Parricidal autobiographies - Sarah Kofman between theory and memory

When the French philosopher Sarah Kofman committed suicide in 1994 she left behind an impressive oeuvre in which both the autobiographical genre and t he treatment of women play a central role. Her theoretical reflections on b oth topics situate themselves in the interstices between psychoanalysis, fe minism and deconstruction and share a common concern: the respect of alteri ty in all its guises. Kofman's resistance to the authoritative claim of the retrospective closure underlying traditional autobiographies is closely re lated to her celebration of an ecriture parricide, a mode of writing which undoes the repression of multiplicity and otherness. Shortly before her dea th Kofman published an autobiographical account of her own childhood years after the deportation and death of her father in a concentration camp. This article addresses the striking discrepancies between the theoretical posit ions Kofman defends throughout her philosophical writings and the autobiogr aphical turn of her own last words.