidimensional Kater
Murr. Not only is the pseudo-review an interesting display of Gay’s playfulness as an author, but it adds layers to Gay’s authorial position as a biographer of Freud. Once the text reveals that it has been written, translated, and found by the same hand, it comes to distinctly resemble Hoffmann’s Kater Murr, particularly in its doubled biographical origin. In his pennamed Harper’s review, Gay fulfills roles as both the biographer of
Freud and the displaced biographer of the anonymous critic.
In Kofman’s discussion of Hoffmann’s Kater Murr in “No Longer Full-Fledged
Autobiogriffies,” referring to the nameless biographer of Johannes Kreisler’s life, she writes of all biographers:
Biographers, fearing neither ridicule nor contradiction, provide circular
explanations… It is as if etymology, always fictionalizing about names, could
explain someone’s character or a life; or as if the ‘proper’ name were appropriate
to designate properties of an individual, like a seal. (“No Longer Full-Fledged
Autobioggrifies” 6)
Indeed, the “reviewer” of The Interpretation of Dreams in “Mind Reading” is a biographer of Freud in similar ways to that in which Peter Gay is a biographer of Freud.
Sobelman 141
Conjuring up a fake archival document and furthermore acting as the document’s translator and annotator seem unlikely acts for Peter Gay, whose strict concern with
Freud’s biography was made clear in his first major publication on Freud, entitled, Freud,
Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture and published in
1978. Interestingly, in the preface to the work, Gay confesses to his highly autobiographical relation to the text:
It should be plain from my language that this collection of essays is a deeply
personal book. And I would acknowledge that it is a piece of autobiography, part
of reckoning with my origins and my changing life’s experience. But I would
reject the suggestion that it is a ‘merely’ subjective report, claiming no greater
authority than whatever authority my voice could muster… I would like these
essays to be read, and judged, as history. (xiv)
Written three years prior to Gay’s inventive undertaking in Harpers, the text may be considered a precursor to the rest of Gay’s biographical and autobiographical work.
Indeed, Gay’s entangled authorial presence and historian-author-editor shifts occuring in
“Mind Reading” may be understood as symptomatic of his role as biographer of Freud and later, autobiographer of himself.
Furthermore, the playful reviewer (Gay) writes: “[W]e must confess that we think it more likely that Dr. Freud will prove to be a genius than a charlatan. If Dr. Freud should be proved right, this monograph will stand as a scientific achievement of impressive dimensions” (159). From a Kofmanian perspective, Gay’s playful text suits a triple reading of “Mind Reading,” Freud: A Life for Our Time, and My German Question extremely well. The multiple authorial layers in “Mind Reading” are highly reminiscent
Sobelman 142 of Hoffmann’s Kater Murr in its absence of an originary source, and any purported system of chronology attempted by the pseudo-reviewer of the text—and, by extension, the historian biographer writing Freud: A Life for Our Time—is inevitably fragmented,
“for he is straddling a wild colt which carries him through hill and dale and across fields without ever taking to the beaten paths” (“No Longer Full-Fledged Autobiogriffures” 10).
Gay’s description of the first time he read Freud in My German Question ties his
Harper’s review, his biography of Freud, and My German Question together to represent a whole construction of Kofman’s complex map of writers and subjects. Thus, Gay’s autobiographical account of “meeting” Freud in My German Question can be contextualized in a web of autobiographical-biographical statements. He writes in My
German Question of his first encounter with Freud:
I no longer recall precisely how old I was, but one day I came upon an article in
one of the many magazines we subscribed to. The author was waxing indignant
about one Dr. Sigmund Freud, who apparently believed that a mother nursing her
infant experiences some sexual sensations. This, the journalist charged, was a
shameful denigration that dragged one of life’s holiest relationships into the dirt. I
had little idea just what or who was being condemned, but the writer’s vehemence
intrigued me; the thought that sexuality, whatever that meant, should invade
presumably innocent acts like breastfeeding was a notion I could hardly grasp but
that seemed to hold untold possibilities. Sometimes, I suppose, reading too can be
destiny. (91)41
41 By “destiny” Gay is no doubt referring to Freud’s line, which Gay cites in Freud: A Life for Our Time: “Anatomy is destiny” (Gay 515). Later in Gay’s chapter (the whole of which is entitled “Dark Continents”), he delineates some problems associated with utilizing the Oedipus Complex without consideration of a child’s larger environment
Sobelman 143
Gay’s depiction of his memory of reading Freud, I propose, had already been recalled by him eight years earlier in “Mind Reading.” What is significant about this repetition of memory depiction is that both texts depict Gay as a defender of Freud against an unnamed critic utilizing a highly stylized biographical method of interpretation.
Both “reviewers” distort an original authorial voice but do not admit to doing so. The possibilities of these Kofmanian readings of Gay’s auto/biographical performances are indeed endless, as Kofman proposes regarding all such readings, for they very simply lack a definable origin. Fascinating in Gay’s case, then, is that while he promotes
Freudian theory as adaptable to numerous facets of human experience, he maintains his position as both a biographical and autobiographical historian of Freud.
Kofman and Gay on Freud’s Jewish Father
This section focuses on Gay’s and Freud’s Jewish fathers and places special emphasis on father figures in his biography of Freud and his autobiography. This examination concludes with the notion that the fathers presented in Kofman’s and Gay’s work, though “oedipal” in a number of ways, reveal each scholar’s very different approaches to Jewish observance.
As illustrated in Chapter Two, Kofman depicts her childhood as dominated by multiple mother figures—her birth mother, Madame Fagnard, and Mémé—and a complex combination of these officiating maternal presences. The literal death of
Kofman’s father is written into Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, but unlike the father in Freud’s oedipal formula, Kofman’s father appears as a highly religious figure, a Rabbi who kindly but sternly follows and mediates the laws of orthodox Judaism to his children.
beyond the parents. He ends his discussion with the curious phrase: “Culture, too, is destiny” (519).
Sobelman 144
Gay’s father in My German Question is depicted as a non-religious but laudable figure, his atheism a characteristic of his heroism. An example of Gay’s admiration for his father can be found in a brief sub-narrative in My German Question in which Gay begins to question his atheistic upbringing, offending his father by doubting the elder’s atheist teachings:
There was a moment in the early 1950s—I am not proud of this memory—when,
puffed up with anthropological wisdom recently acquired at Columbia, I lectured
my father on the vulgarity of atheism and the need to understand the social
function of religion; already in poor health, amazed at my defection, and unequal
to any serious discussion, he went to bed weeping. I was appalled at what I had
done and welcomed my mother’s suggestion that I apologize the next morning. I
did so gladly, and all was well again. I did not repeat that lapse. I was in the
process of discovering Freud in those years, and he promptly restored my
unbeliever’s equilibrium by his teaching and his example. (50)
This passage seems first and foremost to align Gay’s father with Gay’s Freud, though it does so in that it provides Gay the opportunity to challenge his father in an oedipal mode, equating his father with Freud, whose theories “restored” Gay’s atheism. Interestingly,
Gay does not seem to be explicitly paralleling his father to Freud here, but is rather depicting himself and Freud as equals—both sons of atheist upbringing. Gay’s biographical presentation of Jakob Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time is, once again, similar to that of his own father in My German Question, where Judaism is something of an involuntary fact of ancestry, or, as Sander Gilman proposes, perhaps a racial
Sobelman 145 identification. Gay argues in Freud: A Life for Our Time that Freud’s secularism dates back to his childhood, during which he was simply not exposed to Jewish observance:
Unequivocal as it was, Freud’s identification with Judaism was aggressively
secular. He had acquired this secularism early, at home… His father, Jacob Freud,
who did know Hebrew, was no more religious for all that… and had, in the course
of years, shed virtually all traces of religious observance. He continued to
celebrate Passover and to read the Bible—in Hebrew—but that was all. (125)
Although his father may have known Hebrew and observed religious tradition as a young man, Gay denies any traces of Jakob’s Jewishness, particularly as they may be found in the work of his son. Two important examples from Gay’s work add to a model of analysis whereby Gay displaces his father with Freud’s father. The first has to do with
Jakob Freud’s inscription in a Hebrew bible, which he gave to his son on Sigmund’s thirty-fifth birthday. Gay claims that Jakob Freud’s ability to write and read in Hebrew, however, was not a direct indication of his father’s Jewish observance.
