ABSTRACT
It is impossible to read Rue Ordener, Rue Labat without remembering that Sarah Kofman took her own life some seven months after this short personal narrative appeared in France, in March 1994. It was not exactly the Sorbonne philosopher's last book—a collection of essays, L'Imposture de la beaute (1995), had been prepared for publication—and it was brought out simultaneously with her re-examination of Nietzsche's supposed anti-Semitism, Le Mepris des Juifs: Nietzsche, les Juifs, l'antisemitisme (1994). Yet this memoir of her father's deportation to Auschwitz and of her own survival as a Jewish girl during the Occupation stands out harrowingly in a scholarly oeuvre that is as extensive and multifarious as it is remarkably little-related to the tragedies of her own childhood. The awesome ca, or "that", torturing the philosopher all her adult life thus comprises how surviving the war uprooted her from her Orthodox Judaism, from her familial ties, indeed from her strong and tense attachment to her mother.