The point is a highly debatable one, and Y.H. Yerushalmi provides an important counter-argument to Gay’s assertion that Jakob Freud’s knowledge of Hebrew did not equate to any kind of religiosity. Comparing Gay’s and Yerushalmi’s perspectives invites a mode of interpretation whereby Jakob Freud’s dedication becomes a Kofmanian paritext—that is, a text consisting of elements such as publication information, chapter titles, footnotes and endnotes, and other internal references42—indicating a flaw in Gay’s
42 For an elaborate definition of “paratext,” see Graham Allen’s Intertextuality, wherein he writes: “The paratext… performs various functions which guide the text’s readers and can be understood pragmatically in terms of various simple questions, all concerned with the manner of the text’s existence: when published? by whom? for what purpose? Such
Sobelman 146 interpretation of the Hebrew inscription as proof of atheism and a clue as to the inscription’s potentially religious genesis.
Although Gay makes strident efforts to depict Jakob Freud as an entirely secular
Jew who had cut all ties to any religiosity he might have adopted in his earlier years,
Yerushalmi cites the Hebrew inscription as evidence to the contrary. According to
Yerushalmi’s conclusions, which are heavily based on his translation of the inscription and combined with biographical evidence of Jakob Freud’s association with the Haskala,
Freud’s father was indeed a religious Jew. Yerushalmi in fact suggests the possibility that
Sigmund Freud’s life and work might be better defined or understood through the lens of religious Judaism. Beyond the issue of Jakob Freud’s inscription in the Hebrew bible, there is additional evidence to support the notion that, through a Kofmanian lens, when
Gay describes Freud’s father, he is inadvertently referring to his autobiographical father.43 One way in which this idea is illuminated is by looking at Kofman’s and Gay’s approaches to a particular scene involving Freud and his father in The Interpretation of
Dreams.
Both Kofman and Gay provide fairly extensive readings of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, both focusing at various points on the question of Freud’s and his father’s relationships to Judaism. In particular, they both address Freud’s brief recounting of a story that his father told to him, which made a deep impression on his later memories of his youth, so much so that the event’s “power was still being shown in [the] emotions and
paratextual elements also help to establish the text’s intentions: how it should be read, how it should not be read” (Allen 101). 43 As with all of the autobiographical depictions discussed in this dissertation, Gay’s “autobiographer father” should not be confused with his “historical” or real-life father. As I show, Gay’s autobiographical depictions of himself and those around him are intertwined with his biographical depictions of Freud and thus cannot be considered objective representations of his or his contemporaries’ lived lives.
Sobelman 147 dreams” (Interpretation of Dreams 197) presented in The Interpretation of Dreams. The narration reads as follows:
I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with
him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world
we live in. Thus is was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me
how much better things were now than they had been in his days. ‘When I was a
young man,’ he said, ‘I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your
birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian
came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and
shouted: ‘Jew! Get off the pavement!’ ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went
into the roadway and picked up my cap’ was his quiet reply. This struck me as
unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy
by the hand. (197)
Gay and Kofman both scrutinize the origin and effect of Freud’s memory of the walk with his father in strikingly similar ways. In one of her very few biographical notes on
Freud, Kofman turns to this episode in The Enigma of Woman in her discussion of
Freud’s death anxiety—an anxiety which is interchangeable, Kofman asserts, with
Freud’s dread of “women’s fearsome sex” (164). Her analysis is based on particular passages in The Interpretation of Dreams. Kofman asserts that Freud was led to publish
The Interpretation of Dreams by a particular kind of death anxiety, which “is not ‘pure’ death anxiety” but is rather an anxiety that is “inseparable from anxiety related to the limitation of sexual potency” (The Enigma of Woman 167). According to Kofman, Freud therefore wrote the text in order to “outdistance the death that is to come” (166) and “to
Sobelman 148 recapture youth, potency, even omnipotence” (166). Furthermore, she argues that The
Interpretation of Dreams “should confer immortality on its author, the immortality of the heroes and great men…” (166). Through its “unheard-of revelations,” Kofman continues, the text sets out to “transform Freud into a superman, make him a rival of that Oedipus…
A superman, indeed a demigod” (166). Freud succeeds, writes Kofman, in acting out “his infantile desire of immortality” (167) and also in overcoming his “unheroic” Jewish father by way of his own heroic deeds, the first one being to “cleanse the science of neuroses of all of its errors and prejudices” (166). Following her suggestion that Freud’s dream book was his psychoanalytic tour de force, Kofman refers to Freud’s memory fragment in which his father recollects having had his cap knocked off his head by a
Christian and his response to this event, which was to kneel down quietly and pick up his cap.
A closer examination of Freud’s report in The Interpretation of Dreams of the afternoon walk during which his father recounted the story of his brush with anti-
Semitism reveals that, in Gay’s highly glossed summary of the event which, as Kofman writes of all psychoanalytic summaries “is designed to prepare the way for interpretation”
(Freud and Fiction 88), Gay has neglected to read Jakob Freud’s Jewishness (both religious and non-religious Jewishness) into this passage. By putting emphasis on Freud’s disappointment with his father’s unheroic behavior independent of his Jewishness and by failing to address the potential Jewish father-Moses connection—while positively emphasizing the Hannibal-Jakob connection in the text—Gay completely precludes a
Jewish reading of Freud in this passage. Like Kofman’s speculative analysis of Freud’s summary of Jensen’s Gradiva, and Kofman’s summary of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady
Vanishes in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Gay’s summary of the walking scene in The
Interpretation of Dreams, as the following reading suggests, renders the text highly
Sobelman 149 problematic, particularly when it is considered to be part of a larger biographical project
(which is moreover bound to Gay’s autobiographical renderings in My German Question).
Gay’s summary of Freud’s account follows:
The recollection at once troubled and fascinated him. ‘I may have been ten or
twelve years old when my father began to take me along on his walks,’ and to talk
about the world he had known. One day, to show how radically life had improved
for Austria’s Jews, Jacob Freud told his son this story: ‘When I was a young
fellow, one Saturday I went for a walk in the streets of your birthplace, beautifully
decked out, with a new fur cap on my head. Along comes a Christian, knocks off
my cap into the muck with one blow, and shouts, ‘Jew, off the sidewalk!’”
Interested, Freud asks his father, ‘And what did you do?’ The composed reply: ‘I
stepped into the road and picked up my cap.’ His father’s submissive response,
Freud recalled soberly, perhaps a little ungenerously, ‘did not seem heroic to me.’
Was his father not a ‘big strong man?’” (Freud: A Life 12)
Yet a powerful, highly “Freudian” sentence has been cut out of Freud’s original text by
Gay. The first lines of the German text read: “Und nun stoße ich erst auf das
Jugenderlebnis, das in all diesen Empfindungen und Träumen noch heute seine Macht
äußert” [“At that point I am brought up against the event in my youth whose power is still being shown today in all these emotions and dreams” (286)]. Peter Gay’s omission of this line from his summary of Freud’s text suggests that he is, as Kofman writes of Freud, summarizing for the purpose of directed interpretation. Contextualizing the opening line is necessary for the present discussion.
Sobelman 150
“That point” to which Freud refers here is explained by his recollection of his most recent visit to Italy, whereupon he discovered that his childhood “longings for the eternal city” (Interpretation of Dreams 285) of Rome conflicted with his present experience of traveling in Italy. Upon deciding to forgo a visit to Rome for one to Naples,
Freud is reminded of a literary reference to Hannibal, and immediately identifies himself with the character: “I had actually been following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome” (Interpretation of Dreams 284). Freud’s text then suggests a much more concrete link between himself and Hannibal:
To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the
tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church. And the increasing
importance of the effects of the anti-Semitic movement upon our emotional life
helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days. Thus the wish to go to
Rome had become in my dream-life cloak a symbol for a number of other
passionate wishes. Their realization was to be pursued with all the perseverance
and single-mindedness of the Carthaginian, though their fulfillment seemed at the
moment just as little favoured by destiny as was Hannibal’s lifelong wish to enter
Rome. (Interpretation of Dreams 286)
Freud’s dual identification with the “Carthaginian” and “Hannibal,” and the disappointing conclusion that, like Hannibal’s wish to see Rome, Freud’s “passionate wishes” (Interpretation of Dreams 286), which were veiled by his dreams but bound to his waking encounters with anti-Semitism, were as impossible to fulfill as Hannibal’s desire was impossible to satisfy. The passage necessarily informs Freud’s subsequent recollection of the “event” in Freud’s youth “whose power,” Gay avoids noting, was
Sobelman 151 highly relevant to Freud’s interpretation of himself as the Jewish son of a religious
Jewish father. Gay relegates a biographical analysis of his summary of the cap scene to a footnote. The footnote explains Freud’s choice of fatherly hero in his works as a consequence of his interpretation of the walk with his father.
Gay’s exclusion of Freud’s oedipal recollection from Gay’s larger biographical project suggests that he has demoted the lines to a footnote precisely because including the recollection in the body of the text means giving it a central place in the biography, thus compromising Gay’s atheist father/atheist model depicted in the text.
As opposed to Gay, many scholars, both before and after the publication of
Freud: A Life for Our Time take a highly “Jewish approach” to Freud, depicting father and son as observant Jews. As early as 1957, scholars like Ernst Simon pointed out three details of Freud’s account of the scene with his father which are of importance for reading Jakob Freud as a devout Jew: First, that Jacob was on his walk on a Saturday when he was confronted by the Christian who threw his cap to the ground; second, that
Jacob was “well-dressed,” and, finally, that he had “a new fur cap on his head”
(Interpretation of Dreams 197). These three factors indicate that Jakob Freud was not only describing a relaxed weekend walk, interrupted by a bullying stranger, but he was more importantly exposing his faithfulness to Judaism: the day of the week was Shabbat, the “young man” Jakob was dressed accordingly, including the “fur cap” on his head.44
44 Several scholars have indeed noted the connection between Jakob Freud’s story (according to Freud’s recollection) and its distinctly “Jewish” elements. See, for example, Emanuel Rice, Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home (1990); Daniel Boyarin, “Goyim Naches, or, Modernity and the Manliness of the Mentsh” (1998); Ernst Simon, “Sigmund Freud the Jew” (1957); Estelle Roith, The Riddle of Freud (1987); and Jay Gellar, On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007). A curious detail about these studies is that none of them point out that Freud’s original German text contains none of the terms which would lead one to consider Jakob Freud’s religious devotion. That is, in Freud’s original Die Traumdeutung, neither the word “shtreimlech” (a fur hat worn by married religious Jews) nor the word “Shabbat” appear but rather
Sobelman 152
A Kofmanian analysis of Gay’s autobiographical identification with Freud calls for a remark on the literary form of the text. The analysis of Jacob Freud’s religious observances is presented not by his own narrative in the text, but rather by Freud’s purported memory of Jacob’s storytelling. This is thus a secondary narrative, which can be considered a type of “screen memory” (in Kofmanian terms), for the incident remembered is merely a juncture in the path towards the more significant memory trace, which leads back to unconscious memories from infancy. In this regard, Freud is thus correct to note his fundamental disappointment in his father’s unheroic stance in the face of anti-Semitism, based on his distorted memory of the defining walk with his father.
Aware of the function of screen memories, Freud indeed might have consciously fabricated this tale—including the sub-narrative of the memory, which gives greater opportunity for an oedipal reading of the childhood scene.
What is additionally important here is the way in which the memory distortions evident in the passage lead to a reconsideration of Gay’s insistence on Freud’s secularism and a positive connection to Kofman’s assertion that Jewish observance was highly significant to Freud’s childhood recollections, and was thus not merely a sign of “an
“Samstag” (Saturday) and “Pelzmütze” (literally, fur hat): “Und nun stoße ich erst auf das Jugenderlebnis, das in all diesen Empfindungen und Träumen noch heute seine Macht äußert. Ich mochte zehn oder zwölf Jahre gewesen sein, als mein Vater begann, mich auf seine Spaziergänge mitzunehmen und mir in Gesprächen seine Ansichten über die Dinge dieser Welt zu eröffnen. So erzählte er mir einmal, um mir zu zeigen, in wieviel bessere Zeiten ich gekommen sei als er: Als ich ein junger Mensch war, bin ich in deinem Geburtsort am Samstag in der Straße spazierengegangen, schön gekleidet, mit einer neuen Pelzmütze auf dem Kopf. Da kommt ein Christ daher, haut mir mit einem Schlag die Mütze in den Kot und ruft dabei: Jud, herunter vom Trottoir! "Und was hast du getan?" Ich bin auf den Fahrweg gegangen und habe die Mütze aufgehoben, war die gelassene Antwort. Das schien mir nicht heldenhaft von dem großen starken Mann, der mich Kleinen an der Hand führte” (Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Geammelte Werke 202- 203). The assumption of Jakob Freud’s religious devotion based on a highly “Jewish” interpretation of the text indicates the general belief that Jakob Freud had been indeed religious, and that Freud’s memory of the important event in his youth is remembered for the impact of his father’s Jewishness on Sigmund. Overall, however, Peter Gay’s writings deny the force of this event on Freud’s sense of his own Jewishness.
Sobelman 153 indefinable, elusive element at work within [Freud]” (Gay, A Godless Jew 132). There are, of course, limitations to the proposition that Jacob Freud obeyed Jewish practices, particularly as I have used a limited context—mostly extracted from Gay’s work on
Freud’s Jewishness—to argue that Freud’s father was more religiously devoted to
Judaism than Gay maintains.
Indeed, not only Peter Gay, but several other scholars point out this passage in
The Interpretation of Dreams and Freud’s self-analysis. Scholars repeatedly conclude that the importance of the event for Freud is that it confirmed that he “wanted a different father, one who could protect him and make him proud to be his son” (Rizzuto, Why Did
Freud Reject God? 247). Reading Freud’s comment—“This struck me as unheroic conduct”—however, suggests further questions about Jewishness that Gay has overlooked, but which have been carefully read by other scholars, such as Y.H.
Yerushalmi in Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Basically,
Yerushalmi is interested in the Jewish elements of Freud’s life and theory, and particularly the analogy of Moses as the father, not only as a heroic oedipal usurper of the
Godhead’s position, but on a biographical level, of Freud’s depictions of a specifically
“Jewish” father in his self-analyses.
Yerushalmi’s proof of Jakob Freud’s devotion to religious Judaism is based in part on biographical details related to his teaching of the Hebrew bible to his young son:
“Certainly, whatever his interpretations, Jakob was teaching [Sigmund] the Bible not as a collection of fairy tales but as a holy book to be studied with the utmost reverence”
(Freud’s Moses 65). But Jakob Freud’s involvement with “Haskalah”—the “Jewish
Enlightenment” movement45 which was active in Galicia and Germany and whose
45 Three beneficial sources on the “Haskalah” include Moshe Pelli’s Haskalah and Beyond: The Reception of the Hebrew Enlightenment and the Emergence of Haskalah Judaism (2012), a collection of essays edited by Shmuel Feiner and David J. Sorkin,
Sobelman 154 members were referred to as Maskilim—Yerushalmi argues, has not been accurately depicted in scholarship on the subject of Jacob Freud’s religiosity. By identifying Jakob
Freud as one of the “Maskilim,” Yerushalmi argues that other scholars who fail to understand the biographical significance of his association with the Haskalah are simply
“pressing” Jakob Freud into a “typological mold on no direct but only the most circumstantial evidence” (Freud’s Moses 62). Moreover, these same scholars have neglected to define the movement sufficiently: “Those who have pasted the label on
Jakob Freud equate Haskalah simplistically with the abandonment of virtually all Jewish observance, without agnosticism if not outright atheism, with a desire for the most radical, if not total, assimilation” (Freud’s Moses 62). Rather, Yerushalmi says of the Galician
Maskilim, with whom Jakob Freud associated himself, that they “were opposed to using
Yiddish except as an instrument for popularizing their ideas, but they remained loyal throughout to the Hebrew language and to historical and national values. They waged open war against what they regarded as religious fanaticism, Hasidic superstition, cultural hermeticism, but not against Judaism per se” (Freud’s Moses 63). Yerushalmi supports his argument for Jakob Freud’s religious affiliation by pointing to his second marriage to
Amalie Nathanson, Freud’s mother: “You may rest assured that at the wedding Jakob was not bareheaded, all seven nuptial blessings were recited in Hebrew, and the glass was dutifully shattered under Jakob’s foot in remembrance of the destruction of the ancient temple in Jerusalem” (Freud’s Moses 63). Assumptions about Jakob Freud’s rejection or ignorance of Jewish tradition pose a risk for those wishing to understand Freud as a son of any kind—not least of all an oedipal son: “If you want to persist in calling [Jakob] a
Galician Maskil, so be it, so long as you do not turn the term into a cliché. The same
entitled New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001), and Shmuel Feiner’s Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (2002).
Sobelman 155 caution is necessary in trying to fathom his relationship with his son” (Freud’s Moses 63).
Yerushalmi further argues that the father’s faithfulness to Judaism was highly significant in understanding the father-son relationship as one which was more “Jewish” than it was
“oedipal,” for although, like all fathers of Freud’s theory of oedpial familial relationships,
Jakob Freud “also expected obedience and respect” (Freud’s Moses 63). He also, nonetheless, “encouraged his son to surpass him and was proud of his achievements”
(Freud’s Moses 63). In fact, Yerushalmi suggests, “unlike the fierce Primeval Father of
Freudian mythology, these [immigrant] Jewish fathers [like Freud’s father] have been more than willing victims, eager to be slain, doting on their slayers” (Freud’s Moses 63).
Yet Peter Gay’s almost identical depiction of his father and Jakob Freud rests somewhere between the figure of Laius from the myth of Oedipus and the religious yet weak Jewish father. Jakob Freud’s religious affiliations, according to Gay, were for most of his adult life slight and nearly forgotten about by the time he became Freud’s father. Indeed, in
Gay’s telling footnote to his discussion about Jakob Freud’s Hebrew inscription in the bible he presented to Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time, Gay cites the following from
Martin S. Bergmann’s “Moses and the Evolution of Freud’s Jewish Identity”:
If the dedication is analyzed as a Hebrew document it becomes apparent that
Jacob Freud was neither a religious nor a nationalist Jew, but a member of the
Haskala, a movement that saw Judaism as epitomizing the religion of
enlightenment. No orthodox Jew would speak lightly about the Spirit of God
speaking to a seven-year-old. Nor would any religious Jew see the Bible as
belonging to mankind as a whole. (cited in Gay 600)
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Finding proof in the work of Bergmann, Gay suggests that Jakob Freud’s Jewishness was not only irrelevant to his son’s childhood education, but, in fact, held no relevance at all in the familial context; it is marginalized, I argue, as an anecdote that gives Gay sufficient entitlement as a historian and allows him the opportunity to deny the note’s fundamental importance for a particular biographical reading of Freud’s early experiences.
It is via the development of the field of psychoanalysis, Kofman writes in The
Enigma of Woman, that Freud gains immortality by accomplishing “what his father, the
Jew Jakob, had been unable to accomplish, so that his son has to accomplish it in his stead” (“From The Enigma of Woman,” Selected Writings 167). Kofman links Freud’s oedipal succession of Jakob, as well as the son’s feeling of horror associated with the death anxiety (the latter of which “gave him grey hair” [168]) to his hesitancy in publishing The Interpretation of Dreams. Furthermore, it was not simply the takeover of
Jakob’s position as hero, but it was the guilt that resulted from having accomplished what his “Jewish” father could not. Emphasizing the original guilt feelings accumulating in
Freud, Kofman connects his postponement of the book’s publication—“he waited five years” (Selected Writings 168) —to his tendency to delay matters in other areas of his life:
Generally speaking, guilt explains why Freud always postponed fulfillment of his
desires or his ambitions, why he put off his marriage for five years, why he waited
five years to take his medical examination. The delays can thus be attributed to
inhibition, but also to the fact that Freud always had the strength to postpone the
immediate satisfaction of his desires in order to satisfy them more fully later on.
As if five years of life did not count for him, as if he had all the time in the world
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ahead of him, as if he knew that in spite of his delays he would nevertheless
achieve his aims. (Selected Writings 168)
Freud’s ease with postponing projects, personal and professional engagements, and patient consultations—five years was the average “length of treatment of the patients to whom he is closest” (Selected Writings 168)—existed, Kofman writes, “in spite of having a poor Jew for a father” (168), who was not successful in overcoming his own immediate desires, and who “was unable to accomplish the psychic exploit that matters most to a man, that of rising above his own nature” (169). Sigmund Freud, Kofman proposes, is always prepared to overtake his father, and, “thanks to his own—Jewish—tenacity, he will succeed in the end” (169). Indeed, Freud succeeds because he “takes it upon himself to accomplish the feat that his father was unable to perform: the ‘heroic’ postponement of the satisfaction of his desires, giving the lie to the proverb ‘like father, like son…’” (169).
Patience was, Kofman asserts, of necessary virtue for Freud, though the outcome of such patience was to mean the death of an idealized subject. The shifts in God-positions, from
Jakob to Freud, and from Freud to Jakob (via a mission analogous to that of Freud’s
Oedipus Rex), further supports Kofman’s claim that the artist of a work is himself a hero for his capabilities as the murderer and successor of his father, once his own type of hero.
And thus Freud’s quest for immortality through his writing of The Interpretation of
Dreams is further explained: “The search for immortality is carried out by means of successive identifications with various heroes who have been created or admired, representatives of the ego ideal who serve as substitutes for the image of the father”
(Kofman, The Childhood of Art 124). As Kofman notes, both Oedipus and Moses are
Freud’s substitutive fathers; his greatest desire in his relation to each, in Freud’s own terms, is “to be his own father” (“A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men” 173).
Sobelman 158
Although Kofman’s study of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams accomplishes the task of including Freud in his own psychoanalytic model of the father-son dynamic, it seems nonetheless quite odd that Kofman would take such a biographical approach to the text, even if she is following, or “imitating,” Freud’s method of self-disclosure. In order to deal with this seeming contradiction that emerges from an intertextual reading of
Kofman’s The Childhood of Art, “No Longer Full-Fledged Autobiogriffies,” and The
Enigma of Woman, amongst other texts, I propose an alternative model of reading
Kofman’s biographical passages on Freud. This reading responds to concerns about
Jewish observance and self-identification presented in both Gay’s and Kofman’s autobiographical work and claims that the full force of the father-son dynamic is revealed through each scholar’s autobiographical identifications with Jewish practice.
Kofman, Gay, and Jewish Law Givers
I have argued that Kofman’s relation to Jewish observance, as depicted in Rue
Ordener, Rue Labat, is highly complex. As far as Jewish “law” is concerned, it is her mother, rather than her father, who punishes the young Kofman for disobeying Jewish laws, particularly those related to food. In Peter Gay’s autobiographical and biographical works, in contrast, the only significant “giver” of Jewish law appears to be Freud’s father,
Jakob, but only with respect to a literal giving of the Hebrew bible and his famous
Hebrew inscription on the inside cover. Gay’s insistence on Jakob Freud’s non- observance, as discussed in the previous chapter, although a seemingly contradictory notion—especially considering evidence which tends to suggest proof for Jakob Freud’s religious observance—is motivated by his conception of the father-son relationship, found in both his biographical and autobiographical works. Still, there are even stronger indications of Gay’s self and father-identifications with Sigmund and Jakob Freud, again
Sobelman 159 indicated by Gay’s physiognomical analyses of Freud’s “biological” Jewishness. In fact,
Gay’s statements regarding his father’s Jewishness seem unyieldingly tied to his earlier comments on Freud’s atheism.
In several of his texts, Gay cites Freud’s address to “his brethren” at his seventieth birthday celebration at the B’nai B’rith. In Freud: A Life for Our Time, Gay concedes that
Freud’s statements in his address “are a concrete consequence of Freud’s belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics” of Jewishness and that Jewishness was Freud’s
“identifying quality” that “had to be part of his phylogenetic inheritance” (610). Although
Gay asserts that Freud “never explored how his Lamarckian ‘racial’ endowment worked in himself,” he was nonetheless “convinced it was there” (601). Indeed, the “Address to the Society of B’nai B’rith,” which was delivered on Freud’s behalf on his seventieth birthday (May 6, 1926), directly addresses Freud’s relation to Jews and Jewry. A portion of the address follows:
That you were Jews could only be agreeable to me; for I was myself a Jew, and it
had always seemed to me not only unworthy but positively senseless to deny the
fact. What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor
national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever and was brought up without
any religion… But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of
Jewry and Jews irresistible—many obscure emotional forces, which were the
more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear
consciousness of inner identity, and the safe privacy of a common mental
construction. (Standard Edition vol. XX, 273-74)
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Freud’s relation to Jewishness, thus, as far as he explains it, cannot be defined by active religious observance or Zionism, but rather by a sense of emotional connectivity, or perhaps, it can be said, even a racial connectivity.
In convergence with Sander Gilman’s concept of racial Jewishness, Gay proposes that “Freud’s undefined sense of Jewishness represents a special case of his obstinate belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics” (A Godless Jew 133). Gay periodically points to fragments of Freud’s writing—particularly in his letters—in order to stress that “Freud’s Jewish identification was emphatically secular” (Freud: A Life
599). Gay writes in the context of Freud’s address to B’nai B’rith that “he seems to have found the near veneration with which B’nai B’rith claimed him as its own a little embarrassing and quite amusing” (Freud: A Life 599). Gay cites a letter from Freud to
Marie Bonaparte in the same month that Freud addressed B’nai B’rith, which again calls attention to Freud’s ideas of inherent Jewishness: “’Altogether… the Jews have celebrated me like a national hero, although my merit in the Jewish cause is confined to the single point that I have never denied my Judaism’” (Freud: A Life 599). Although
Freud’s identification may have stemmed from his vague yet certain sense of Jewishness,
Gay sternly argues that this sense did not come in any way from the religious observance of Freud’s father: “If Freud went to the synagogue ever, it must have been for a memorial service for one of his friends. But there is no evidence that he ever did” (Freud: A Life
600). Thus for Gay, Freud, who, “forgetting the little Hebrew he had ever known”
(Freud: A Life 599), and having had “no practice in the Hebrew language” (599) remained, to the end, an “infidel Jew” (599).
In nearly identical comments about the lack of religiosity of Gay’s own parents, he writes in My German Question:
Sobelman 161
No adolescent struggles with the faith of my fathers for me—I had no faith to lose
and was perfectly comfortable with a condition that more devout people have
described as sadly deprived. My parents were so sure of their disbelief in God and
their disdain for rituals that agnosticism struck them as a tepid compromise. In
fact, my father was convinced that Jesus was not a historical figure but a priestly
invention. (49)
Freud too, Gay claims in Freud: A Life for Our Time and A Godless Jew, was firmly secular. Denying all traces of Jewishness from his upbringing, Gay points to The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism as written products of Freud’s entirely nonreligious upbringing.
Yet another parallel, perhaps more unsuspecting, arises in a comparative reading of Freud: A Life for Our Time and My German Question. The link between the texts in this case has primarily to do with Gay’s reading of the “cap scene” in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Gay’s depiction of a walk he took with his own father. Although Gay’s memory dates back to his toddler years, and Freud’s to the beginning of his adolescent years, the scenes are parallel when examined from the perspective of Gay’s analytic conclusion of both his and Freud’s memories, namely that the father is an oedipal figure whose actions leave their greatest impression on their sons as a singular, defining event in the child’s upbringing.
My father once recalled for my benefit a single incident that had not registered
with me but evidently gave him some trouble in retrospect: when I was little more
than two, walking with him and my Tante Esther, I got bored or tired and begged
to be carried. When my father proved unwilling to oblige, I started a sit-down
Sobelman 162
strike, which he broke with a spot of corporal punishment. This was so
exceptional an incident that he could bring it to mind years later. (My German
Question 32)
Besides having a highly residual affect on Gay’s conception of his childhood—as his description of Freud reveals—another parallel is evoked in this memory fragment: the retelling of the story by the father. Whereas the result of Jakob Freud’s retelling promotes a depiction of the weak, Jewish father, according to Freud the son, Gay’s recollection of the defining walk at his father’s side encourages a rewriting of Freud’s overcome father, the stronger, more kingly father in the previous father’s place. Furthermore, this comparative reading supports Sarah Kofman’s explanation of the child’s ambivalence towards the father, which, according to her arguments set forth in The Childhood of Art, are not a contradiction for Freud, but rather a natural ambivalence, even a necessary one.
In My German Question, Gay describes a childhood scene which confirms a
Kofmanian ambivalence towards his mother and father. This depiction is comparable, as the following section explains, to the dual depiction of Kofman’s mother and father as the abusive enforcer and passive lawmaker in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Kofman’s conclusions in The Childhood of Art, as I have shown in chapter two, apply not only to
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, but they also pertain to Gay’s autobiographical text, further contradicting his scholarly claim that Jakob Freud was an entirely unthreatened father, only enthusiastic about Freud’s progress, unaffected by his son’s successes. Gay writes that his two earliest memories “point in opposing directions,” though they have “bravely struggled to the surface of [his] mind through the thick fog of forgetfulness” (My German
Question 37). The doubled memory fragment reads as follows:
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I am in a hotel with my parents, perhaps on the way to a family visit or spa. There
has been a power failure which has cut off the water supply, and my parents,
knowing how much I dislike carbonated water, have put a glass of seltzer on a
dresser to let the bubbles escape so that I may drink in comfort. But then: I am at
home, there are guests in the living room listening to a humorous record played
on our phonograph. It is of a trumpeter trying to perform a solo and hitting a sour
note; he tries again and again, only to repeat the same mistake at the same place,
and someone begins to laugh at the trumpeter’s discomfiture… My parents well
know that I cannot abide this record and break down in tears whenever it is
played… Still, they play it again. Balance sheet: one act of kindness, one of
callousness. If this were baseball, it would be a sensational, never-yet-heard-of
batting average. But this was not baseball. (My German Question 37)
This passage may be read through a Kofmanian lens in a number of ways, most notably in relation to Gay’s emphasis on the doubled depiction of Gay’s parents. In order to clarify Gay’s depicted ambivalence, I propose it is the notion of “screen memory” which links Kofman’s theoretical conclusions and Gay’s autobiographical texts most engagingly.
Kofman’s chapter six of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, entitled “Screen” may be interpreted as a “material” depiction of the Freudian concept of “screen memories.”
Freud theorizes, first in The Interpretation of Dreams and then in his Pyschopathology of
Everyday Life (1901), that one’s so-called memory of childhood is not accurately representative of childhood events themselves, but is rather indicative of the later experience which struck recognition of the “original” experience in the mind of the analysand. What occurs at the later junction of recollection may consist, Freud asserts, of
“retrogressive displacement” (Kofman, Childhood of Art 59), that is, the belated insertion
Sobelman 164 of particular elements of the memory which define the memory as such. What is even more likely, however, is that in the process of recollection, the analysand unconsciously veils the original memory with a later one. Regardless of the directionality of the memory displacement, the unconscious is intent on fulfilling one goal in the analysand: the maintenance of repression. Rarely, as Kofman notes, the screen memory may be synchronized with the original memory of the early event. Kofman seems keenly aware of the function of screen memory in her writing of chapter sixteen of Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat. There she recalls a scene in which she witnessed Memé undressing behind a “big mahogany screen” (55). Indeed, the title of the chapter—“Screen”—indicates the hidden importance of this scene in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, and yet recognizes its utterly impossible analysis. For like all such distortions of memory, the screen memory too “is always already a matter of imagination, just as meaning, rather than being given in the present, is reconstructed after the fact” (Childhood of Art 62). Kofman performs the screen memory in her “Screen” chapter: Memé is hidden, behind the screen, untouchable yet there, in highly distorted form. The chapter ends with Kofman’s claim that during her stay with Memé in the hotel room, she did not think of her biological mother for even a moment.
Kofman’s “Screen” chapter in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, I propose, is a reflective sketch of Kofman’s imaginative memory recollection, while Peter Gay’s in My German
Question is without such Freudian reflection, and thus is yet one step further from the possibility of memory depiction. Although Gay claims his doubled memory to be analyzable from a psychoanalytic perspective—including the initial memory of the seltzer scene, followed by the connected, earlier scene of his parents’ embarrassing dinner party—his understanding renders him nonetheless caught up in the midst of a larger project of displacements, to which he refers in the beginning of My German
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Question as “not an autobiography” (ix). Kofman not only shows her comprehension of
Freud’s theory of screen memories more clearly than Gay, but she does so to a point that she employs literary playfulness with the term. Once again, she proves herself unabashedly practicing the work of the Freudian analysand, including recognizing the limitations of her role.
The aim of the analysis proposed in this chapter has been to illuminate the problems of autobiography and biography proposed by Sarah Kofman through a reading of Peter Gay’s biographical work on Freud in conjunction with his autobiographical work as textual Kofmanian subjects of scrutiny. This analysis supports my original proposition that the autobiographical, biographical, and scholarly texts are inherently—and indeed impenetrably—intertwined.
In order to tie together and extend the various arguments proposed in the three chapters presented thus far, the concluding chapter that follows provides a suggestion for a methodological approach to studying scholar autobiography that will satisfy critical concerns regarding the necessity of separating autobiographical texts into genres.
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Conclusion
Pushing the Limits of Scholar-Autobiography
The arguments presented in this dissertation focus on Peter Gay’s and Sarah
Kofman’s autobiographical works and scholarship on the life and work of Sigmund
Freud. I have shown through intertextual analyses of Gay’s and Kofman’s scholarship and life writing the importance of a scholar’s autobiographical writings for his or her critical claims widens in certain cases. In conclusion, I wish to approach scholar- autobiography from still another theoretical-autobiographical perspective—namely, that of Freud’s autobiographical works in relation to those of Gay’s scholarship and life writing. This approach extends the possibilities for scholar-autobiographical analysis to the level of Freud, the scholar whose theories are at the center of Gay’s academic work.
The main focus of the following analysis is America, a country and an idea which appear in the writings of Gay and Freud under a veil of ambivalence; in certain texts they show admiration for America and in others disgust. The references Freud makes to America, which are discussed here, may be found in his An Autobiographical Study. Gay’s personal writings about America which are addressed here are found in his 1977 article in
American Scholar, entitled, “At Home in America.” The central goal of the comparative analysis of these two works is to test the relevancy of Freud’s autobiographical work for understanding Gay’s biographical work. The brief examination presented here pushes the boundaries of scholar-autobiographical analyses to include an intertextual study of the life writing of a scholar with the autobiographical works of that scholar’s biographical subject. This reading further illustrates the complexity of the narratives within Freud’s corpus that make his work critically important for readings of autobiographical works by
Freud scholars. Finally, another goal of this conclusion is to bring my previous analyses
Sobelman 167 into perspective by comparing the scholar-autobiographical works of Gay and Freud, thus illustrating an extensive range of forms in which arguments and theories present themselves in autobiographical works. I begin with an explanation of how Gay understands Freud as an autobiographer and an analysis of Freud’s autobiographical depiction of his relationship to America.
Gay argues that Freud’s utilization of the autobiographical mode appears in the form of psychoanalytic self-interpretation, which Freud first employed in his works in the mid-1890s.46 Self-analysis, Gay notes, was Freud’s “act of patient heroism, to be admired and palely imitated but never repeated” and may be considered “the founding act of psychoanalysis” (Freud: A Life 310). Furthermore, in his biographical reading of Totem and Taboo (1912), Gay links Freud’s theoretical conclusions to his life, partly motivated by Freud’s autobiographical remarks about his father in the text. Gay writes: “It is highly plausible that some of the impulses guiding Freud’s argument in Totem and Taboo emerged from [Freud’s] hidden life; in some respect the book represents a round in his never-finished wrestling bout with Jacob Freud” (Freud: A Life 335). Whether Freud clearly alludes to his autobiographical self in his analyses or merely suggests a connection between his private life and theoretical arguments is mostly irrelevant in the context of my study of his autobiographical texts, as it is regarding the studies Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman presented earlier in this dissertation. The Barthesian author/text distinction also holds in Freud’s case. Accordingly, the present analysis strives to exclude such speculative links between life and work, and rather focuses on the extent to which
Gay’s statements on America compare—and also clash—with those of Freud.
46 Gay writes: “Freud, analysts say, undertook self-analysis beginning some time in the mid-1890s and engaged in it systematically from the late spring or early summer of 1897 on…” (Freud: A Life 96).
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Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time touches on Freud’s relationship with Woodrow
Wilson and America in a subsection entitled “The Ugly Americans.” Here, Gay describes the brief project Freud undertook with journalist and American diplomat William Bullitt, which centered on a “psychological” study of Woodrow Wilson: “Bullitt had called on
Freud in the mid-1920s to consult [with] him about what he thought to be self-destructive behavior, and during one of their meetings told Freud that he was writing a book about the Versailles treaty” (Freud: A Life 554). Apparently unhappy with the outcome of the
Versailles negotiations, Freud, Gay explains, due to his “embittered mood” (554) and his failing health, disregarded his previous efforts to keep psychoanalysis “on the couch” and went ahead with the project. According to Gay, Freud’s dismay with Wilson did not stop him from writing up a psychoanalytic report of the president; he was “prepared to make an exception with Woodrow Wilson” (554). Gay suggests that Freud’s disapproval of
Wilson trickled over into his general opinion of the United States: “No doubt Woodrow
Wilson’s being an American gave Freud special pleasure in venting his aggressive spleen…. Whatever guise the American assumed, saint or moneygrubber, Freud was ready to write him off as a most unattractive specimen in the human zoo” (Freud: A Life
562). Gay points to several other comments made by Freud, primarily from letters, about the superficiality of the American mentality, claiming that Freud “had given voice to his anti-American sentiments years before he set foot in the United States… he never ceased taking pleasure in calling [Americans] bad names” (562). A crucial point of Gay’s description of Freud’s anti-Americanism is found in his discussion of Freud’s relationship with his “gifted analysand,” (565) Horace Frink, an American who suffered a psychotic attack in 1924. According to Gay, Fink’s breakdown was, for Freud, “a characteristic American failing” (565); Freud had meant to make Fink the head of the
American Psychoanalytic Association but was now gravely disappointed with his
Sobelman 169 colleague’s mental collapse and made Fink an example of the larger American problems of superficiality and narrow-mindedness. Gay’s reading is problematic for one primary reason: his reliance on Freud’s letters in his evaluation of Freud’s opinion of America overlooks an important work of Freud’s written that same year, An Autobiographical
Study (1924). While Gay’s claims have merit insofar as his readings of Freud’s letters go, his dismissal of An Autobiographical Study, which is arguably most indicative of Freud’s opinion of America, is interesting in light of Gay’s glorification of America in two of his own autobiographical works, “At Home in America” (1977) and My German Question.
As discussed in Chapter Three, Freud’s An Autobiographical Study is his most deliberately autobiographical work; there is no other title in his repertoire which includes the term “autobiography” or any other phrase which might indicate a confessional work, or one based directly on events in his life. What is interesting for a discussion of Freud’s opinions of America is his account in An Autobiographical Study of his visit to the
United States and his relationships with a number of Americans there. He begins:
In 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Jung and me to America to go to the Clark
University, Worcester, Mass., of which he was President, and to spend a week
giving lectures (in German) at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of that
body’s foundation. Hall was justly esteemed as a psychologist and educationalist,
and had introduced psycho-analysis into his courses some years before; there was
a touch of the ‘king-maker’ about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and in
then deposing them. We also met James J. Putnam there, the Harvard neurologist,
who in spite of his age was an enthusiastic supporter of psycho-analysis and threw
the whole weight of a personality that was universally respected into the defense
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of the cultural value of analysis and the purity of its aims. (Autobiographical
Study 94)
Oddly, Freud’s positive experience with Hall, Putnam, and more specifically William
James are not at the center of Gay’s examination of Freud’s attitude towards Americans and he does not credit these relationships with defining Freud’s general experience of
America. Freud’s Autobiographical Study, however, offers a different narrative, one which places America in a softer, more welcoming light. Of his meeting with William
James he writes:
Another event of this time which made a lasting impression on me was a meeting
with William James the philosopher. I shall never forget one little scene that
occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag
he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch up as soon
as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He
died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as
fearless as he was in the face of approaching death. (Autobiographical Study 95)
Freud’s slightly emotional account frames James as a brave American who interacted with Freud on an individual level, and the episode is embedded in An Autobiographical
Study within his general description of his visit. His meeting with James also functions as a preamble to a much longer section on Freud’s general experience in and of America. He recalls:
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At that time I was only fifty-three. I felt young and healthy, and my short visit to
the new world encouraged my self-respect in every way. In Europe I felt as
though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost
men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five
Lectures Upon Psycho-Analysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible
day-dream: psycho-analysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a
valuable part of reality. It has not lost ground in America since our visit; it is
extremely popular among the lay public and is recognized by a number of official
psychiatrists as an important element in medical training. (Autobiographical
Study 95)
Considering Freud’s narrative alongside Gay’s biography, one can immediately find discrepancies between the descriptions provided by Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Time and Freud’s own account in An Autobiographical Study. Whereas Gay proposes that
Freud “perceived the United States as a seductive rival, rich, alluring, powerful, in some primitive way superior to Europe…” (Freud: A Life 563), Freud’s life writing reveals otherwise. It is perhaps the case that Freud’s writing reflects a certain hesitancy to disclose negative feelings towards the United States due to the fact that the larger publication in which his essay is embedded is an American one, but Gay does little to recognize the text according to its title, and points only to Freud’s letters—notes from his
“real life” as it were—to support his claims. A brief look at Gay’s own autobiographical work may explain his particular presentation in Freud: A Life for Our Time.
In My German Question, Gay writes of his own feelings about America when he was a sixteen-year old German Jew attending the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin:
Sobelman 172
History has a way of spoiling, or at least complicating, the best stories… The
Olympic Games had been staged by the [Nazi] regime with an eye to world
opinion… I am glad in retrospect that I knew nothing of this in 1936. It would
have tarnished my unqualified idealization of the United States. (83)
Gay’s “unqualified idealization” of America is also noted in “At Home in America,” wherein he writes: “In 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympic Games, my impractical infatuation with America assumed more realistic contours with the visit of one of my mother’s older brothers, my ‘American uncle’” (33). Indeed, Gay’s affection for America is unwavering in his New York Times essay: “In truth, I had been infatuated with America for several years before I saw the country, before I could be sure that I would ever see it”
(“At Home in America” 31). The event of the 1936 Olympic Games do not appear in
Freud’s writings, but one year prior to this major event Freud added a Postscript to An
Autobiographical Study in which he proposes a shift in the subjects of his theories from the individual to larger societies. Recollecting his major works of the 1920s, including
The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he writes in the 1935 postscript:
I perceived more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions
between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval
experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a
reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id, and the super-ego,
which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—are the very same process
repeated upon a wider stage. (Autobiographical Study 82-3)
Sobelman 173
He continues, stressing the role of Germany in his newly formed theories of psycho- historical development: “These studies [The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its
Discontents], which, though they originate in psychoanalysis, stretch far beyond it, have perhaps awakened more public sympathy than psychoanalysis itself. They may have played a part in creating the short-lived illusion that I was among the writers to whom a great nation like Germany was ready to listen” (Autobiographical Study 83). In 1935,
Freud was thus fully aware of the damage the “great nation” would thrust upon its own people, and he admits that, although he was awarded the Goethe Prize and was complimented by Thomas Mann as “one of the acknowledged spokesman of the German people,” by the mid-1930s his popularity ceased, for “the boundaries of our country narrowed and the nation would know no more of us” (Autobiographical Study 83). Just two paragraphs shy of the end of his Autobiographical Study, Freud announces: “And here I may be allowed to break off these autobiographical notes” (77). The remainder of his autobiographical text stresses the growing influence of psychoanalysis on other fields besides medicine, including education and psychology. He writes proudly, but with an air of defeat, as he no longer includes himself – as “I” – in the text. For example, his last two lines read:
It happens from time to time that an analytic worker may find himself isolated in
an attempt to emphasize some single one of the findings or views of
psychoanalysis at the expense of all the rest. Nevertheless, the whole impression
is a satisfactory one—of serious scientific work carried on at a high level.
(Autobiographical Study 85)
Sobelman 174
In 1935 Freud acknowledges the importance of psychoanalysis in various fields, simultaneously doubting its positive growth in Germany. As his earlier paragraphs on
America attest, it was, in contrast to the Germany he defines in the Postscript, an inviting and freethinking place where he and his work were respected and enjoyed. Why, then, if one inquires into Gay’s anti-American biographical description of Freud’s relationship to
America, does he situate Freud in opposition to the country which Freud boasts of as the homeland of G. Stanley Hall, a major supporter of psychoanalysis and teacher of its aims, who, according to Freud, had a “touch of the ‘king maker’ about him” (Autobiographical
Study 57). Gay even notes these lines in Freud’s Postscript to An Autobiographical Study in a section of Freud: A Life for Our Time entitled “Vitality: The Berlin Spirit.”
Interestingly, however, Gay’s affection for Berlin comes through these pages more than
Freud’s. One way he shows his approval of Berlin’s acceptance of psychoanalysis over
America’s is by noting that Freud himself recognized the acceptance of psychoanalysis in certain locations in Europe, North America, and as far east as Calcutta and Japan in his
Autobiographical Study. Nonetheless, when gay examines Freud’s autobiographical narrative of the spread of psychoanalysis throughout the world, he makes special note of its place in Berlin:
By the time Freud wrote this summary [in the Postscript to An Autobiographical
Study], several of the institutes had an interesting history behind them. Abraham
had transplanted the model of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society to Berlin back
in 1908, scheduling regular gatherings for discussions and papers in his apartment.
This became the nucleus for the Berlin chapter of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, founded at the Nürnberg Congress in 1910. (Freud: A Life 460)
Sobelman 175
The enthusiasm with which Gay writes of the movement of psychoanalysis from Vienna to Berlin is in stark contrast to his description of the movement in the United States.
Berlin in the 1920s, he asserts, was home to the “most vital of all these [psychoanalytic] organizations” and “had established itself as the nerve center of world psychoanalysis”
(Freud: A Life 460). In contrast, Gay writes of psychoanalysis in the United States in
1911, two years following Freud’s visit to Clark University, stating:
In the United States, in 1911, physicians interested in psychoanalysis had
organized themselves, not without some tense moments, into two bodies, allies
and rivals: the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the American
Psychoanalytic Association. (Freud: A Life 460)
Gay leaves his description of the psychoanalytic movement in America there. His biography of Freud contains at least a dozen more remarks about Freud’s relationship to
America and Americans, including his description of Freud’s “reluctance to speak publicly in the United States” for fear that “he and his colleagues would be ostracized once the Americans discovered” (208) that psychoanalysis rested on a framework of sexuality. Gay further states that Freud’s trip to the United States—which was preceded by an eight-day boat journey with Karl Jung and Sándor Farenczi—was overshadowed by Freud’s fainting spell. The spell, Gay notes, was brought on by Jung’s incessant talking about prehistoric remains found in northern Germany which resulted in Freud’s complaints of Jung’s talk as a death wish against him (Freud). According to Gay, despite some people in Freud’s audience “who thought his theories of sexuality quite shocking” he “had no cause to feel slighted, let alone rejected, by his American listeners” (Freud: A
Life 212). Gay claims that, at the time of his acceptance of the invitation to lecture at
Sobelman 176
Clark University, Freud was “[u]sing American generosity and open-mindedness as a stick with which to beat the Europeans” (212). Gay’s references Freud’s letters in which
Freud slights “’prudish’” (Gay 212) America and his general evaluation of Freud’s aversion to America—in particular “the American cuisine” which “raised havoc with his already malfunctioning digestion” (211)—are understandably quoted in light of Gay’s general claims regarding Freud’s anti-Americanism, yet he neglects to quote Freud’s overtly positive comments in An Autobiographical Study, which in fact counter the comments Gay cites from his letters. Thus despite acknowledging Freud’s references to
America in his letters and, Gay never swerves far from his claim that America was not hospitable to psychoanalysis and it was not good for Freud.
An exploration of Gay’s reception of Freud as “anti-American” raises important questions about Gay’s choice of historical evidence as proof that Freud was not appreciative of America, despite the people it brought into Freud’s life and the benefits it brought for the spread of psychoanalysis beyond Europe. One of the many ways of entering into this study is to compare Gay’s analysis of Freud’s Autobiographical Study to Freud’s letters written around the time of his visit to America, as well as at the time of his original publishing of An Autobiographical Study. Such a study will further broaden the possible intertextual connections between scholar-autobiography (Gay’s and Freud’s in this case) and biography.
The general goal of this dissertation has been to argue that autobiographical works, read as textual embodiments of a scholar’s broader theoretical agenda, may be included in a scholar’s academic repertoire. The arguments presented in this dissertation have responded to the lack of scholarship related to these issues and serve to challenge the notion that because autobiography fails in its attempt to depict truthfully a lived life, it has little or no theoretical significance for scholarship. I have proposed that Sarah
Sobelman 177
Kofman’s and Peter Gay’s autobiographical formulations—from small textual fragments to whole texts—act as supporting or contradicting evidence in a dialogue with their critical assertions.
The next step in encouraging more studies on scholar-autobiography would involve three primary tasks: a deliberate effort on behalf of students of life writing to extract autobiographical accounts and details from the scholarly works of the authors they examine; including scholar-autobiographical texts within the framework of scholarship via the creation of textual dialogues between an author’s autobiographical and scholarly works; and finally, an effort to understand that, although nearly all texts, depending on the perspective from which they are interpreted, may be deemed
“autobiographical” in various ways, the significance of creating boundaries between genres is a necessary step towards reuniting a critical sensibility with an autobiographical one. Successful studies, as the conclusions presented throughout this dissertation suggest, will first explore gaps in a scholar’s repertoire as a means of extracting autobiographical formulations which have not yet been scrutinized for their critical value. Examining these texts with an eye towards including them into a scholar’s larger critical corpus will allow for a return and reiteration of the notion that genres are, at best, unstable categorizations, but nonetheless utilizable for opening corpuses and extracting previously unexamined textual kernels.
Sobelman 178
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תקציר
עבודת מחקר זו טוענת כי קיימת זיקה יוצאת דופן בין חיבורים אוטוביוגרפיים של חוקרים ובין חיבוריהם
- האקדמיים תיאורטיים. באמצעות בחינת מספר רב של מושגים וטיעונים העולים מן החיבור האוטוביוגרפי של
המלומד ביחס למחקריו האקדמיים, חלקם מקבילים בעוד שאחרים משנים את כתביו האקדמיים, צצים
אופקים חדשים לקריאה והבנת סוגת האוטוביוגראפיה. החיבורים האוטוביוגרפיים והתיאורטיים של
- המלומדים מושאי החקירה בעבודת המחקר שלי הינם אלה שחוברו על ידי היסטוריון התרבות הגרמני
אמריקאי פיטר גיי והפילוסופית הצרפתייה שרה קופמן. עובדה חשובה לעניין הטיעונים המושמעים בעבודתי
היא כי שני המלומדים חוקרים את חייו ופועלו של זיגמונד פרויד כחלק הארי בכתביהם. היצירות
האוטוביוגרפיות העיקריות של שניהם מבוססות על זיכרונותיהם וחוויותיהם המוקדמות לפני השואה,
במהלכה, ומייד לאחריה. יצירות אלו עומדות בזיקה מובהקת עם כתביהם הביקורתיים והביוגראפיים
המתמקדים בפרויד ובפסיכואנליזה, ושופכים אור מושגי חדש על העבודות האוטוביוגרפיות שלהם. נקודת
- המוצא של עבודתי היא בחקירת תת הז'אנרים של יצירות אוטוביוגרפיות שנכתבו על ידי פיטר גיי ושרה
- קופמן ובמערכת היחסים השוררת בין תת ז'אנרים אלו ותחומי ההתמחות של כל אחד מן המלומדים.
הטיעונים המועלים בעבודת דוקטורט זו מתייחסים להעדר מחקר בנושאים אלה וכן קוראים תיגר על התפיסה
לפיה אוטוביוגרפיה אינה יכולה להיות עדות מדוייקת ומהימנה לקורות חיים בשל היותה סובייקטיבית, ולפיכך
אינה יכולה להוות מקור בעל סמכות תיאורטית שיש בו חשיבות משמעותית עבור המחקר. בניגוד לתפיסה זו,
המחקר המוצג כאן מוכיח שהניסוחים האוטוביוגראפיים של שרה קופמן ופיטר גיי, החל בפרגמנטים
טקסטואליים שנכתבו על ידיהם וכלה בחיבורים שלמים, מקיימים דיאלוג מתמיד עם טענותיהם הביקורתיות
ויש בהם משמעות רבה להבנת עבודות המחקר שלהם [משמשים כמערך ראיות תומך או סותר]. התוצאה של
ניתוחים מעמיקים ואינטרטקסטואליים של מושגים כגון ביוגרפיה, יהדות גרמניה, והלם השואה הן בחיבורים
הביקורתיים והן האוטוביוגרפיים של גיי וקופמן, היא כי אוטוביוגרפיות השואה שחיברו נעשים או הופכים להיות מובנים, הלכה למעשה, כטקסטים ביקורתיים.!עבודה זו מראה כי אלה האחרונים הופכים להיות מובנים
לא רק כחיבורים המשתייכים לביקורת הפסיכואנליזה, אלא חשוב מכך, כמשתייכים למחקר השואה העכשווי.
שרה קופמן, פיטר גיי, חיבורים אוטוביוגרפיים של חוקרים, אוטוביוגרפיות של השואה
העבודה נעשתה בהדרכת פרופ׳ מרק גלבר במחלקה ספרויות זרות ובלשנות בפקולטה מדעי הרוח והחברה
הצהרת תלמיד המחקר עם הגשת עבודת הדוקטור לשיפוט
אני החתום מטה מצהיר/ה בזאת: (אנא סמן):
_X__ חיברתי את חיבורי בעצמי, להוציא עזרת ההדרכה שקיבלתי מאת מנחה/ים.
_X__ החומר המדעי הנכלל בעבודה זו הינו פרי מחקרי מתקופת היותי תלמיד/ת מחקר.
____ בעבודה נכלל חומר מחקרי שהוא פרי שיתוף עם אחרים, למעט עזרה טכנית הנהוגה בעבודה ניסיונית. לפי כך מצורפת בזאת הצהרה על תרומתי ותרומת שותפי למחקר, שאושרה על ידם ומוגשת בהסכמתם.
תאריך: 2015 מרס 29 שם התלמיד/ה: אלאנה סובלמן חתימה______AS____
תפניות אוטוביוגרפיות של חוקרים פרוידיאנים
מחקר לשם מילוי חלקי של הדרישות לקבלת תואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"
מאת
אלאנה סובלמן
הוגש לסינאט אוניברסיטת בן גוריון בנגב
אישור המנחה______
אישור דיקן בית הספר ללימודי מחקר מתקדמים ע"ש קרייטמן ______
תאריך עברי ט׳ ניסן תשע״ה תאריך לועזי 2015 מרס 29
באר שבע
’תפניות אוטוביוגרפיות של חוקרים פרוידיאנים: כתבי חיים של פיטר גיי ושרה קופמן‘
מחקר לשם מילוי חלקי של הדרישות לקבלת תואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"
מאת
אלאנה סובלמן
הוגש לסינאט אוניברסיטת בן גוריון בנגב
תאריך עברי ט׳ ניסן תשע״ה תאריך לועזי 29 מרס 2015
באר שבע